In all fairness, this isn't much different from commodity ETFs promising that they have a warehouse of gold or silver somewhere that matches the market cap of the fund. There's no easy way to completely, 100% verify this, so people just trust them.

That’s what auditors are for - solving exactly that problem. Well mostly - like everything else it’s imperfect

You're absolutely right. I'm not saying they're solvent. There just isn't any evidence that they aren't.

They just got hacked for $30 mil. Pretty safe to say they are in the red at this time.

They may not be. $30 mil is a small percentage though. Bitfinex makes a few million per day in volume. It's not unreasonable to think they might still be solvent, even with a 30 million dollar loss. But they also might not. However, they definitely won't be if their fix to block the stolen Tethers goes through.

Bitfinex got hacked for 119,756 BTC last year, and Tether got hacked for $30 mil today.

Both are owned by iFinex LTD, and had the same CEO till earlier this year. Total amount they have lost comes out to $1 Billion.

How are you still claiming "They may not be"?

At the time Bitfinex was hacked, they automatically converted the "hacked" BTC balance to USD. It was around $650 I believe at the time of the hack. It would be unfair to measure the hack in today's BTC value because they converted the liability in customers' accounts in USD.

Tell that to the Mt Gox account holders... they don't seem too happy that their BTC claims have been converted to JP¥

They were plenty happy with it when BTC was crashing. People just like to whine. Converting to JPY in MtGox's case and USD in Bitfinex's case was the reasonable thing to do. Denominating massive debts in cryptocurrency is an insane thing in a market this young and volatile.

I don't think this was terribly good for them when bitcoin was crashing either, because it still ate into the amount they'd get paid out since the underlying assets were still partially in bitcoins. The bankruptcy trustee basically gave Mark Karpeles free options on bitcoin with all the customers he'd screwed over as forced counterparties.

I was a Bitfinex customer when they got hacked. I lost 30% of my funds on that day. I couldn't be happier with how they handled it. They paid me back in full and did the best they could with the situation they had. People being upset with them over it is insane to me. As far as I can tell, it's mostly people who had nothing to do with it spectating from the sidelines. If an exchange you use ever gets hacked, I certainly hope they do exactly what Bitfinex did, for your sake. And you should too.

They said "They paid me back in full" so I assume he did not lose the 30% in the end? Admittedly I'm not sure I understand what they mean.

I also wish that "everybody I disagree with is a shill" meme stayed in 4chan and reddit, it's incompatible with reasonable discussion.

What I mean is that when the hack occurred I lost 30% of my funds. However, I received BFX tokens equivalent to the amount I lost. Eventually, as Bitfinex continued operating and accumulating fees from operations, they paid me back 1:1 USD for BFX tokens they had given me as debt.

So, I did lose the time-value of that money (they didn't pay me interest on it), and I didn't get paid back in Bitcoin or Ethereum, which would have been more money, but i'm still very happy with how they handled it. I think it was the most reasonable and honest solution to the problem that they had available to them at the time.

Do you mind not posting comments that the guidelines clearly ask us not to?

> Don't accuse others of astroturfing or shillage. Email us and we'll look into it.

> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. When you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Bitfinex already fully financially recovered from the 119k BTC theft by repurchasing the last of the BFX debt tokens a few months ago.

...with suspiciously issued Tethers, which is kinda the whole point here.

But it doesn't matter. From a legal aspect, customers who accepted to sell their BFX tokens are no longer creditors to Bitfinex.

and those tokens were traded at how many pennies to the dollar ?

They were redeemed by Bitfinex at full face value.

No. They blacklisted the stolen tethers, and all they now have to do is issue a new batch of $30 million worth of tethers. In no way this puts them in the red.

Stolen Tethers were transferred to a known Bitfinex Exchange deposit address. The hackers bought Bitcoins within an hour and took off with their loot.

Reversing Tether tx does nothing to recover those Bitcoins.

Source?

Edit: found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7e1840/the_30000000_us...

It seems like people did in fact notice the $30m being deposited on Bitfinex and being used to buy Bitcoin, all before it was known to be stolen. Difficult to confirm a thing like this, but I wouldn't bet against it.

As as been pointed out above they can't unilaterally blacklist tethers, the other parties have to accept the modified client.

But since Tether Limited are the ones who back the tokens with real dollars, they can effectively unilaterally pressure anyone to upgrade the client. Those who don't upgrade and accept stolen tethers will be left with worthless unredeemable tokens.

Read this lawsuit: Tether only has $50 mill and their wires have been frozen by Wells Fargo since March 2017. So the remaining $600 mill tokens are backed by nothing.

http://article78againstnydfs.com/docs/317-cv-01882-BitfinexC...

That was filed back in April when there were only $50 million Tether in existence: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ Also, the money that's supposedly backing Tether is in Taiwanese banks, not Wells Fargo, and their problem with Wells Fargo should only affect international wires.