So what? This is an exchange not a bank. There are no missing bitcoins so there is no liability issue. All that has happened is that there has been an introduction of a delay in withdrawing. Because that delay is 72 hours it seems like a long time in bitcoin because of usually instant transactions. Compared to traditional banking it is relatively normal length of time to access funds.
Right now all the signs are pointing to the exchange owner as the culprit.
Multiple suspicious things occurred prior to this announcement. For example, withdrawals were disabled for all unverified users and those who tried to verify saw that the verification queue was severely backlogged. You could terminate your account but only receive BTC regardless of what other currency(s) you had stored (many users are reporting their accounts were terminated but did not receive any BTC).
Some users reported that there was a bug that caused deposits to be duplicated. Ex: Deposit 1 ETH and the transaction would show up twice in your account therefore making your balance 2 ETH which then you could withdraw successfully.
Exchange was rolled back to before the hack, so all transactions after that point were voided. In the end nothing happened except that people had their trades reverted during that time.
Anybody at other bitcoin exchanges have info/ideas to share on what may have happened here and how other exchanges can avoid similar pitfalls? It's intriguing that withdrawal limits were bypassed.
I wonder what sort of monitoring+alerting their team had set up and how long this attack ran for.
That's obviously not what was being talked about in this context. The discussion was about being affected by suspended withdrawals if exchanges never give people their deposits back.
You may get it back in the future, if they open again… or not. Sorry for your loss
It is reasonably well-known that it is dangerous to leave money on exchanges. BTC is only yours when it's in a wallet with a private key that is known to you, and no third party.
The lesson here is to withdraw funds from shady exchanges as you accumulate them. They probably wouldn't have noticed a 0.1 BTC daily withdrawal, but the 2.7 BTC transaction set off alarm bells.
I think the title of this thread should be edited since its highly misleading and first thing people thing is their bank account was closed which would be a huge kick in balls to bitcoin.
edit: quite possibly this is a false rumor being spread by malicious party to sink bitcoin for their profit, now the title and the tone makes sense to me, as well as lack of any news about this from bitstamp
edit2: checked r/Bitcoin seems convincingly legit but still nothing official from bitstamp, might be good idea for people to use better exchanges like Kraken anyways, those guys are cool
From what they said it sounds like the issue was executing the same withdrawal request more than once, unrelated to the bitcoin confirmation window. The fraudulent withdrawals had to happen on the same second, not merely on the same hour.
No. The funds were supposed to be transferred by Nov 15. On Nov 22 I asked them to cancel the transaction because I had not been paid. On the 27th I got a form email asking me to reply if I still had a problem, and I re-iterated that I wanted the transaction reversed for non-payment.
I might add, that between the time that I tried to sell and the time that I got paid, They charged me for an automatic buy order that I forgot to cancel... at $823.09/BTC
I don't know the internal mechanisms of how they operate, but I think they have acted despicably. The more deeply I look, the more amateurish everything connected with them becomes.
Is that actually true? I don't follow cryptocurrency that closely but I seem to remember headlines of a site shutting down and something like a million BTC disappearing forever and people never got it back.
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