How much do we know that this wallet reflects bitfinex's bitcoin holdings?
I agree with the proposition that users are likely withdrawing bitcoin from bitfinex in higher degrees than they are depositing; however, bitfinex has been maintaining really decent trade volume too, so the supposed exit from Bitfinex has not seemed to have significantly negatively affected their trade volume.
I can answer you both questions... even if the second is not really a question
1) We don't know. They might have more cold wallets. Also, they wouldnt even need to use their cold wallets as they can just buy Bitcoins OTC and sell them to users for a 10% premium. If they are not doing that already, the situation is even more scary that it appears to be.
2) If they were in deep shit, they would for sure do play all sort of games to hide that fact. Running bots to increase trading volume, or even just fake it is so easy you should never take that as proof of ANYTHING. There are two types of bankrupted companies/managers... the ones that do recognize it preventively even before it happens to avoid any sort of responsability (we know Bitfinex is not that type, as they SHOULD have done it right after the hack when the liabilities exceeded the assets)... and the ones that are already so deep in their shit that keep playing until they totally drown in their own shit.
I cannot really disagree with anything that you are saying, and I think that your response is fairly reasonable.
Regarding 1), they would be pretty dumbass if they did not attempt to figure out a way to make some additional profits on the current 10% premium.
Regarding 2), There could be more layers of financial irresponsibility, but it does seem that Bitfinex has at least attempted to employ some pretty sophisticated tools - yet maybe if we Bitfinoxed, then we would not recognize the level of their shenanigans, until quite a while after the fact - which was also kind of the case with GOX, too... I mean with GOX, they may have kind of thought that they had some methods to be able to attempt to handle the situation and to get matters under control while their whole situation continued to slip deeper and deeper into the red.
Of course the btc (now usd) whales will buy very low just to sell a year or two at a much higher level.
