A Word of Caution for Poloniex Users and Traders

in #cryptocurrency8 years ago

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The Poloniex Crytpocurrency Exchange continues to have serious problems with trading and withdrawals.


The Poloniex exchange has had many issues over the past week or so with volume and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. They have mostly been unable to keep up with the increase of trading, which is a huge concern for traders and the cryptocurrency markets in general, since Poloniex is currently one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Just in the past two weeks, the exchange has had numerous ongoing issues with frozen coins, the inability to execute regular market orders, stop-losses, and margin trades, and there are currently long wait times for withdrawing currencies from the exchange, even with previously verified accounts.

Over the past 24 hours alone, STEEM-BTC trades were frozen on three different occasions. The first two trade stoppages were about 45 minutes long and the third lasted over 4 and a half hours! This is unfortunate, since Poloniex handles the most volume for STEEM/SBD trades by a large margin over other exchanges.


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This would be a cause for concern even if it was a one-time problem with the exchange. However, these have persisted for well over a week now with no end in sight. Poloniex has attributed this to a spike in volume and issued a press release on May 16th, but matters have yet to improve.

It should be noted that the stoppage of many trades has occurred just as markets begin to make large moves in either direction. It should be no surprise then that many users are outraged at the continued failures of the exchange. It's simply unacceptable for repeated failures like this to occur, especially when some trades in currency pairs can be executed while others cannot. There have even been many reported instances of some traders being able to trade while others cannot. If severe problems are occurring with the exchange, then all trades should probably be halted until the problems are corrected.

If these issues persist, I will be completely withdrawing from the Poloniex exchange.


I would encourage anyone who has funds at Poloniex to consider doing the same if things do not drastically improve very soon. Find an alternative exchange where you can trade and actually withdraw your money without severe delays. You do not want to be stuck with the inability to execute a trade or withdraw your money, especially if the exchange is under multiple attacks or cannot handle the load of increasing volume.

If you're using Poloniex, please proceed with caution.




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I have been on both Bittrex and Poloniex. The coins on both exchanges you can expect Bittrex to follow Poloniex. over the last couple of days I been watching the volume on both exchanges and Bittrex is now up to 15% of the volume of Poloniex.

The withdrawal fees may be higher but isn't it worth the peace of mind? At the time of this writing , I have been waiting on support at Poloniex for 11 days and my trading is halted because of it. I had one support ticket at Bittrex and it was answered within 4 hours and resolved. I regret moving back to Poloniex and when my support ticket is finally resolved, back to Bittrex i go.

Poloniex is in deep trouble and the only thing keeping it up is all the uneducated, non-researching noobs and their new money. The whales are relentless when the eternal lag occurs and they let their APIs drive down prices while all buy and sell functions are rendered useless. The Trollbox is never ending requests to mods to"escalate" tickets with no results and bans for those that raise their voices.

They are the leader in alt-cryptocurrencies exchanges and they are about to lose it as new exchanges have emerged. Poloniex is now the high school of exchanges and it is time to use others until Poloniex get their act together. This means a completely revamped interface and a staff to support 40,000+ users. 10 days to resolve a ticket is unacceptable in the crypto environment. High speed transactions require high speed support or it is worthless.

I have a support ticket that is "Being Processed" for 13 days now. I hate the Trollbox but I go in there daily to have a mod "escalate" my ticket. During my Trollbox visits, I watch the endless FUD when the lags and attacks come. Read my editorial on my observations and findings about Poloniex. https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@joebitcoin/crypto-at-the-crossroads-poloniex-epic-fail-opinion-editorial

I have already came to that same conclusion. I have started using Bittrex almost exclusively and on occasion I dabble with cryptopia, but I have my own concerns with the latter.

why do you guys love centralized exchanges? There is a DEX built on the same foundation as STEEM - Bitshares Dex.

