The platform, Vebitcoin, said in a brief statement on its website that it has ceased all activities after facing financial strain and that it would update clients on the situation as soon as possible.
[...]
Turkish authorities have blocked Vebitcoin’s domestic bank accounts and detained four people as part of a probe into the exchange, Reuters reported Saturday. According to CoinGecko data, Vebitcoin had almost $60 million in daily trading volumes prior to its collapse.
The founder of a popular crypto exchange in Turkey has disappeared, with media reports indicating that he has fled the country with $2 billion as roughly 300,000 frustrated users have suddenly lost access to their accounts.
In Turkey, the national currency lira has been in a secular decline for nine consecutive years, urging people to take some risks in a bid to protect their savings and maybe even earn something. As a result, the recent rise of cryptocurrencies predictably attracted many investors who hoped to protect their money and possibly gain some more. But things did not go well for them as Thodex, one of the country's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, went bust.
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Thodex was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in Turkey with 700,000 users, many lured in by an introductory offer of 'millions' of free Dogecoins. Apparently, most of those Dogecoins were never distributed.
It's always the exact same thing, too. People leave their money on an exchange, money gets stolen, repeat. Maybe they're just used to the idea of their money being sort of inaccessible on stock...
It's always the exact same thing, too. People leave their money on an exchange, money gets stolen, repeat. Maybe they're just used to the idea of their money being sort of inaccessible on stock exchanges, or just don't know that leaving your currency hanging out in someone else's possession for an IOU is a risk? I mean I use an exchange, but only to load funds in, change currencies, and pull funds right back out. Even though I "trust" my exchange, that trust only goes so far and I keep it to the narrowest windows possible. It's not a bank account.
One of my favorite sections of a Matt Levine post ever, talking about QuadrigaCX: (from here)
One of my favorite sections of a Matt Levine post ever, talking about QuadrigaCX:
I’m sorry, I know that this is just the most boring and obvious cliché about cryptocurrency, but still I have like a physical need to say it: If you are a believer in the power of cryptocurrency, if you like its promise of trustless decentralized money, why did you entrust millions of dollars of your money to one guy with a laptop? One guy with a laptop! Ooooooh it was “the largest crypto exchange in Canada,” sure, but it was also one guy with a laptop, and he died and bricked the laptop and now your money is gone. (Or he didn’t and it’s stolen, or some other dumb combination of those things.) “I don’t trust the banks, but this chap from the internet seems nice, and he has a laptop, I’m sure he can hold my money for me, and what are the odds that he’ll die suddenly?” Gahhhhh come on.
This is not how it works! Either you have some sort of stable trustworthy regulatory and investor-protection framework so that you can go to any reputable intermediary and assume that it will do what it says it will do, or you have to do your own careful due diligence on any intermediary before choosing to trust it. But no one seems to have done the diligence of, like, showing up at Quadriga CX’s headquarters/house and asking “wait where are the rest of you,” in the same way that I’ve never gone to Valley Forge, Pa., to make sure that the Vanguard Group is actually there. The problem is that people think they don’t trust the traditional financial system, but in fact its most basic functionality — not forgetting where it put your money — is so reliable that people just keep assuming without evidence that the crypto system must work the same way. Surely a big crypto exchange must have, like, systems, and lawyers, and more than one employee, so you can trust it, right? Wrong! If I ever buy Bitcoins I will keep them at Gemini, the Winklevoss twins’ exchange, just because I am absolutely sure there are two of them.
Thanks, I wanted to go back and find some good Matt Levine quotes but didn't come up with a good way to search. This isn't the one I was thinking of, but it will do. :-)
Thanks, I wanted to go back and find some good Matt Levine quotes but didn't come up with a good way to search. This isn't the one I was thinking of, but it will do. :-)
The problem is if you pull the coins out of the exchange and then add them back to sell, you get hit with 2 sets of TX fees which costs about $50USD currently. If you just leave them in you avoid...
The problem is if you pull the coins out of the exchange and then add them back to sell, you get hit with 2 sets of TX fees which costs about $50USD currently. If you just leave them in you avoid this. You can imagine why its tempting to leave it in. Especially when you can set up auto sell setups.
Idk, maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I don't really think most people who trade on these type of platforms even know about the idea of wallets for cryptocurrencies. I think most people wouldn't be...
Idk, maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I don't really think most people who trade on these type of platforms even know about the idea of wallets for cryptocurrencies. I think most people wouldn't be comfortable knowing that their money is in someone else's bank account, which essentially what an wallet on an exchange is. As these currencies become more popular the general public definitely needs to become more educated on how they work.
There's also the minor inconvenience of fees which I can imagine being a deterrent for some. Especially since they are more often seen as a store of value that a functional currency.
A second bitcoin exchange collapses in Turkey amid crackdown on cryptocurrencies
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From the article:
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This surprises me exactly 0%. Cryptos are just a trivial target for scammers to take money from morons who think they are investors.
It's always the exact same thing, too. People leave their money on an exchange, money gets stolen, repeat. Maybe they're just used to the idea of their money being sort of inaccessible on stock exchanges, or just don't know that leaving your currency hanging out in someone else's possession for an IOU is a risk? I mean I use an exchange, but only to load funds in, change currencies, and pull funds right back out. Even though I "trust" my exchange, that trust only goes so far and I keep it to the narrowest windows possible. It's not a bank account.
One of my favorite sections of a Matt Levine post ever, talking about QuadrigaCX:
(from here)
Thanks, I wanted to go back and find some good Matt Levine quotes but didn't come up with a good way to search. This isn't the one I was thinking of, but it will do. :-)
The problem is if you pull the coins out of the exchange and then add them back to sell, you get hit with 2 sets of TX fees which costs about $50USD currently. If you just leave them in you avoid this. You can imagine why its tempting to leave it in. Especially when you can set up auto sell setups.
Hmm, maybe Coinbase fees aren't as bad as people say?
Idk, maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I don't really think most people who trade on these type of platforms even know about the idea of wallets for cryptocurrencies. I think most people wouldn't be comfortable knowing that their money is in someone else's bank account, which essentially what an wallet on an exchange is. As these currencies become more popular the general public definitely needs to become more educated on how they work.
There's also the minor inconvenience of fees which I can imagine being a deterrent for some. Especially since they are more often seen as a store of value that a functional currency.