i know once your hot wallet gets empty, u guys will refill it up with your cold wallet... do u guys have only 1 cold wallet or many? from what i know once a cold wallet is activated online there is risk! and then the cold wallet becomes a hot wallet too
I'll leave it up to Bitfinex to give an official statement on this and the safety of the Bitcoins. I'll just share this: I know for a fact it's both offline and multisig.
We have multiple offline cold wallets, so that what allegedly happened to MtGox will never happen to us (i.e. we will never "discover" one day all the coins are gone).
Thanks a lot and have a good day
Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team
what do you think about gmaxwells proposal how an exchange can proof it has the coins?
its more difficult in your case, as you have also funds in bitstamp: but they have commited themselve to provide such a proof so it should be possible for you also.
gmaxwells proposal does not reveal how much user you have or how much fund an user owns.
we are evaluating different proposals and ideas, but at the end of the day if we implement a system it must make sense.
To prove we have access to a certain amount of coins doesn't mean anything.
How can each of you be sure about the total number of coins we say we have on behalf of our customers?
Every customer just knows how many coins he has, but can never be sure of what is the total we claim.
Is seems easier than what it really is.....
Any suggestion is as usual more than welcome
Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team
Make a anonymized user list (I'll explain this below), publically post this list of users and their btc account balance, then sign messages to prove ownership of cold wallets. The total amount of coins in your wallets should match the total amount of coins on the list. Everybody can see their anonymized name in the list, and thus feels confident that he/she is included, and that the company has the funds.
Now the anonymization part: let users chose a password for the public balance, hash that password (or perhaps the concatenation of the username and that password to ensure that a certain combination doesn't occur twice), and use that hash as the username. You could also give users the option to split their account into several anonymized usernames, if they don't like it that their total btc number is shown publically.