Hi everyone. This article will cover how two of the top worldwide cryptocurrency exchanges, namely Bittrex and Bitfinex, are each rapidly beginning to close down many of their users' accounts. This seems to be affecting a huge pool of users for each of these exchanges, and may also be taking a toll on the Bitcoin price.
Let's see what's going on.
Bittrex, one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges and one of the altcoin exchanges with the most volume, has begun to mysteriously boot thousands of user accounts. According to users, the most affected countries may be in the middle-east and eastern Asia, namely India, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, and Russia, with some from Afghanistan.
When an affected user attempts to log onto their account, they get a message like the one shown below. This affects all types of users, even verified ones:
Bittrex customers affected by this are swarming to places such as Twitter, Bittrex's Slack Channel, their customer support, and other venues to try to get ahold of Bittrex. However, Bittrex seems to be simply ignoring all of these customer requests.
Some users have very large amounts of Bitcoin and altcoins stored on Bittrex, and are frantically trying to cope with the situation. We're all trying to avoid a situation similar to the one in early 2014, when infamous exchange Mt. Gox shut down, barring access to users' bitcoins.
Though we're not sure of the exact cause of the shutdown or the reason for Bittrex's silence, it's clear that things are not looking good.
Bitfinex, another super popular exchange, is now officially asking US customers to remove all coins from their exchange. Already, Bitfinex does not allow United States users to become "verified." However, this next step seems to be preparing for a total shutdown of United States service.
In Bitfinex's blog post, Bitfinex specifically notes that the message is, "with respect to terminating our business with U.S. individual customers."
Bitfinex has made it clear yesterday that they will not be operating in the US anymore:
As indicated in the announcement, we are terminating trading, deposits, and withdrawal functionality for U.S. individual customers by no later than November 9, 2017. U.S. customers are already barred from receiving financing from other users on Bitfinex’s peer-to-peer financing platform. This restriction will remain and, in addition, U.S. individual customers will no longer be able to provide financing on Bitfinex effective November 9, 2017.
All U.S. individual users must make arrangements to withdraw their Digital Tokens by November 9th.
It seems that November 9th, 2017 is the (latest) day when all functionality will be prohibited for US customers, even including withdrawals. If you are in the U.S. and you're using one of these exchanges, please immediately begin to secure your altcoins and bitcoins.
Bitfinex seems to be blaming this pull out of the US market, on tight rules and regulations. Bitfinex itself is not based in the United States, and it seems they feel a US-based exchange would be more ready to cope with such things.
As you can see, with exchanges, things can topple very fast. The old adage goes, "If you don't know the private key behind your bitcoins, they aren't yours."
When you deposit Bitcoins to an exchange, you give up all rights to the Bitcoin. The exchange "promises" you to let you trade with those bitcoins, but you don't actually own them on the blockchain.
This is why it's imperative that, in events such as hard forks and calamities like this one, you get your coins out of your exchange, and fast. If you wait too long, you may end up suffering huge financial damages and trauma.
Thanks for reading,
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announcement #1:
