Anyone who is watching the bitcoin prices has surely noticed that since Bitfinex re-entered trading, that the price has been depressed, and slowly ebbing downwards. Their 'tokens' I am pretty sure people are selling as quickly as possible for bitcoins, and then they are cashing them out of Bitfinex. I personally think that they are gonna continue to be a downward influence on Bitcoin prices until they go broke.
Why do I think this? Because I was using their platform during the big upward movement in June and then continued to use it until about 2 weeks before the hack. I was doing well for the beginning, but then the volatility was getting way too much for me, and I was seeing 'issue' emails from them way too frequently and there was quite a long outage about a month before the hack happened, and then a quite frequent series of 'issue' emails talking about bandwidth problems. I work in IT support and when we have bandwidth issues in our business, it usually means someone is fucking up somewhere. In our business, it's usually British Telecom, but sometimes smaller suppliers, but more minor issues tend to be caused by bugs and misconfigurations in some of our server farms.
Sure, this is not quite the same as being hacked, but hacking can only occur when a system has weaknesses caused by bugs that can be exploited. The bugs can cause latency and throughput issues all by themselves but they are worse when they are being prodded and probed by hackers looking for a way to gain a shell into one of the machines.
And so then before they came back online, they announced that they were bailing in, 'socialising' the loss. Lucky for me I had no money held with them anymore, but the depression on the price caused by smarter people realising that it's time to get out was the reason for this. Then they double down by issuing their own bullshit debt tokens, which they don't even guarantee they will redeem for bitcoins. So people are grabbing the bitcoins as fast as they can and selling their bitcoins and pushing the resultant USD back to their bank accounts. This is typical bank run behaviour. Bitfinex is probably now late paying back debts and they are scrambling to try and get their books in order, and we, the bitcoin users, are all paying for it.
I expect this to get worse for a while. In fact I'm pulling out all of my positions in Bitcoin. I am pretty sure more bad news about Bitfinex is coming soon and that's gonna drive more selling. I want to move to working with other currencies, but until the biggest one is free of its current big issue, I don't think it's wise to do anything but short it, or stay out.
Sounds like the Comex
The reckoning for Comex's excessive issuance of especially silver certificates is still in in the future at this point. But it's going to come eventually and the silver price will bound upwards very fast. It's not possible for the competition between bullion buyers and industrial users to continue at current prices. Something is gonna snap in the next 12 months for sure.
Actually it's worse than this. And I think they are gonna fall afoul of laws about securities trading over these BFX tokens. They basically amount to stock issues. I am pretty sure their books are in the red, and I have a feeling that there is probably laws against insolvent corporations trying to sell pseudo-stocks to recover their losses and become solvent.
The charts don't lie, there could be a slow bleed for quite some time now, simply because of how ugly the charts look. However, the fundamentals of Bitcoin are still pretty strong, the halving will most likely begin to drive the price up at some point, only question is when. Bitcoin still has the strongest network effect and infrastructure, as well as the most venture capital at its disposal. It seems to be taking hold in countries that are feeling the early effects of a crisis that is most like coming (again, only question is when). Even the hack itself could act as a kind of supply reduction if the hacker has trouble actually using those coins. Also yes, Bitfinex is robbing Peter to pay Paul.
If I had an American Gold Eagle for each time they supposedly did not, yet a week later everything was the opposite of what 'experts' were saying would happen..
Peter is its customers, Paul is the banks.