They probably lost them like the rest of us due to a "bug" in the wallet..
That's extremely unlikely. A lot of the wallet features we provided in v0.4.0 were directly requested by Poloniex, they wanted to be certain that coins could not be lost and we made certain that as long as they kept the original seed, coins could not be lost.
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I am afraid the wallet is not syncing, we are indeed speaking with the coin developer and awaiting a solution, when the wallet is re enabled all deposits and withdrawals will be processed at once. Wallets are backed up regularly so we can recover everything if needed.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
Best regards,
Johnny Garcia
Poloniex Support
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That's good to know. We're not sure why some wallets have infrequently had troubles syncing, but we're looking into it. If anyone else has had this problem, it would be great to see the logfiles, particularly gateway.log. We don't know what's causing the issue, and haven't run into it ourselves yet. Usually deleting the consensus folder is sufficient to fix the issue.
I notice that some new users are still thinking that they have no balance because it does not display before unlocking the wallet and I think the unlocking should only be done after the wallet is fully synced up. I realize this was meant to be a feature but from a practical standpoint perhaps that should be re-evaluated.
In v0.5.0 there will be a loading splash until 'siad' has finished loading. If you unlock the wallet while syncing, it will take time for the balance to catch up but I haven't seen anyone complaining about that. Also, it will no longer display a '0' in your balance, instead will use '---' to indicate that the wallet is locked. Maybe we should just display a lock icon.
I do believe that the UX has been changed a bit since v0.4.8, we haven't released in a while.
Is there an ETA for v0.5.0 yet?
Yes. Jan 9th for v0.5.0-rc1
Jan 19th for v0.5.0
And we're aiming for v1.0 in March.