I have opened up an account on Bittrex and will doing my purchases on there now on! Too many issues with polo

I started on bittrex when its fee was 0.0002 BTC to withdraw.... I switched to Poloniex because their fee is only 0.0001 BTC to withdraw. However, it appears the BTC network partially uses fees to prioritize things. I've had a withdrawal take 22 hours recently. So I started using bittrex again but their fee is now 0.001 btc which is 10x the cost of poloniex. It is stuff like this that makes me hopeful that one day we won't need to use BTC as a middleman to convert to fiat if we need to make purchases with fiat.

This is a valid point @dwinblood and one of the reasons I tell new traders/investors to move things other than BTC between exchanges. Coinbase is now allowing ETH and LTC sells and both of those are dramatically quicker.

Yeah, but using Coinbase is like asking the big brother: "Please, spy on me"

I am sure there will be more currency exchanges or another way to transact that is free or a smaller fraction than what either of these two charge. I do like the trollbox on polo though! Now following you @dwinblood.

It only means that all cryptocurrencies are dependent to bitcoin. Without it, we could not cash out.

Apparently coinbase will let you use LTC or ETH instead of BTC and I believe they have a VISA you can charge up too. So there may be other options. Also what you described is NOW. That could quickly change and with the slowness I expect it eventually will.

But the problem with coinbase is that they are not yet doing business towards our country, philippines.

Bitshares DEX is 0% fee to withdraw
0.07 BTS fee to trade, that's $0.063 - and that is currently HIGH because of the increase in BTS (what like 500 or 600% since the beginning of this year? Fees get adjusted once a quarter. Bitshares was paying its witnesses plenty when fees were much lower.
Decentralized? Yes. Low trading fees? Yes. Withdrawal limits? No.
The only reason why we don't have volume is because "the uneducated" wont trade there... idk out of stupidity?

Looks good, will try it out soon!

Going to try this exchange.

I've switched back to Bittrex recently, because I was noticing how long it was taking for deposits to happen. I've had no problem with Bittrex.

I'm moving my BTCs to Bittrex. Fck Polo. I'm not able to verify since a month!

Eh, I've transferred some SBD minutes before I saw your post.

OK, now I have some bitcoin sitting at Poloniex. I will withdraw them next week.

What is the alternative? Bittrex?

Bittrex is where I went. I think it's the second best option after Polo, but I would love to see other suggestions as well

Cool. I was first at Bittrex but switched to Poloniex because the rates are usually slightly better. And the volume is much higher.

Bittrex is fine with me. I'll do my next transaction there.

Thanks for the reply.

Volume may not be lower there for long, with all these people jumping ship from Poloniex. I've been slowly transferring my coins from there to Bittrex (and hardware wallets), as well.

I found polo so much better for short term trading for those reasons. Sadly, they have to fix their stuff before I consider coming back.

Bitshares DEX - go to openledger.io , but this is just a gateway into the Bitshares ecosystem.

bittrex sin duda sin problemas, le haría falta es un stop limit para ser lo maximo

Bittrex is reliable - quite unlike Poloniex which is either utter garbage or a total scam...

Polo was reliable for a long time too. The same thing can happen to bittrex as well if they aren't equipped to handle huge volume and mitigate repeated Ddos attacks. I hope bittrex is watching polo's struggles and making preparations to prevent these things from happening there.

Well bittrex fees are 10x more than Polo, but it does seem more reliable and faster.

The stress is 10x less :)

Well also... that is like $0.15 on Polo to wait 22 hours for your money (sometimes), and $1.50 on bittrex with almost no waiting.

Though if you use shapeshift.io that is like $6.00 which is high. Changelly.com looks like it might be worth using as it is just slightly under what bittrex charges.

I don't do much trading either, but a full day to go through made me agitated and sweaty!

I will be watching the situation and if polo gets their shit together, I will return. I prefer polo to bittrex by a significant margin.

I don't do a lot of trading... so doesn't matter much to me. I prefer it's fees... they certainly seem to be the lowest.

Poloniex is as dirty as Maxine Waters!

DAMN! That's dirty!

The answer is, decentralised exchanges! added with the ability to talk cross chains... both very soon will be a reality in my view.

