unfortunately yes.
 
I would recommend getting an account with kraken, buy bitcoin or ether there and send it to bitfinex.

I believe that it is mandatory and everyone should do it as soon as possible.

Has anybody tested IOTA's tangle? From what I understand it distribuites the processing/registering of its transactions to other other senders. What are the hashrate processing costs?

2nd part of the 2 part series on IOTA is out here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXvRWN0Kig

IOTA and its research proposal predecessor DagCoin don’t record any form of objective transaction finality (such as Byteball’s stability points) for the unsynchronized partial orders of transactions in the ledger!

Transactions include some PoW so that tips (leaves) of the DAG branches are extended with probabilistically more cumulative PoW as new descendant transactions are issued, but there is nothing forcing these unsynchronized partial orders to converge on a single-total ordering, i.e. there is no probabilistic finality of transaction confirmation. In fact, (in the absence of IOTA’s “Coordinator” centralized servers) the partial orders will have conflicting orders due to double-spends, and there is no leadership election process nor witnesses set to decide on the ordering of the conflicts.

The (load of misleading technobabble bullshit) theory of their convergence to a single total ordering based on network propagation order (which experts know can never be provably consistent for all nodes without some synchronization algorithm) and/or a model requiring centralized enforcement of the algorithms employed by the payer and payee, which is inherently insecure due to unconstrained divergence. IOTA employs centralized servers named “Coordinator” (apparently not mentioned at least in the early revisions in the whitepaper) to enforce the whitepaper’s Monte Carlo strategy on all participants. IOTA has been challenged numerous times by numerous people (including the guy who challenged the developer @Come-from-Beyond to remove their Coordinator centralized enforcement in order to prove that IOTA will function decentralized, and afaik they have never done so.

That guy was threatened with a lawsuit by the “IOTA Founder” @iotatoken (real name is David Sønstebø) if he would attempt to publish these truths.

yeah i am expecting a huge increase by 5 or 10x fold in less than 1 year,

1º its going to be on a lot of exchanges,
2º reason is no sense, iota has 2 years of background and constant news on this project every month,

there is zero reason to believe such disruptive project will not keep climbing,

2$... probably you will be very lucky if you can get a miota at 2$ at the end of the year.

I remember reading something about the coordinator being turned off soon, when IOTA will pass its infancy stage. When will that be? What was the issue again, a threshold of hashpower in the network?

After the current chain of upgrades is over we are planning to create a service that will recover iotas of those who know the correct seeds.