BTC-e hacked ??

[Zorgunfleck]

I have no idea what's going to happen. I did loose some money there (probably), but not most of it, cause I spread it out. I'm just speculating.

I never said they have a moral problem with an exit scam. It's in their own self interests to find a way to weather the storm. Remember they may have some links to illegal money, but they aren't ponzy scheming. They earn legitimate fees from people trading. People with BTC-e type of funding tend to be a bit better at hiring the right people to navigate legal land better than two bit criminals with 30 day scam websites.

The more that dark web drug markets are taken down the more they keep popping up. I don't think they would have any trouble selling it. A lot of people are willing to risk a lot more for a lot less than the amount of money that the owner of BTC-e will make if it comes back up and running again. People will stuff their butts full of heroin for a few thousand dollars and risk dying. You think there's no one brave enough to give this a shot? I just think there's plenty of reasons for it to come back. Maybe it won't, but to think no one is willing to take the risk if they can figure out a way, is pretty simple minded.

[stingray454]

What makes me most suspicious at the moment is the total lack of communication. Everyone already knows what happened, word travels fast. If they had updated every hour / few hours with stuff like "btc-e founder arrested, need some time to clear up allegations", "no servers has been siezed", "all funds are safe, don't worry, we just need some time to solve this" and so on, I'd be a lot more calm.

As mentioned before, last two tweets were exactly 24 apart.. if we get another tweet in exactly 15 minutes I'll be a lot more suspicious.

EDIT: Sorry, 1h 15 min, miscalculation.. We'll see in an hour. (8:42pm CET)

[cyvene]

$110 million fine is pocket change to a $4 billion company. If BTC-e is going to steal all the money, it's not cause they need a few million dollars for a fine.

How is BTC-E a $4 Billion company? That figure counts the total transactions made on that site for a few years, not their total asset. As for covering $110 million, I took a quick count of their earning in fees. So, before they went offline, their daily volume was about $56 million on all currency pairs. Since there's no maker-taker system, it's safe to say that they earned about 0.4% (0.2 for two sides) for most of the transactions. That brings them about $224K in daily earning. Let's be nice and assume that this is their average day and without taking lower price or volume into account, it will take them 500 days to cover $110 million. This is while covering operational cost which definitely won't be cheap.

All in all, I don't think they will be able to continue unless they levied the cost on the users but even then it's still hard to function without profit for the next 1.5 years. The only way I can see it will go well if they either take a plea deal that reduces the fine to a more manageable amount or just ignore the whole ordeal and becomes more rogue than ever while still maintaining trust from bitcoin users in general.

[stingray454]

All in all, I don't think they will be able to continue unless they levied the cost on the users but even then it's still hard to function without profit for the next 1.5 years.

You assume they haven't saved any of the profits they made so far. They have been running for what, 5 years? Sure the profits increase with time, but they should easilly have made 2-300M during that time. Sure they have costs and have surely taken nice salaries for themselves, but I don't think they would start from 0. My guess is they are using the coins / funds from the site to play the market around aug 1, they could probably make a huge chunk of the cash back that way.

[Tradewatcher]

What makes me most suspicious at the moment is the total lack of communication. Everyone already knows what happened, word travels fast. If they had updated every hour / few hours with stuff like "btc-e founder arrested, need some time to clear up allegations", "no servers has been siezed", "all funds are safe, don't worry, we just need some time to solve this" and so on, I'd be a lot more calm.

As mentioned before, last two tweets were exactly 24 apart.. if we get another tweet in exactly 15 minutes I'll be a lot more suspicious.

Thats one of the main reason why i dont believe they will come back. Some single words would be enough to fight FUD for me it looks like they dont know what to do now - exit scam will be the best option for them in my opinion. Take the billion and bye bye crypto.

It would be nice to get my money back but all hope is gone.


@stingray454
You think all this shit happens because of BCC ? lol stop dreaming - they dont need to ruin their money making machine for such an action. Fake DDOS for 24 hours on 1. August would be more than enough.....

[stingray454]

@stingray454
You think all this shit happens because of BCC ? lol stop dreaming - they dont need to ruin their money making machine for such an action. Fake DDOS for 24 hours on 1. August would be more than enough.....

