Yup. Not only do you get market risk, but counterparty risk besides. Just a cost of doing _that_ type of business. Factor it in when you're doing your cost/benefit analysis.

I think the same.

in this case(Bitstamp), hm...I am not sure what to say...

What I am SURE is that all the big "players" are a gang. I include the chineses exchangers too.

Bistamp is related with Ripple, Bitcoin Foundation and others. Their shareholders are shareholders for many other bitcoin companies.

i think they will cover the loss because the scandal will be TOO BIG and it will involve all these companies and Bitcoin will crush.
Bitfinex, Coinbase are related with Bitstamp. Bitstamp is processing their orders.

They have no interest to comprise all these companies when they are making millions.


So, they are a gang who is manipulating the market how they want and each of them are taking a piece of the cake named Bitcoin.

a simple proof is these days. Bitstamp hacked, people in panic, a lot of sells and the Bitcoin price is raising

Bitstamp said that they will open today
Bu now still i cant use them
it smells bad..

Where did they say that? They never said that. On the first day they said they wanted to give an ETA later that day (which they did). Then they said it would take them approx. 24 hours until they got their internal system back up from the backup in a new safe location - they did. Now they are saying it will take approx. 24-48 hours until they are available again. Doesn't look to bad in my books!

I don’t understand why the coins can’t be traced to the hackers.

If Bitcoin address 1234 sells to 4321 and 4321 sells to 100 other wallets, when those 100 wallets dump to an exchange can't the police just trace it back to the source?

I think there should be a credentials checking system for creating wallets, for example when someone sign’s up for a wallet they provide ID, the crypto addresses that are created from the wallet are then legally binding to that person. This ID information is not publically available, but instead locked up within the Bitcoin network protocol. Ok, I understand there will be some level of administration and the whole process will need to be automated as much as possible to reduce cost overhead. In the same way Bitcoin transactions are processed using "Bitcoin Miners", maybe add on to the existing protocol, some sort of "Identification Miner" which has connections to credit reference agencies. In fact, let’s not have people and make this completely automated, isn’t the world heading that direction anyway? Although, I suppose someone would need “the key” to unlock ID information, which would mean a form of centralisation. I think.

It’s only an idea, what the heck do I know, I’m no programmer and certainly not an expert in BTC. Just some guy who really wants BTC to succeed and enjoys a bit of mining   

That's difficult in one step I think. But as a first step you could blacklist stolen coins and don't trade those coins. Private mixing don't helps much, because in this case you would need 19k clean coins to get the taint under 50% and the tainted coins would still distinguish from others. This is at least not a technical problem but a political issue in the community:

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/505-coin-tracking/

tldr: Community don't want this for religious reasons. Do not discuss with religious fanatics. I also think that most exchanges do not want it. Gox was an inside job for a example. Today the big mixing services exchanges are in China. 0+0=8; nuff said.  

In bitcoin, there is a concept of mixing, for which tracing coins may become very very difficult or almost impossible. Services like bitmixer.io offers mixing. Mixing can also be done by trading in exchanges against alt coin.

It is generally more difficult to mix that large of an amount of bitcoin in a short period of time. For example the maximum that bitmixer can "mix" at one time is ~2,000 bitcoin but even mixing this much would mean that there is an increased chance of some adversary figuring out where your coins ended up

The price of bitcoin actually spiked when bitstamp opened back up.....to almost $300 (although it did subsequently fall to ~270)

Bitstamp is one of the best Exchange.