What happen with bitfinex??? Some thread with a good resume?
They said they have been "hacked". Months ago. Were you asleep ?
People who still store any amount over there deserve to lose it all. It will happen.
ghdp: I doubt that the Bitfinex situation is as gloomy and doomy as you are making it out to be.
Yeah, there is considerable potential for considerable and ongoing shenanigans going on with regards to Bitfinex, but there is also a very interesting scenario, as well.
Factually speaking, this whole Bitfinex situation is playing out in a very unique kind of way and a bit innovative and outside of normal scenarios and even normal expectations.
Sure, there are a lot of folks who are suggesting that Bitfinex is running one scam over another scam over another scam in order to divert attention while they run off with the coins, but it seems also clear that if they had wanted to run off with a significant number of coins, they would have already been able to do that in August - but yeah, maybe they are still working on perfecting their exit strategy... who knows? I kind of doubt that the situation is either as dire as the bitfinex naysayers are describing it to be (which you seem to be in that camp) nor as rosey as the bitfinex public relations folks like to attempt to make out.
Regarding the actual heist, whether that was an inside job or not remains a bit of a mystery.
They had nearly 120,000 user coins go missing, which represented about $72 million dollars in value at the time (120k x $600). They stated that represented about 36% of all user assets/funds on their site, which would be about
$2billion $200 million (Edited correction to my napkin math).
Their innovative step was to cause the users to bear the loss, while creating a compensation system that would in theory allow the potential for users to be compensated or to potentially trade the assets, representing the measured compensation, measured in BFX tokens. Yeah, sure a bit of a clusterfuck because "compensated" users would come to varying decisions regarding the present or future value of the "compensation" and some users would have different terms than others (for example, USA customers could sell their "compensation" but they could not buy back). They have also created an equity system in which users could trade their BFX for RRT, and yeah, additional complication and potential for confusion regarding present or future value of such additional tokens.
Over the past 5 months, Bitfinex has paid out about 5.5% of the outstanding BFX tokens at 100% of their initial assessment value, which creates additional possibilities for insider trading, yet has served as a kind of tangible compensation mechanism.
Whether Bitfinex is going to "go under" or not or be hacked again remain decent questions, yet those outcomes are no way near any kind of certainty such as hypothesized by ghdp.
There certainly seem to have been some changes in Bitfinex, and their relative trading volume seems to returned to very similar pre-"hack" levels.. We cannot really know for sure if some of those measurements are fake or not, but their "recovery" plan does seem to continue to have some legs and some potential for success... There remains a risk with holding coins on any exchange, and probably the risk on Bitfinex is a bit greater than some of the other major exchanges, yet it is likely not so significant of a risk differential on Bitfinex to cause a blanket conclusion against holding coins there because there seem to remain considerable ways to profit from trading some coins there (and also some arbitrage opportunities from time to time).
I personally had thought that it would have been good for Bitfinex to employ some additional low fee trading strategies and other mechanisms to attempt to attract new users and to increase retention of old user, but maybe in the end, those kinds of incentive mechanisms play out as a kind of double edged sword in which they may not necessarily cause the expected results. It is quite likely that Bitfinex managers have employed considerable breadth in their deliberations about going forward strategies (whether there was some kind of insider jobs going on or not) - by the way with the present price of bitcoin hovering around $770, and the fact that the hack caused BTC prices to drop into the mid $400s (very temporarily), caused additional ways that insiders could have schemed bitfinex customers (these are potential bitfinex corruption and disingenuousness scenarios, but currently, they are not conclusively demonstrated by any tangible evidence).
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