Comment by Workaccount2

Comment by Workaccount2 2 days ago

5 replies

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Just yesterday it was announced that Bitfinex will be returned the 95,000 bitcoin that were lost in a 2016 hack. These coins will be returned to the account holders which were affected by the hack.

At the time the bitcoins were lost, they were worth ~$575 each.

Today those returned tokens are worth close to $100,0000 each.

I doubt anyone who was affected by that hack realized they just got involuntarily forced into the best investment of their lives.

fckgw 2 days ago

> These coins will be returned to the account holders which were affected by the hack.

I haven't seen any reporting on that. Bitfinex, the corporate entity, is receiving the coins recovered from the feds. It's up to Bitfinex how they device to dole out those funds, if at all.

When these things happen, often times exchanges will make their customers whole by giving back the monetary value of the coins at time of loss. It's very rare they repay them 1:1 in bitcoin.

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  • ElevenLathe 2 days ago

    IANAL but it seems like whoever is running Bitfinex should endeavour to make all the creditors whole in whatever medium their debt was denominated, according to seniority. So if they owe users X BTC and other creditors Y USD, and the BTC debts are senior, they should hand out the BTC to users regardless of its dollar value and, if there is any left, auction it off for the benefit of the (junior, in this scenario) USD creditors.

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    • fckgw 2 days ago

      They could, but there's nothing requiring them to do so.

      AFAIK the only crypto company who have been hacked (and there are a lot) and returned funds as BTC and not in dollars is, ironically, Mt. Gox. Users got repaid in Bitcoin 10 years after the fact. FTX bagholders were compensated ~120% in "equivalent value" dollars. Lost crypto was not repaid.

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chasebank 2 days ago

Interesting part of the story is the hacker who stole them is a YC alumni, he founded mixrank. Kid only got 5 years in prison for stealing $1B.

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