Easy way out. Convert all holdings at Polo to STEEM and steem up :D That's what I did. And for the rest of the crypto there is other wallets.

I have had no trouble with withdrawals, but the lag time combined with margin trading is very troubling. Having traders receive margin calls and forced liquidations when the site is too laggy to trade is unacceptable. Wiping out half your traders accounts is not sustainable..

The sad part is how those problems of Poloniex not only affected the traders on their site. But this mess caused the whole bullrun to a halt multiple times..

We need a well functioning decentralized exchange everyone feels comfortable using. And we need it asap.

I have been mostly using Poloniex for awhile now as their fee for withdrawals was only 0.0001 BTC. Yet that does me no good when it takes me 22 hours to withdraw the money. I switched back to bittrex for the moment, but man bittrex has really raised their fee. 0.001 BTC so they are ten times as expensive to withdraw as poloniex.

I may need to check into some alternatives... I mostly use them as a steem to fiat gateway when I need to buy things.

That's why I used polo, it's fees are cheaper, until they figure out their issues I'm paying the higher fees.

me too... I just tested it with blocktrades.us as well and that worked fast and was easy. Not sure its fees. It seems shapeshift.io might be worth checking too.

I'll check out shapeshift, my husband did the math on blocktrades, the fees are very high compared to polo, which states its fee rate. That's one of the reasons I liked polo. I'll only do 70.00 sbd or more with blocktrades, I'm bothered I can't see the fees I pay for my exchange on blocktrades.

Yeah not showing the fees bothers me too. Right now though the fee is higher I'd use bittrex over polo.... taking 22 hours for polo to get the bitcoin transferred so I could use it. Sometimes for some deals 22 hours is too long... opportunity missed.

Have you compared them to the Blocktrades fees? I haven't withdrawn much from Poloniex yet, as I've only been using it for trading. But I do use Blocktrades for my withdrawals to fiat. I honestly haven't checked the rates lately because it's mostly just a convenience thing for me. It's really simple to use and you don't even have to log into anything.

I've used blocktrades before, but I haven't tried using them for this. Whatever their fee is, it is likely less than bittrex.

I should note that my fiat conversions are actually sent to a debit/credit card and not directly converted to dollars in a bank account.

Yeah I have a bitpay credit card... which I was sending steem/sbd to poloniex... trading for BTC.

Clicking add funds on bitpay and then withdrawing that amount of BTC + the fee to charge up my card.

I believe I may be able to just use steem -> btc sent directly to bitpay to make that more streamlined using something like blocktrades.

Main reason I used poloniex as it seemed to have the lowest fee, but that is not particularly beneficial at the moment.

That fee is not worth waiting 22 hours for my money.

I believe I may be able to just use steem -> btc sent directly to bitpay to make that more streamlined using something like blocktrades.

Yeah, that's exactly how it works. You send the STEEM/SBD to Blocktrades, Blocktrades converts it to BTC, and then they send the BTC to your Bitpay card's address. Once you sign the transfer in your Steem wallet, it takes a few seconds for Bitpay to receive it...unless it's underpaid - then it takes up to 6 BTC confirmations, which is about 3.7 years, currently.

I must have been lucky; no problems with trading Steem for ETH on Polo and sending that to Kraken to trade for Euros that go to bank account.
Using BTC for fund transfers is so 2017. Oh wait ...

Yeah I just sent $61.50 worth of SBD to my bitpay card using blocktrades and it worked fine. Not sure what the fee was. It is not very clear about that.

That's exactly what I'm doing!

