Bitcoin Exchange Bitstamp Still “Rebuilding,” Customers Anguished
The world’s most popular Bitcoin exchange since the fall of Mt. Gox, BitStamp, as you may already know, is currently unavailable due to a hack that made off with nearly 19,000 BTC. Last night, Nejc Kodrič, CEO of the company, posted to Twitter two very important pieces of information. One, if you had a deposit prior to January 5th at 9AM, it is safe, and two, the new, hopefully more secure system would be online in 24 to 48 hours. Listening to worried customers, Bitstamp has updated their website to look prettier.
Also read: Bitstamp to Resume Operations in the Next 24 Hours
Bitstamp Still Offline
However, a few hours later Kodrič backtracked by saying “We are fully rebuilding our systems from the ground up so that customers can use @Bitstamp with full confidence and trust.” This raised questions from his followers as to whether the earlier stated timeline was no longer valid, none of which he has yet replied to directly. However, not long after that, he posted another tweet where he said, “My earlier tweet of 48 hours was a rough timeframe. We are testing our redeployed system internally before going live again to customers.” Which only raises more questions, such as: which is it? Are you rebuilding from the ground up or are you redeploying? The only comment on this tweet at time of writing was “RIP,” meaning Rest in Peace.
On the earlier mentioned tweet, a legitimate prediction was made by Girevek Capital (@girevekcap): “You do realize there will be a massive bank run on the exchange after it reopens, right? You have lost people’s trust.” Other users just encouraged the company to admit defeat and return everyone’s coins. There seems to be little hope among followers of the affair that there ever is any coming back from a problem such as this where as much as $5 million of other people’s money goes missing. The fact that they did not repeat the problems of Mt. Gox by being transparent and quick to action may not be enough to assuage users.
All of which leads one to wonder what the next big Bitcoin exchange will be and whether it will suffer the same sort of problems. So long as there are networking and software involved, there will be hackers and hacks, but these sorts of problems don’t happen in other financial spheres near as often. All can agree that something will need to be done in a big way to prevent these problems in the future if mass adoption is ever to be attained for Bitcoin.
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