BCC to BTC on Litebit.eu

Question

I sent .67 BCC to a BTC address on Litebit 13 days ago. The address is showing the amount of cryptocurrency and it is showing as verified.

They state on one of their webpages that unless the total is above 2000 euros and reported within 8 days they won't move. Is there a genuine reason for this or are they just casually admitting to stealing all incorrectly sent cryptocurrency under this amount? How hard can it be?

"Recovering cryptocurrency cross chain is an inherently dangerous and time-consuming process"

Answer 1

Many exchanges have similar policies, either officially (such as Bittrex) or unofficially.

The reason for this usually comes down to time and security. Any exchange worth their salt will have security set up in a manner to prevent human access to private keys, and prevent unauthorized tx signing even through an automated system.

While cross chain recovery is sometimes technically possible, with an exchange's systems in the mix it will often require:

1. Someone with a very high level of trust manually accessing private keys, or accessing a system that will sign arbitrary transactions. For most exchanges, this will only be one or two people, as anyone with this level of access could move any funds to any address, and effectively clean out the exchange.
2. That person's time. Due to security set ups, this kind of process will often not be a 5 or 10 minute thing. Considering that the person performing this action is going to be of a fairly high level, any time they spend on the recovery is time taken away from regular business, and is costing the exchange.

Due to this, most exchanges impose minimums and other rules on coin recovery, since it makes no sense for them to sacrifice security and time over small amounts.