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Withdrawals Frozen at Crypto Mining Firm Poolin Amid 'Liquidity Problems' (theblock.co) 68

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
Poolin, one of the world's biggest crypto mining pools, is suspending bitcoin and ether withdrawals from its wallet service due to "liquidity problems." From a report: "As you may have known, Poolin Wallet is currently facing some liquidity problems due to recent increasing demands on withdrawals. But please be assured, all user assets are safe and the company's net worth is positive," the firm said in an announcement Monday. Poolin said that it would "make a snapshot of the remaining BTC and ETH balances on pool on September 6th to work out the balances." "The daily mined coins after September 6th will be normally paid out per day. Other coins are not affected. The details of payout schedule for remaining balances will be released when details are set," the post continued. The Beijing-based company is among the latest industry firms to suspend withdrawals due to liquidity problems amid this year's decline in crypto asset prices. Lenders Voyager Digital and Vauld both halted withdrawals in July. Voyager has since begun restoring some access to customers.
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Withdrawals Frozen at Crypto Mining Firm Poolin Amid 'Liquidity Problems' More

Withdrawals Frozen at Crypto Mining Firm Poolin Amid 'Liquidity Problems'

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  • Shocked, I say!

  • company's net worth is positive (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @04:19PM (#62854638)

    But we're suspending your withdrawals to save all that for ourselves ...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well .... DUH.

      We can't steal your money if we let you take it out.

  • There may well be a sucker born every minute, but it's looking like that's no longer fast enough to keep the Bit-scheme afloat.

  • Amazing (Score:3)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @04:31PM (#62854662)

    These crypto companies seem to have more liquidity problems than a desert.

    Why is that?

  • It seems crypto is a great investment as long as everyone involved is satisfied by looking at an ever growing number in their wallets, but never try to take anything out. As soon as "investors" try to cash out, well, sinking crypto currency values and liquidity problems reliably emerge.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      That's neglecting the considerable chance someone will come along and forge a transaction. Even when the people backing a cryptocurrency have good intentions, it only takes one (inside job or outside hack) to run away with all of it.

    • It seems crypto is a great investment as long as everyone involved is satisfied by looking at an ever growing number in their wallets, but never try to take anything out. As soon as "investors" try to cash out, well, sinking crypto currency values and liquidity problems reliably emerge.

      News at eleven.

    • Crapto is akin to a Ponzi scheme. It's great until you run out of suckers... I mean "investors" to keep the con running.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thomn8r ( 635504 )

      It seems crypto is a great investment as long as everyone involved is satisfied by looking at an ever growing number in their wallets, but never try to take anything out. As soon as "investors" try to cash out, well, sinking crypto currency values and liquidity problems reliably emerge.

      That's literally the definition of a Ponzi scheme

    • That sounds just like the stock market.. that's why the stock market has regulations in place that when everyone sells, trading will be paused. Sounds familiar? E.g. NYSE "A market-wide trading halt can be triggered if the S&P 500 Index declines in price as compared to the prior dayâ(TM)s closing price of that index."

  • The dominos are all falling.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @04:47PM (#62854696)

    The dominos are all falling, and no one wants to be the last one holding the bag.

    Enjoy the collapse, suckers. Stick to what works.

    True, nothing ventured nothing gained -- but this whole crytpo thing definitely looks like tulips all over again.

    • this whole crytpo thing definitely looks like tulips all over again.

      It's going to take a while though. Too many people's lives have revolved around "free money!" for the last few years for them to let go easily.

      • I doubt there are enough individuals in various coins to keep the scam going much longer. Consider the drop from 68k to 20k for Bitcoin is already shocking even in the down economy. It had no reason to be at 68k much less the current 20k. Eventually the bigger scammers who have been holding on for ever higher numbers will cut n run and it will descend to its natural real world value: zero.

    • Worse, tulips are a real thing, and prettier than a yawning chimp in a boating hat.
  • Crypto is even more of a scam that it used to be. They're not even pretending any more. glad I divested when I did.

    • The real question is "Why hasn't every one divested by now?"

      Is everyone blocked from withdrawing now?

      Are people still hoping crypto goes back up so much that they are blind to the most likely situation where they lose everything?

      • I would say 3. Blind.

        Anecdote time.

