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Something strange is taking place at digital currency exchange mcxNOW. The exchange has posted an alarming update on their website that urges its users to withdraw their coins from the platform, or they’ll be gone forever.
Called a “site maintenance period”, the exchange posted the following (bold emphasis ours):
mcxNOW will be going into a maintenance period beginning November 15 2014 and lasting at least some weeks to address some issues concerning wallet use and the number of system administrators able to resolve problems. We will also take this time to perform some feature requests from users.
All wallets here will be removed to make way for a new wallet system meaning you will need to withdraw all your cryptocurrency holdings prior to this cutoff point. Any coins left in mcxNOW at the cutoff point will be destroyed.
Existing wallets and all backups are going to be shredded to maintain privacy of users. Some coins currently on mcxNOW will not return. Thank you for your patience while we try to keep mcxNOW one of the best platforms for cryptocurrency.
As you can see, the exchange says this is required in order to update the back-end system, but the fact they’ll essentially be “destroying” coins and giving clients such a short time to react isn’t exactly what we would call good business.
What do you think? A good plan or not so much?
freddie 
Kevin Cazad 
Harvey Dentist 
A Bitcoin private key is 32 bytes. A 2Tb hard drive is not much more than $100.
There is no good reason why you would ever delete a private key unless you were trying to, let’s say hypothetically, destroy evidence that could at some later stage be incriminating to you or your associates providing liquidity to your exchange.
https://btc-e.com/news/212
Purely hypothetical of course and not to be taken as an allegation of any kind. But I suggest customers of MCX make a note of their deposit addresses in a public forum so we can watch to see what happens after the date has passed.
And just so we’re clear. 2 terrabytes (~$100 of storage) = 62,500,000,000 private keys.
Just sayin’
I desperatly want to remove my funds from a UK high street bank and put them onto the Blockchain, but these types of shenanigans are not helping me do that – also, these exchanges pontificate about complying with KYC and AML regulations but are not regulated themselves – They want your ID and phone numbers but how many of these exchanges publish their phone number or a physical address.
I trust the Bitcoin protocol and technology – I do not trust some of the players involved.
I think if you can’t find the time to pull your digital currency funds from an exchange within a 2 week cutoff you have other problems to worry about.
not everybody has time to check every single exchange acct every 2 weeks
#1 do not keep any coins in an exchange