Tales From the Cryptsy

It was a dark and stormy night and I was happily trading away at Cryptsy when I noticed a good opportunity for arbitrage. HBN was trading high on Cryptsy and low everywhere else. I sold some HBN there for a rather good price. Thinking I’d made a good deal I thought I would move the BTC to another exchange and purchase back some HBN at low cost and make a profit.

I tried to move the BTC but got some cryptic error message which implied that it might someday come through if I was patient enough. Several days later but no BTC was sent my way but the tech support promptly and courteously canceled the request and reset my account when I emailed them about the issue.

So I thought, “Maybe I’ll purchase Litecoin and move that”. I traded the BTC for LTC paying higher than market rate. I tried to move that off the exchange but no go.

I’m starting to get a bit ticked off, despite the years of Zen meditation and mindfulness practice. All kinds of strange information was floating around bitcointalk. Cryptsy was getting creepier and creepier.

“Run for your lives, the zombies are attacking Crypsyland!”, one investor advised.

“WTF?”, I thought, “Cryptsy was always a really good place to trade, I’m sure they will straighten things out soon enough”.

Crystal Skull3 by Lightsplasher

As the weeks passed, things got worse and worse. I began to hear a giant sucking sound as all the cash and any cryptocurrency worth anything was drawn into the black hole of Crypsy and and not let back out.

Everyone thought that Crypsy was minting customers proof of stake coins in order to maximize their profit. Banks use other peoples money to support their loans and nobody cares much, but a cryptocoin exchange profiting off the coins deposited by customers really made everyone mad. The small coin markets could not afford this type of abuse.

“Run for your lives, there a gonna shutter their doors, get out while you can!”, another investor said.

Taking their advice I escaped with as many of the low value trinket coins that would still flow out of Crypsy as I could - paying dearly for them with fiat and BTC.

Sure enough, just after this the fly by night exchange was nowhere to be found. The mystery of Crypsy darkened, “Where was Big Vern? Where was Crypsy?”

Why it Happened

Because of the anonymous nature of block chain technology we may never fully get to the bottom the mysterious overnight shuttering of Crypsy. A smart enough investigator might though, because of the public nature of the addresses and transactions.

Claims have been made that hackers took a large amount from Crypsy. Rather than let people know at the time of the theft, they tried to cover this up and make enough profit to keep going.

If this were so, why suddenly disappear? Why not cooperate fully with investigators and help in any way possible to track down what might have happened during the initial theft?

I’ve heard that Big Vern is somewhere in China and has started up a new exchange. Crypsyland part two is somewhere out there waiting to take your money… (Start the creepy sounding music)

The Moral of the Tale

Always keep your funds in a fully FDIC insured government backed institution of reputable skulduggery. If you must bury your booty in a crypt as least write down the private key somewhere and then dispatch anyone that had anything to do with your project. (Leaving their bones on top of the crypt helps discourage hackers I’ve heard)

---

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed my humor. :)