I've been reading on twitter that people are having a lot of issues with accessing bitfinex, and that there has been some hacking involved or something? I was thinking about starting a bitfinex account to trade with but now I'm worried. Are they safe?
According to their Twitter account, they've been fighting DOS attacks for the last several days. You can monitor bitfinex.statuspage.io/ for real-time updates. 16 hours ago, they said:
So I don't think this is a hack. But in general, I don't consider Bitfinex to be a "safe" exchange. The 2016 hack is still unexplained (no post-mortem). But more than that, the whole Tether business and banking blockade seem worrisome, and the fact that they've never held licenses in the jurisdictions they serve. I lost a lot of coins when BTC-e went down, so I minimize my exposure to unlicensed exchanges now.
I mostly stick to GDAX and Bitstamp, although I'm looking forward to decentralized exchanges once they start gaining liquidity.