Poloniex is not responding. Anyone remember tulving.com?
Bankrupt metals fraudster Hannes Tulving found himself in trouble as the market tightened.
1) Transactions slow down to a crawl with no customer support answers
2) Complaints build up, and build up, and build up.
3) Phones are turned off, and deliveries stop
4) Account Imbalances & Hidden Money?
July 5th, 2017 - This is where the comparison becomes speculation
I am not a customer of Poloniex, and I have no financial interest in it one way or the other. I am writing this purely out of curiousity. I realize that some people have very serious stakes in Poloniex, and when I speculate about its imminent demise, I fear that I will be making some people who read this physically ill. I apologize for that. You've probably already vomited several times this week.
Most readers here are familiar with Mt.Gox. The primitive (centralized) bitcoin exchange abruptly closed up shop in February 2014 (at the same time as Tulving Coins ceased operations) and a fortune in bitcoins disappeared. Mt. Gox was plagued with problems for the better part of a year leading up to its death, and bitcoin holders were made to suffer thru numerous hacks and security breaches. At the time, Mt.Gox had been handling roughly 70% of the world's bitcoin transactions!
Abrupt Market Moves
I am not saying that Poloniex.com is in the same boat as Mt.Gox or Tulving.com or BernieMadoff.com, but I am saying that the similarities are eery. In times of extreme volatility in a closed marketplace, the manager of that market sometimes finds himself backed into a corner that he did not anticipate, and he makes rash, unorthodox decisions. We are seeing some incredible volatility in the cryptocoins at the moment, and it doesn't take a great imagination to think that someone at Poloniex may have made an error in judgement which is now causing them some major trouble.
Steemit
@poloniex has 28.707 MILLION steem in savings in their steemit.com wallet. Their steemit wallet has an estimated account value of $48 MILLION dollars. Why is this the case? Can someone explain it to me? If something terrible happened to poloniex.com tomorrow, like the SEC seizing all their assets for example, what would happen to these steem, especially if their private key somehow disappeared or was changed? Is this their way of keeping the coins in "cold storage"?
Implications for the Broader Market
If another huge exchange goes tits up, it will cause a serious shakeup in crypto markets. Even more so if poloniex is found to have a huge liability somewhere which would cause them to sell massively to cover it. We could be seeing something like that happen right before our eyes, like THIS WEEK. It would likely decimate the alt-coins, and set bitcoin back a few steps. However, it might be an opportunity for decentralized exchanges to show their true value as a limiter of counterparty risk
My Poloniex account is safe because it is empty. Does he eat popcorn, delicious!
Did something in particular spur you to empty it?
You were not involved in cryptocurrency back in late 2013/early 2014, were you? I advise you to read up on the history and implosion of Mt. Gox.
I wasn't involved, but I was watching that closely for months before and as it went down. I wasn't focussing on that in this story, just linking it as another example of brutal losses due to counterparty risk. Tulving was absolutely brutal too. It took a while to play out.
I like your WOT name btw. :)
I am a new crypto bird and I try to learn from the mistakes of others. 🐥 I have owned Lisk on Polo, they displayed message, that they had some issues with withdrawing Lisk, so I change it to BTC, withdrew it and said Goodbye to them. Long-lasting maintenance of different coins was another annoying thing.
Likewise. Smart move.
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This has been boiling for awhile... think i'm gonna follow the smart guys and get my loot out of polo for a while.
Thanks! from thedamus
For that matter, does anyone remember Mt. Gox? The place where $0.5B of Bitcoin disappeared at nearly the same time as Tulving.com imploded?
Excellent topic here and becoming ever more poignant. Like Tulving, Polo was so stable and dependable for so long that, well we became complacent. I thought I was just going to wait it out and move once the confusion settled. Could that large deposit of STEEM be the coins that were purchased on Poloniex?
Very disturbing comparison indeed between Polo and Tulving! The Tulving demise was a real shocker for me, and a very sad circumstance overall and was it a coincidence that Mt Gox blew up at the same time? It just ruffles my conspiracy feathers.
Yep. Stay frosty. And always know that if you don't have it in your hands, it isn't really yours.