Bankrupt metals fraudster Hannes Tulving found himself in trouble as the market tightened.
1) Transactions slow down to a crawl with no customer support answers
2) Complaints build up, and build up, and build up.
3) Phones are turned off, and deliveries stop
4) Account Imbalances & Hidden Money?
July 5th, 2017 - This is where the comparison becomes speculation
I am not a customer of Poloniex, and I have no financial interest in it one way or the other. I am writing this purely out of curiousity. I realize that some people have very serious stakes in Poloniex, and when I speculate about its imminent demise, I fear that I will be making some people who read this physically ill. I apologize for that. You've probably already vomited several times this week.
Most readers here are familiar with Mt.Gox. The primitive (centralized) bitcoin exchange abruptly closed up shop in February 2014 (at the same time as Tulving Coins ceased operations) and a fortune in bitcoins disappeared. Mt. Gox was plagued with problems for the better part of a year leading up to its death, and bitcoin holders were made to suffer thru numerous hacks and security breaches. At the time, Mt.Gox had been handling roughly 70% of the world's bitcoin transactions!
Abrupt Market Moves
I am not saying that Poloniex.com is in the same boat as Mt.Gox or Tulving.com or BernieMadoff.com, but I am saying that the similarities are eery. In times of extreme volatility in a closed marketplace, the manager of that market sometimes finds himself backed into a corner that he did not anticipate, and he makes rash, unorthodox decisions. We are seeing some incredible volatility in the cryptocoins at the moment, and it doesn't take a great imagination to think that someone at Poloniex may have made an error in judgement which is now causing them some major trouble.
Steemit
Implications for the Broader Market
If another huge exchange goes tits up, it will cause a serious shakeup in crypto markets. Even more so if poloniex is found to have a huge liability somewhere which would cause them to sell massively to cover it. We could be seeing something like that happen right before our eyes, like THIS WEEK. It would likely decimate the alt-coins, and set bitcoin back a few steps. However, it might be an opportunity for decentralized exchanges to show their true value as a limiter of counterparty risk
