AKA - expressing in another way.
The longer that Bitfinex maintains its price disparity, the more uncomfortable I become.
For several days, I thought that it was not a big deal - but this is going on a week now.
Furthermore, in the beginning, I am thinking that there are a variety of innocent explanations; however, the longer it goes on, I become more skeptical regarding the possible innocent explanations.
For example, Bitfinex seemed to have been on a pretty decent roll - restructured itself, paid off it's debt through innovative tools, social cost sharing and creation of new categories of equities devices. Also, maintained its trade volume...
One thing that causes me to worry about the large price differential and it carrying on for so long is that insiders at Bitfinex can take advantage of such large arbitrage opportunities much more easily than regular people and even use those kinds of arbitrage opportunities as ways to attempt to address their solvency issues (O.k.... Yeah.. I said it... "solvency" issues).... a manner of raising money to pay for their having had paid off all of their BFX tokens...
A problem with this whole scenario is that there can be a trade off with getting the economic advantages and losing credibility when they let the matter drag on for extended lengths of time.
Yes, but whats the question? If there is any here...
Sometimes when we post, we have questions, and other times, we are making current observations. My last post was more of the observation category and also to describe that my thinking had been changing on the topic.
All you are saying is a possible scenario, yes. In the past years I have done consulting for several companies in bankruptcy and let me tell you most of the times they are in a denial that makes them invent all sort of excuses for its solvency problems that would be similar to what's happening here. But also, it may be a legit explanation for a solvable incident. We just don't KNOW.
I am not going to assume malevolence if there is little to no evidence, and I am not going to pump out scary scenarios if there is no justification for it; however, it still can be productive to comment about scenarios as they are unravelling and as the information is coming available to us.
Yeah, Bitfinex keeps quite a lot of its information private, but they also make announcements too - and they do not fall under traditional industry, when it comes to bankrupcy strategies, if they were going to go down that road.
I personally don't believe that we are in the bancrupcy category, yet, with Bitfinex, but any exchange owner (and insiders) are going to be tempted by their abilities to make additional money from their insider position, and I do not necessarily assume that exchange owners and insiders are engaging in insider trading - but the longer that these kinds of extreme price disparities exist, the more that I become skeptical regarding what the fuck are they doing to resolve the matter, or not.
They DO know for sure, so yes, if they know they are solvent they have an awesome opportunity to take advantage of arbitrage. If they are not, then it doesn't matter, they are fucked big time as if they do that and later not be able to fill all claims, there would probably be criminal charges (depend on local laws).
Wether they are solvent or not, they can take advantage of insider situations - and whether they are solvent or not, they may be restraining themselves from such insider conduct.
If you are worried that this could be a GOX 2.0 that would crash BTC into a bear market for years.... I don't think so. GOX was the reference at that time, and it is almost a miracle the market recovered from that fiasco. Bitifinex, being somewhat important, is nowhere near in the position that GOX was.
I agree with you that Bitfinex is not likely to be a Gox 2.0.. even if there seem to be some similarities, there are also a lot of differences too.
If you have some funds in Bitfinex I would withdraw them asap, but other than that.....
I have some funds there, and I am not sure, yet whether a run on the bank is necessary - even though, maybe it is better to get some of the funds out... I will consider the matter a bit more and maybe hope that it is not too late... hahahaha
