First off, as a trader I gotta and genuinely love going back over my trades and events in hindsight so this topic I wanna dig into rn is interesting to me.
Second, to keep it objective, I'm not gonna throw in my own opinion just facts nothing more.
Genuinely curious how people who were around in 2020 think about this now.
honestly looking back at the whole "bitmex scam" framing from that era the real case was pretty specific. cftc went after them for running a derivatives platform without proper us registration and aml controls ended up settling for around $100m in 2021.
not great, obviously.
But what's kinda interesting from a few years out is how much that case ended up shaping the rest of the industry. kyc requirements that everyone takes for granted now on binance, bybit, okx got noticeably stricter in the years after. bitmex wasn't the only catalyst but the case definitely set the tone.
They implemented kyc, paid the fine, kept running. no withdrawal pause, no customer funds lost. which is more than you can say for half the exchanges that were operating in 2020 lol.
And if you compare that to the bybit 2025 case and their "North Korea" hack, how much do these incidents actually shift peoples opinions on the platform, do they even shift them at all?
thats what I'm curious about.
for anyone who was actually trading derivatives back then has your read on this changed with time, or you still feel the same way you did in 2020?
Story from 2020, is bitmex safe or nah?
byu/Nomadictionnn inCryptoCurrency
Posted by Nomadictionnn
5 Comments
The part that bothers me most is how everything around privacy got stricter, with platforms leaning harder into KYC that’s basically why I’ve stopped using centralized exchanges altogether.
I wouldn’t call regulatory issues a scam same with Bybit
A scam to me is about client funds disappearing, and that’s not what these cases are about
same here. opened my account in 2018 after the perpetual swap got popular, never had a single missed withdrawal across multiple cycles. boring positive answer but its true
not for nothing but every scam exchange thread on reddit eventually evolves into here’s how that exchange actually handled things responsibly and the lesson nobody seems to take from it is that you shouldnt be parking money on any exchange long term in the first place
doesnt matter how good their track record is, doesnt matter how publicly the ceo communicates, none of that protects you from the next regulatory action or counterparty risk that hasnt happened yet
ive been fully self-custody for 4 years now, never looked back, the entire which CEX is safest debate is just choosing which type of dependency you want
Honestly, a lot of people yelling “scam” on Reddit don’t seem to distinguish between regulatory issues and a real hack. Feels like basic category confusion is everywhere on that sub.