All correct!
I have been affected about 5 times (ish) during the last 4 weeks when Poloniex had an alt coin pumping insanely.. And suddenly the entire exchange freeze for 10-15 minutes.. And when it start to work .. the price is DOWN 20+% while NO ONE has been able to sell a single coin.
Its been Ripple, LBC and a few others.
After the last big "SCAM" (Friday) it had become so obvious that it's insider trading in cahoots with Poloniex themselves that i just moved all my coins out of there.
FYI. Poloniex is/has become a SCAM from the inside.
Im not the only one that think that.. Just read what i posted 3 days ago.
https://steemit.com/crypto/@andersokohler/berns-weiss-llp-investigates-potential-cases-concerning-recent-kraken-and-poloniex-ddos-attacks

🍒 I also believe that Poloniex has become a Scam

Haters gonna hate. Polo's volume is only improving. To the m00n and beyond.
That said, I love my monies too much and withdrew all of it from Polo already.

Swerve! Sweet answer.

hadware wallet is a solution to move bitcoin securely

Moved to Bittrex a while back, I had to as a resident of WA state. I haven't had any issues there.

Good info, thanks! I get especially worried when an exchange can't get users cashed out. Liquidity between BTC and USD is currently a hidden problem. Most folks are more interested in buying in so it hasn't been too much of a concern since MtGOX but liquidity may become an issue as more merchants begin to accept BTC and seek a simple method and fair exchange rate for cashing in their earned BTC.

and I literally just signed up 3 minutes before you posted this!!!

Thanks for the warning!

I've been noticing some of that flatlining... and feel thankful that I am (inadvertently) outside the chaos because Poloniex suspended all accounts of verified users based in Washington state... last month. I still use Poloniex "for reference" (because they have higher volume) but all my trading is on Bittrex now... no problems or bumps in the line, so far.

As the number of leaving users increases, it looks like Polo will eventually recover from problems of volume!

Thanks for the warning and something definitely to think about. I guess the only positive is when we have had these odd events the "Loan Offer" rates spike. But, like many of you have mentioned I'll probably pull some BTC and split it up with Bittrex.

Thanks again.

woah. I hope that we'll make it! lol jk... the world keeps on turning, don't it!
Thanks for this rad post!

I have been on Poloniex's waiting list for over three months trying to get tier 3. I am still at $7000/ day withdrawal. I have now moved all coins over to www.BITTREX.com and couldn't be happier.

Didn't really consider this before but this made me think.. I will open up Bittrex soon and see how that goes! Thanks for the post.

Shapeshift is a great alternative! Try it out.

What is their fee... I mostly use such services as a steem to fiat gateway... I convert to bitcoin and then transfer it to a visa card. If shapeshift can facilitate that easier and has a lower fee than bittrex (which it should as bittrex is currently expensive) then I am interested.

With shapeshift you can convert coins to other coins (no fiat at the moment). They don't have any fees: "With ShapeShift, what you see is what you get. The exchange rate shown is exactly what you'll receive, minus only the "miner fee." There is no exchange fee, or service fee.

https://info.shapeshift.io/about

Hope this helps.

Yeah it likely works similar to blocktrades.us which I successfully just test used instead of bittrex or poloniex and it worked.

My bitpay credit card (my fiat source) you click ADD funds and say $50 and it tells you how many bitcoin to send and the address and it charges the card.

So blocktrades and shapeshift may speed things up. The miner fee is what I'll need to find out about.

You can find out about miners fees in the link above in my previous message.

🍒 I saw the fees list and the Bitcoin Miner Fee is: 0.004 BTC, I think it's cheaper to stay on Bittrex right?

If the bitcoin miner fee is 0.004 BTC then yeah that is very expensive... that is almost $6 right now... bittrex is 0.001 which is $1.50 or more...

bittrex used to be 0.0002 and poloniex IS 0.0001 which is why a lot of us used it as that is only like a $0.15 fee, but 0.004 BTC fee is expensive...

Where was that? I won't be using anything that is that much I can spend a few minutes extra and use bittrex if I need to.

On the link that @alex13 gave you https://info.shapeshift.io/about just scroll down a little bit and you will see a blue list and that's it

That about lists the fee at 0.004 BTC. That is easily over $6 right now and is 40x more than poloniex charges and 4x more than bittrex. That's too high, I won't be using it. :(

I just recently published post about best options available to trade coins:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@alex13/shapeshift-vs-exchanges-best-options-to-buy-sell-exchange-your-coins

Basically it depends on the amount and specific pair of coins. In some cases Shapeshift provides better options.