        My nephew (27) is a total crypto bro. His answer to everything is always, "hold, it'll go back up". Even after I told him I worked for a crypto company for a while both internally and with customers and told him all the ridiculous stupid shit going on didn't even scratch his blind belief in crypto. He has given his mom "advice" on which alt coins to buy going on 2 years now. Every single bit of advice lost her money. 100% failure rate. He's running a miner in her ho

  • Two stories, back to back [slashdot.org], about crypto companies having liquidity problems. Add in the other stories and BTC back below 20K, and it looks like crypto has a problem on its hands. Namely, it's not backed by anything other than, "Trust me, bro."

  • Who knew that if you give some unregulated company some unregulated tokens that their promise of guaranteed returns is based on some purely speculative virtual token ever increasing in value. Hmmm.... remember those mortgage investment vehicles in 2008 which were based on ever increasing values of homes? Anyone remember what happened when the home values stopped their meteoric rise?
  • Money for the initiators, jack for everyone else.
  • Despite all the market manipulation by the exchanges they couldn't keep it above that. By all accounts $20,000 was the break-even point for most miners. Assuming ethereum doesn't back down again every minor is about to lose the best and most profitable currency to mine leaving nothing but Bitcoin and what are colloquially referred to as shit coins.

    Basically the entire mining market is about to collapse. They have huge amounts of money invested in not just gpus they can dump on eBay but custom Asics bett
    • Sadly I expect it to affect the broader economy in strange ways that we can't fully predict. People who saved all their lives will be filing bankruptcy. But also data centers with unpaid bills that they can't collect. Municipalities that increased electric grid capacity to attract the miners and now have to pass those costs to rate payers. Disposing of some of that equipment may be difficult which means that when the miners stop paying their bills, the data centers cant even rent out the space to somebod

      • I expect any effects away from people invested in the actual coins themselves to be extremely isolated. Only a handful of municipalities were stupid enough to buy into this, and given where they're mostly located they'll probably find a convoluted way to place the blame on illegal immigrants.

        People who "saved all their lives" are almost certainly not managing their retirement money themselves.

        Given the specialized hardware involved, the only data centers which will be impacted are those that were built expr

        • Google life savings list in and crypto is the first suggestion for me. Of course its hard to figure out who lost money in which type of scam. I.e. a scam where there was never any crypto-currency in play or a the more general crypto-scam.

          https://www.abcactionnews.com/... [abcactionnews.com].

      • I think the amount of people who lost their life savings to BTC is very small in the broader economy. Particularly compared to mortgages, which is where the majority of Americans' net worth comes from.

        Places that built data centers and electrical capacity just for mining also seem few and far between. El Salvador, some nowhere place in Siberia, a random town in Texas. Slashdot tells us about these experiments, they take up a lot of our mindshare. It's easy to lose sight of how small these ventures are in th

      • Realistically despite it size, in the world scheme of things crypto is a "bit" player. those that gambled everything make up a tiny percent of the population just like real gamblers. The net effect of crypto disappearing overnight would be pretty small despite all the crypto bro's screaming save them as it would be a disaster.
        • I hope so because that way when crypto disappears I can just enjoy the world being free of one ridiculous thing!
  • I wonder if that "net positive" is based on some assumptions of crypto valuations hitting some future targets.

  • Rest assured? PHEW! I was about to start having a major panic attack, but I'm glad that I can rest easy now!

  • about their customers. No firm with sophisticated clients would announce that "be assured that our company net worth is still positive". To anyone knowledgeable, that translates to "we're bleeding out but we're dead.... yet". Anyone even slightly knowledgeable would run for the exits after hearing that. Being anywhere near net zero worth means you're in WORSE shape than bankruptcy.

    Wait.... it's a BEIJING based crypto pool? Hahahaha nevermind I missed that. If anyone gets even pennies on the dollar out
    • You can't run for the exits because they halted withdraws. I don't exactly know what a crypto mining pool is. Is this a case where people invested in the mining equipment and then get regular payouts of the mined coins?

      • it's extremely unlikely that a solo miner will ever find the solution to a block, so people who want to mine join a goup of other miners and use software to manage and record the mining effort. this is known as a mining pool: where miners join their cryptohashing efforts together hoping to find the solution for the next block, thus earning the block reward. the pool software then pays out shares of the reward to the miners based on how much cryptohashing they put in.

        • Yes but... with additional overhead to the people managing the pool.

          Sort of like the gold rush where the only people getting rich were shovel sellers.

    • that translates to "we're bleeding out but we're dead.... yet"

      I really hope you just left out a "not" just before "dead"...

