Bittrex is carrying a hot pile of shit.
Hello guys, if you've not been living under a rock you must have heard/read about the Hive Robbin hood gist who stole from the thieves and gave back to the owners, only that in Hive's case he gave back to an exchange, interestingly, Bittrex.
So let me give you a quick run down of Bittrex in case you don't know.
Bittrex is one of the biggest and most popular exchanges in crypto and one of the earliest exchanges to list Hive and also contributed a lot to Hive's P.R during the listing, they also did not take part in the Steem hostile takeover saga but remained neutral all through.
It is safe for one to think they have "saner" people in their management than the others, perhaps this was what led to the "Robbin Hood's" decision to send the funds to Bittrex custody, or maybe it was a totally different reason, it remains yet to be known.
And so a pile of hot shit was dropped in the laps of Bittrex, the question now is what will Bittrex do? This is also a question on the mind of everyone aware of this occurrence in cryptosphere. Bittrex tweeted earlier today that it was letting of some Steem in a post describing the predicament.
What happened during the hard fork and the allegation that the “community321” account was hacked outside of the Bittrex ecosystem are two separate issues. We cannot conflate these two issues.
Source
In a nutshell, they are confused as hell and they don't want to mess up. Can you blame them?
If they return the funds to Justin, they just aided the biggest Heist in Steems history and will forever be labelled as such, anyone who can do a proper research will confirm that Justin Sun bears no truth, not from his words nor his actions, neither from the beginning nor till this time and people who have bought and earned their funds are having their funds stolen, I find it outrightly preposterous.
If Bittrex returns the funds to the original owners, they might end up being in Justin Suns bad books for not complying with Steemits cry wolf of being hacked(who cares?). But it will be recognized across the entire cryptosphere as a stand of courage against the tyranny of centralization.
Perhaps its not this simple and there are other factors involved, such as legal factors that makes this situation more daunting than it seems for Bittrex.
If I were Bittrex though....
I will follow the order in the memo, as it was the instruction accompanying the deposit regardless of whom it came from, "please return to the owners prior the hardfork". I mean, hacker or not, the funds were sent with a memo right? And the instructions were clear, I guess that's got to stand for something.
Wild wild west!
The world of cryptocurrency can be much likened to the Wild Wild West due to its unregulated characteristic. Also cryptocurrencys try to create a narrative that is different from the modus operandi of the present governance system and its dogged laws, it is appalling that people still have to run to the mercy of this existing messed up system for solutions to the issues that arise from within the sphere.
I guess it all shows how early we still are in this space, under an already well established paradigm, Justin Sun will think twice before doing most of what he's done, because there will be consequences, right now the only price he's paying is a damage to his reputation which he obviously doesn't care about, I wonder how long he can keep that going.
“We must review the facts of this transfer in order to return these funds to the original wallet owner provided the owner or owners of the wallet can prove the funds belong to them,” Lai said in his notice.
I really hope Bittrex makes the right move as whatever comes next is totally dependent on it. Will Bittrex take a stand? What will you do if you were Bittrex?
Thanks for reading