Hello all. I'm terrible sorry for not responding to this earlier. A mix of personal issues with searching for a solution prevented me from it.
Unfortunately, I have very bad news. I cannot currently proccess your withdrawals. The situation is very complicated and it's all my fault, that's why I feel terrible about it. I tried to make this up, to keep the site afloat and somehow recover the funds, but it's not possible anymore. Right now there are 1786 BTC pending withdrawal, which I can't honor...
Earlier this year, I had this "genius" idea which led me to making a fatal mistake. I thought I could provide a hedge fund service for Bitmarket users. There were other sites providing this service so I guesses that it could be successful. I had experience in trading before, all I needed is a platform. And there was one - Bitcoinica. I was so convinced with this idea (and sooo wrong in hindsight) that for a while I kept majority of "offline" Bitmarket funds there. What I didn't expect was that one day it could just dissapear - taking all the money with it. What's worse, the funds were shorted when it happened (converted to USD and sold) - and after Bitcoinica dissapeared BTC price rose by about 250% until now. So while there is still chance to recover the funds (there is an appointed liquidator assigned to this case and I've already sent in claims) it will be not enough to cover all people's funds. For the record - there are
20161 18787.72139217 BTC missing (edit: I subtracted my funds that also were deposited on Bitmarket), and Bitcoinica claims total for around 50K USD (the exact amount is uncertain because the liquidators haven't yet stated at what rate they will liquidate positions).
Sadly, I alone, I'm out of options. I don't have own money to pay for this loss (Bitmarket never made any real profit and I make up for a living by part-time web/mobile programming). The options for making this up for everyone as I see are:
- find an investor (or investors) that is willing to cover at least part of is debt. I would transfer all rights to the website software, servers and database to him and also work as a technician, possibly also implementing features he'd wanted. If you reading this have the funds necessary to make this work, PLEASE contact me on this.
- freeze all current funds and "start over" trading with explicit fees, implementing much-needed features like rating system and others. All profits from the fees would go directly to a fund for repaying the debt. I'm afraid that this option alone is not enough though - many people won't (and have full right to do so) trust the site again...
- something else?
Again, I would like to deeply apologize to everyone involved with this. I'm really sorry
. I made a fatal mistake and I have to deal with it now. If you thinking about sueing me about this - you have full right to do so, but I don't think it's a good idea - I don't have any money so winning a case will get nothing for you and possibly ruin my life
. It also would prevent me from doing anything to alleviate this situation, and I really want to make this up for everyone and I'm willing to do anything in my power to do this. I had many sleepless nights thinking about how I can make this tight. I just need some help with this.
Last, but not least...
If you have any bitcoin you can donate to help users that have locked funds, please send them here: 1Km5GFMat1DXcbvMTeH9ZvLGKvFCLBA9dMAll received Bitcoins will go directly to process withdrawals. I will update how much is left in this thread.
What I'd like to know is, was any user aware of this "hedge fund service"? If M4v3R was serious about providing a hedge fund service for his customers, what would have been the expected benefit? Was he going to pay funds to the users if the BTC price dropped or something?
My suspicion is that it was never on behalf of the users at all - that M4v3R got greedy, got tired of running a service for free, and wanted to use the massive amount of BTC he was holding on behalf of other users to make a profit for himself.