Don't see Steem and Steem Dollars on the chart. I am not a trader. I just use them to convert some of my posting earnings to fiat. For that shapeshift seems very expensive. Like going to an ATM that charges me over $6 (as that is low) for a withdrawal.

Thanks for the warning and updates. What exchange are you going to use instead of Poloniex?

I'm done as well. I just withdrew all of my STEEM to here and sent my BTS to Open Ledger. I still have some DASH/ETH/BTC/LTC there that I'm not sure what to do with.

You should check out the jaxx wallet. it holds all your coins in one wallet.

Will check out Jaxx immediately.
Thanks

Perfect, is the best information.
Great project.

When you are on 2.5x margin and can't log back in.

Oh man! I would really like to withdraw my crypto from Poloniex but I won't be able to get to the computer in the nearest days and do it from the phone is simply unrealistic. Every such post makes me feel myself more sad and helpless...

Well, there's no need to panic right now. Just keep an eye on things and be ready to withdraw if you need to. And be wary of the delays.

I've moved to another exchange, too much going on with polo for this newbie.

Over the past 24 hours alone, STEEM-BTC trades were frozen on three different occasions. The first two trade stoppages were about 45 minutes long and the third lasted over 4 and a half hours!

During the attacks many users were outraged that Polo did not halt trading. Now users are outraged they are halting trading. #when-polo---going-down?

I do not have those statistics. :)

🍒 I've read other articles yesterday that report issues with Poloniex, what I noticed when trading last week is that when I sold 50 SBD the transaction was done for only 25 SBD, so they cannot be trusted anymore, unfortunetly :/

I agree, while I don't suspect polo is in any financial trouble, they just aren't doing a good job at the moment and don't deserve my business.

It looks like changelly.com might work like blocktrades and has a fee slightly under bittrex. I calculated it to about 0.00085 BTC. Bittrex is 0.001 BTC. Poloniex is 0.0001 BTC Shapeshift.io is 0.004 BTC (expensive!)

awsome write up... i have taken all my coins off and switched to bittrex and openledger. I hope no one losses to hard from all this.

Any feedback from Polo itself? What are there plans? Im sure they are looking forward to it since they are one of the largest exchange in the world and I think they will not just let it ruin their reputation. But even so, still, being cautious is the best way to do.

The best part about the most recent 4.5 hour shit-show (which I got caught up in) was watching the volume numbers continue clicking (showing someone was trading) while the trading UI was completely frozen, which would imply bot trading was still happening.

I looking to move everything I have off Poloniex, but know nothing about Bitrex. I have heard good things, but I'd also heard good things about Poloniex in the beginning as well. Maybe a dumb question, but can I move my other altcoins (LISK, Dash, etc.) into Bitrex without having to exchange to Bitcoin, transfer and when it arrives at Bitrex at the end of next week (courtesy of Bitcoin blockchain bloat), exchange back to my altcoins?

They better get to work.

Personally, I haven't had any problems. Nonetheless, I am only withdrawing money.

Hmm, you are making be afraid now. Was about to open an account on Poloniex, but after reading your post, I will wait till things get sorted out.....

I don't think you need to fear anything at this point, just be careful about using the site right now. Trading has been unreliable and withdrawing funds has had long delays and additional verification. Just monitor the situation for now and see if it improves at all.

But it might be better to find an alternative, just to be safe, especially if you're trading or need to withdraw the money in a faster time frame.

Thanks for the guidance.

Since two weeks I am only on bittrex. Thanks for the heads up.

Agree totally, I have also re3cently opened up an account with Bittrex initially to invest in coins that were not available on poloniex. I have also transfer some funds nearly 48 hours ago and still waiting for it to be process not sure if that is a general slow network problem.

#DEX DEX DEX
DEX DEX DEX
Come on chant with me.
We can make a song out of it and spur the revolution: decentralise everything!

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