I had opened an account on Bitfinex earlier and made a small deposit of Bitcoin in order to buy some altcoins. Then came this Bitcoin fork thing.
In July 27 announcement Bitfinex said "At the time of the fork, all Bitcoin addresses holding a balance will automatically have
equivalent balances in Bitcoin Cash."
https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/212I thought, nice, why don't I sell some of my Bitcoin Cash on Bitfinex. So I made another deposit early in the morning August 1. A bit late, I know, but it should get in time. And the deposit had many confirmations hours before the supposed time of the fork, but for some reason it still remained "unconfirmed" on the exchange even after 15 confirmations. I made a support ticket about why my deposit was not credited and also asked if I get the Bitcoin Cash, because that was what the deposit was for.
My message:
I have 8/7 confirmations to my BTC deposit and it still keeps saying "unconfirmed". Why?
Will I get the Bitcoin Cash?"
Then finally it was credited on the exchange and I had this answer from the support:
Hello
Thanks for your message.
Your deposit is now completed.
Kind regards,
Claudia
Bitfinex.com
support@bitfinex.com Yes, I could see that, thanks for the info, but no answer to either of my questions.
Frustrating, but I kept hoping all would go fine.
But of course, when the Bitcoin Cash finally came, my fears were confirmed and I could only see Bitcoin Cash credited for the Bitcoins earlier deposited on the exchange and none for the later deposit.
I made another support ticket asking what's the deal with that because their deposit address would no doubt have that Bitcoin Cash. The deposit had many confirmations well before the supposed time of the fork. It only stayed "unconfirmed" on the exchange for some reason even after 15 confirmations on the blockchain, before finally being credited.
But they decide to steal my coins and avoid answering my questions. This is starting to remind me of the Cryptsy farce years past. The only answer I got was some standard copy/paste bullshit with no answer to any of my questions:
Please review our announcement on how we handled BCH distribution.
Distribution Policy
BCH will be distributed to settled bitcoin wallet balances as of the UTC timestamp of the first forking block, which is expected to occur on August 1st, 2017.
The token distribution methodology will be:
All BTC wallet balances will receive BCH
Margin longs in BTC/USD and margin shorts in XXX/BTC will not receive BCH
Margin shorts in BTC/USD and margin longs in XXX/BTC will not pay BCH
BTC Lenders will receive BCH
Users who hedged the BTC in their account after we made our initial announcement on how we would handle the Bitcoin Cash distribution.
You can review your account history in the reports section of your account.
If you did hedge your BTC balance make sure to take that into consideration, as we will not be able to issue BCH to users who created an opposite margin position.
Kind regards,
Andrew
Bitfinex.com
support@bitfinex.comA total asshole copy/paste answer with no relevance to my questions.
I asked again, why would they not answer my questions and am still to receive an answer from their support, so I decided to make this post. Clearly they are avoiding responsibility and can't be trusted. I'm taking all my coins out and won't be depositing anything there again. I would recommend anyone to do the same and avoid this exchange.
Also they only credited 85% for the coins they did, how is that "equivalent" (which is what they originally promised)? I know it's because of their incompetence, which is explained here
http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/07/29/bitcoin-impending-accounting-disaster/ . But why should a person who only deposited coins (no trading, lending or anything) pay tax for
their losses. It would be acceptable if that would have been what they originally said, but they said "equivalent balances". Thus they promised something and did not deliver. And now they are avoiding questions and pretending it's all fine.