  • Horrific timing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dynamo ( 6127 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @05:22PM (#62854762) Journal

    ETH miners don't have two weeks. They have just over **nine days** until mining is over forever. I hope there aren't many ETH miners out there using Poolin's wallet service.

    Crypto itself is not sketchy - it's a risky investment (especially outside of BTC and ETH), but that's it.
    A mining pool also operating a wallet service on the other hand, is sketchy as hell. It's like letting your employer hold the money they pay you until you ask to take some out so you can pay your rent or go out to dinner - a ridiculously stupid proposition even without the concept of letting them make up their own currencies to save that value in.

    Anyone planning to have more than $100 invested in crypto at any point should be smart enough to be directing their mining profits to an offline hardware wallet where it is literally impossible for this to happen (and where it is not happening - note those who are mining with them but not using their wallet service are unaffected by these "liquidity issues"), or if they aren't mining, they should keep it all offline and only move it online to trade.

    If you are naive enough to trust a third party with all your money, just use a bank and hope they don't rip you off or get ordered by the government to freeze or seize all your money. At least you get FDIC insurance on the non-crypto part that way.

    If you don't trust a third party, WTF are you doing leaving it in a third party controlled wallet???

    It's sad to see all these scam companies with their own useless tokens (especially the so-called stablecoins) being treated as if they are the same as the legitimate crypto companies like mining pools that do not run their own wallets.

    • I'm not a crypto-bro, so I think the idea of these "mining pools" is that they take investor money, buy some "mining equipment" (not minerals, but crypto-currency) and you get paid dividends based on the currency mined? It's probably made to look like rather than owning shares in a company, you own a partial piece of equipment. I.e. if the setup costs $5k, I can invest 1k and get 1 out of 5 coins mined by that piece of equipment. But in reality you are just giving money and getting interest/dividends in

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dynamo ( 6127 )

        No, there are plenty of non-scam mining pools that take just enough to keep the pool running (usually less than 1%), and it is worth it to the pool's users to keep it running. With strangers and in large groups with hundreds or thousands of pool users, it's reasonable to take a small amount for administration.

        A (legit) mining pool is basically the same idea as a lottery ticket pool you might be part of at work, or in a group of friends, where everyone puts in a small amount of their _own_ resources - in tha

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Looking forward to another flood of used but good condition GPUs hitting eBay.

    • If you are naive enough to trust a third party with all your money, just use a bank and hope they don't rip you off or get ordered by the government to freeze or seize all your money.

      Why is it naive to trust a bank? I mean about 330million people in the USA use a bank and we don't hear any stories of them rushing off with your money.

      I love these kind of anti-establishment comments, the kind that somehow are made on the supposition that civilisation hasn't functioned perfectly fine in stable countries for literal centuries.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

      Crypto itself is not sketchy - it's a risky investment (especially outside of BTC and ETH), but that's it.

      Please explain what the "investment" is? Because in the end, it looks like you do not own anything other than a hash that has no value other than the hope that someone dumber than you will come along and pay more for it than you did.

  • There is a story about Isaac Newton from Grahams's classic "The Intelligent Investor" "Back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England. Sensing that the market was getting out of hand, the great physicist muttered that he 'could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.' Newton dumped his South Sea shares, pocketing a 100% profit totaling £7,000. But just months later, swept up in the wild enthusias

  • lump the crypto and NFT stories together (Score:4, Interesting)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @05:54PM (#62854846)
    These idiots losing their money is great, but it is getting boring.

    Rather than every new disaster, couldn't you just post a weekly digest of the funniest bits?

  • Can we now finally state unequivocally that the crypto industry has been funded by fucking idiots who have made a pack of scammers wealth. And can we now start heavily regulating the industry, and stop these bullshit stories about farmers in Brazil and Indonesia benefitting from what really is a series of fucking Ponzi schemes. Every cryptobro should be rotting in prison.

    • Regulate the industry? We already have laws making pyramid and Ponzi schemes illegal.

      No need for new laws. Just start arresting people under current laws. They fit perfectly.

  • I have mined bitcoin off and on myself, typically during the winter under circumstances I would have been otherwise running an electric heater - obsolete bitcoin miners are cheap and give out exactly the same amount of heat as an electric heater of equivalent wattage. I have never used Poolin, but I think from reading their announcement I might know what is going on. I noticed they were switching bitcoin mining going forward from full pay per share to pay per last n share. Full pay per share means the pool

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