As a bit of an update on the Bitflyer drama, I have good news and bad news: the good news is that I’ve managed to recover my bitcoin from Bitflyer (what ultimately worked was emailing them and CC-ing the Japanese Financial Services Agency, the New York State Department of Financial Services and the CSSF, as explained on Bitflyer Dot Sucks).
The bad news is that reports similar to mine keep piling up, even among domainers. For example, earlier this week, someone posted that he or she is going through the same situation as a comment to my initial Bitflyer warning. The same way, complaints are popping up over at Reddit and other platforms. In my opinion, there’s something very, very shady going on, which is why despite getting my money back, I’ll be maintaining the Bitflyer.Sucks website and enabling others to share their Bitflyer horror stories.
In my opinion, they might be selectively giving money back to people (such as yours truly) they believe are making too much noise, while ignoring other customers.
Why this is happening is anyone’s guess.
They might have experienced a huge loss and are dealing with liquidity issues, similar to what happened with Bitfinex when they were hacked or to give an even more infamous example, similar to what happened over at MtGOX. As such, under the pretense of bureaucratic constraints, they’re freezing accounts and essentially buying time until they figure something out.
Maybe it’s something else, I have no way of knowing for sure.
However, I won’t close down Bitflyer.Sucks just because I got my money back. I’ll keep making it available to people who are dealing with issues similar to mine, so if you have a Bitflyer story to share, simply shoot an email to contact@bitflyer.sucks and I’ll do my best to help.
We need to remember the mistakes of the past such as MtGOX.
If action would have been taken sooner, there would have been a lot less victims. But, instead, people remained passive. Liquidity issues appeared but they didn’t care. Bitcoin then traded at a premium precisely because enough concerned customers were withdrawing crypto (fiat withdrawals started becoming problematic) but many chose to look the other way. The rest, as they say, is history.
