BTC-e has decided to refuse to credit ETH depositors in their exchange with their ETC balances they are rightfully owed. Poloniex and Bitfinex both credited their users who had ETH with the pre-hardfork ETC balances.

​There's also been issues from Coinbase, who said they got bad advice from Ethereum Foundation to ignore the ETC tokens as the chain would die away itself:

Charlie Lee is quoted as saying they made a "conscious decision not to protect the ETC".

Now BTC-e seems to have gone one step farther and flat out stolen the Ethereum Classic (ETC) tokens from the users who had ETH deposits.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) has been taking the crypto scene by storm. On Poloniex it is doing almost half the level of volume that Ethereum Hard-Fork (dubbed by some traders as "Vitalium") since it was added Saturday, July 23 at midnight American time.

Now the derivatives specialists at BitMEX have added an Ethereum Classic contract to their bitcoin futures exchange! This means you can deposit bitcoin to BitMEX and short (or long) ETC contracts to earn money as the ETC/BTC exchange rate fluctuates!

Here is what the ETC/BTC chart from Poloniex looks like, and you can compare the volume on ETC to ETH:

In a bizarre turn of events, today, July 14, 2016, MtGOX chief Mark Karpeles was released from prison on bail in Tokya, Japan.

Karpeles has been in state custody since summer of last year when he was arrested and then charged for massive fraud in connection to the collapse of what was the top bitcoin spot exchange in 2014.

The most surprising part of this revelation is that he lost over 100 pounds while in prison! Here's what the formerly porkly Karpeles looked like before being arrested:

His steady diet of high sugar Starbuck's beverages cut off, Karpeles seems to have shed significant weight in the notoriously high-discipline Japanese criminal justice system. Here's a frontal view of Mark Karpeles after dropping 40 kilograms of blubber:

No reports yet on whether Karpeles contracted HIV or other illness while in jail, which may have contributed to the rapid weight loss.

The bitcoin halvening of 2016 went as smooth as it could have gone. The network behaved fine, the protocol was stable, and the fresh 420,000th block on the blockchain was mined, with a reward of 12.5 BTC for the F2Pool mining pool who correctly solved it.

But how did price do? Quite fine, here's the 4-hour chart from Finex:

Notice in the highlighted area that there was actually a spike of volume right when the halvening happened on July 9th. This was actually a massive selloff of over 10,000 bitcoin in the few blocks before 420,000. Many traders panicked, but the strong hands won, and price stabilized later in the day and has remained sideways in the week after.

The inflation rate of bitcoin is now 4.08% rather than the over 7% it was with 25 BTC block reward. This is a nice decline which will reduce selling pressure in the market for miners getting fresh coins. Last time we had the halving of block reward from 50 to 25, the price mooned significantly in late 2012 and through 2013 where we bubbled to over $1,000 on Chinese adoption.

It's not sure that we will experience this kind of move again on this halving, but traders are certainly on guard.