It’s been another week, an eternity in the bitcoin world, and it looks like Bitfinex’s chosen recovery plan, in which it would “socialize” its losses by having its customers share 36% of the loss, may not actually, strictly speaking, be legal.
“I think these questions are falling into a bit of a grey area,”said bitcoin and blockchain technology expert Patrick Murck. “It’s something that depends on how you classify different types of accounts. Particular US accounts were supposed to be separate accounts, but if you look at the actual implementation, how the keys were distributed, the reality does not match what customers were told.”
The last time we checked in with Bitfinex, the company had come up with the plan, where all of their customers suffered 36% of the loss, to rectify the damage done by the second-largest hack in bitcoin history, with the exchange suffering a loss of around $80 million.
And if experts were dubious about the socialization decision then, at this point they’re pretty well convinced that it will never hold up in court.
Multiple sources report that the socialization loss plan actually violates Bitfinex’s terms of service, which state that the bitcoins in customers’ multi-signature wallets are owned by them, while others point out the issues with the BFX tokens, issued to customers ostensibly for reimbursement purposes or for stock in parent company iFinex, stating that, in the words of Cornell associate professor Emin Gün Sirer, “they are using the terms tokens, but they are really securities.”
If they can actually be classed as securities, this means that trading the tokens might legally require licenses, in the US specifically, that Bitfinex doesn’t have.
“People should not be trusting these centralized exchanges anymore,” said Sirer. “That’s a lesson that for some reason the community is refusing to learn.”
Bitfinex itself admits that there are problems with the BFX tokens, claiming there are still “protocol level details” to work out in the same post as its reassurances to customers regarding its secure new infrastructure.
Aside from the questionable legality of its recovery plan, the “protocol” problems of its tokens, and the growing frustrations of its US customers, whose accounts were reportedly frozen, Bitfinex is also making what many consider doomed efforts to recover its lost bitcoin, now offering a reward for the coins’ return or information regarding that return.
The Wild West bounty— “you know the rules, Slim, no bounty if no recovery”—being offered by Bitfinex executive Zane Tackett amounts to just about $3.5 million, something the exchange could possibly afford to lose if it actually recovers a significant chunk of the missing bitcoins.
Whether or not the plan is legal is something that’s still being debated, by everyone, so we’ll have to check back in next week to see if things are any clearer. Just another week in bitcoin!
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