No I didn't day that, but there will be huge market fluctuations around aug 1. It would be a good move to keep the site closed and play the market with tons of coins, making it possible to earn a lot of those $110M back without taking it from their own pockets. That is of course assuming they are trying to pay the fine, which is a very big "if"..

[Arksun]

BTC-e is a huge money maker for whoever is brave enough to run it. As long as the site isn't taken over by authorities, there's a huge incentive to come back. If they do come back they will recover public trust very quickly and more than ever before.

That's very wishful thinking, their reputation is shattered. First thing most people will do is try to withdraw their funds, if they're still even there.

[cyvene]

You assume they haven't saved any of the profits they made so far. They have been running for what, 5 years? Sure the profits increase with time, but they should easilly have made 2-300M during that time. Sure they have costs and have surely taken nice salaries for themselves, but I don't think they would start from 0. My guess is they are using the coins / funds from the site to play the market around aug 1, they could probably make a huge chunk of the cash back that way.

I honestly hope that is true and they can see this as just a setback that might costs them 1.5 years. Although personally I'm hoping they will just stay to be that "rogue" exchange everyone knew, maybe becoming more regulated is the best and perhaps the only way to stay alive.

[Zorgunfleck]

Couple things you're not taking into account here.

A large amount of their money has always been collected in crypto. They likely had millions of $ of crytpo 5 years ago, which means they likely have billions worth now.

You are assuming that all their money is made through fee's, and although that is a very nice amount of money, I'm sure they were doing their own trading as well and probably making at least as much off of that as they were making in fees.

They might be saying very little about the situation for the same reason you should shut up if the cops ever start investigating you. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Maybe they're just a little smarter than you think they are.

People would be wary at first and would take most of their money out, but they just need to stay around, and people would come back in even greater numbers, guaranteed.

Again, I'm just being pragmatic. I'm not counting on getting my money back. I would be cool though.

[SEELE^^01]

honestly, to think that btce was the only loundering exchange for criminals is pure false. there is no such exchange, where shady individuals are not cashing out their stolen coins...

[Nivir]

Some people said they could just run with the money as the best option. But if they are already named and duly registered then it will bring more doom for them then? Not unless they love playing hide and seek.

[Tradewatcher]

they have to hide anyway.

[stingray454]

Some people said they could just run with the money as the best option. But if they are already named and duly registered then it will bring more doom for them then? Not unless they love playing hide and seek.

Ok that one guy has MtGox involvement allegations on him, but if the other admins would run with the money, they would be in even worse trouble. That's a big "money vs freedom" choice to make. I think anyone would prefer making "only" $200k/day more or less legally than getting millions but be on FBI's most wanted list or something like that .

[Zorgunfleck]

That's the other thing. If you associate with criminals who launder millions of dollars and hold money for them and you also value your life, exit scamming when people know how to find you is very stupid. Criminals with resources don't have to worry about international treaties, extradition, due process, or even evidence. They should be more worried about that than the authorities with their fines and penalties really. A ripped of mobster will kill your family and make you watch before they kill you.

[not.you]

It'd be kind of cool if they popped back up as a tor hidden service and became what the US says they already were.

[fabske]

What I have understood till now is: MtGox is involved in the btc-e downtime. My assumtion is: btc-e will be started up with a new design and will be called mtgox.com. Then finally LTC  on MtGox.


Can someone tell me where the trollbox self-help group is?

[deisik]

Couple things you're not taking into account here.

A large amount of their money has always been collected in crypto. They likely had millions of $ of crytpo 5 years ago, which means they likely have billions worth now.

You are assuming that all their money is made through fee's, and although that is a very nice amount of money, I'm sure they were doing their own trading as well and probably making at least as much off of that as they were making in fees

I'd venture a guess as to say that they might have been earning a lot more via their own "trading"

If we could of course call that trading at all (since milking the clients can hardly count as trading). I traded at this exchange using their api, and you could query the server only once per two seconds (otherwise you would be receiving cashed data). This is in fact a tremendous amount of time within which they could be safely doing all sorts of illegal tricks (illegal for regulated exchanges, obviously) massively front-running the orders of their clients and squeezing profits from every other trade without ever revealing themselves

[Darooghe]

Is really Alexander Vinnik admin of btc-e or it is only a guess and rumor?

[Tradewatcher]

90%+ but he isn't alone there are more admins.

[gollygosh]

what site - and it's gone

Error 525