Bitcoin Forum

Apparently according to reports, up to 1.5 billion EUR in bank funds will be lost in Crimea after the occupation. This is money in Crimea based bank accounts.

I wonder why the funds are not transferred out. Hold on ... bank accounts are easy to freeze ... if banks would use the Bitcoin network:

BITCOIN USERS NOT AFFECTED  ;D

So will the Ukraine thing be good for BTC?

ukrainians don't know yet what to do with bitcoin, they will take usd/euro over anything else anytime though.

If Ukrainian govt will impose restrictions on foreign currency exchange, Bitcoin can take off here!

it's neither good nor bad. BTC is irrelevant to the events happening in Ukraine.

The gold bulls are having a good run on this one.

It's neutral, but we could point to this in the future as a reason to use BTC over banks ;)

Ukraine has zero to do with BTC.

My $.02.

;)

Ukraine has a great interest in using bitcoin/cryptos - look at the inflation rate over there right now that's accelerating and all the debt they have, specially towards gazprom. No doubt central planners will do what they do best: keep those bitchez printing!

High inflation = great for bitcoin

Pretty sure they have more pressing issues at hand right now ...   :-\

Ukraine coin is coming guys:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=499818.0

What is more, the crisis is totally engineered by the western bloc, USA spent 5 billion USD to do what its still good at: a coup d'etat

I'm afraid the time for a currency reset has come. Three options exist:

Hyperinflation?
Currency reform?
War!  >:(

What an excellent choice to get rid of US debt and give the economy a boost, for the third time.  :'(

I'm scared.

Has no affect on BTC. However if they adopted the use of BTC they could have crippled the banks instead of the banks crippling them...

I have to agree, Ukraine will have no effect on Bitcoin.  Now if Russian messes with a NATO country, that will be a different story....

Uh, no but it certainly is a nice thought!

My $.02.

;)

I would expect some bump for BTC.

I haven't heard of Ukraine doing anything to BTC have they?

The situation in Ukraine has zip to do with Bitcoin and will affect it just that much.

My $.02.

;)

Yep, unless we suddenly see a revolution by people who are sick of both sides and they adopt Bitcoin as their national currency ( I seriously doubt that will ever happen ) Bitcoin won't be affected by this in any way a currency has to have people in a certain area using it and these guys only want to adopt the Ruble or the Euro.

I think they have more important/urgent matters right now besides BTC..like preventing a war and fighting against corruption.

Interesting article on CNN: Obama screams loudly, carries no stick.  ;D
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/15/opinion/gingrich-graham-ukraine-obama/index.html?hpt=hp_t5

That doesn't have anything to do with Ukraine and BTC.
There is another topic that deals with the current affairs in Ukraine.

It's not even really the Ukraine.  It's Crimera, which is a small peninsula in southeastern Ukraine.  So even if Russia does take over Crimera (via force or vote) it's not the entire Ukraine.  This is more about whether Crimera wants to be independent or part of Russia, it's a different situation than the monetary shock they had in Cyprus (which I think did impact Bitcoin).

Obama has no "stick".

My $.02.

;)

I think most of ya'all are wrong on this.

The annexation of Crimea by Russia will have a noticeable price affect on bitcoin.

Why? Because Russia is going to get hit by more sanctions, their economy will take a hit, and the smart rich in Russians will look to bitcoin to try to get out of the ruble or to move currency out of the country.

If it causes more people to start using Bitcoin then it is good. If it doesnt than it is neutral.

 Ukraine is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.

 Old Testament; real wrath of God type stuff.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!

Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...

The dead rising from the grave!

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

This will however have no effect on Bitcoin whatsoever.

My $.02.

;)

Quick, somebody get a camera and get over there!  The only chance to make another 2012 movie without paying for special effects :D

Who hows maybe Ukrainian market will be good in few months cuz no one is mining and when they do prices can go booth ways up and down.

My prediction is on some altcoin rather then btc. Made more coins on some altcoin then on btc. Using btc for buying some altcoin on market and sell it.

Crews are on the way!

My $.02.

;)

Good points!

Thank you for your insightful post!

My $.02.

;)

agree with you
i've  just read history of money and banking
seem banking system not reliable, especially when crisis come (monetary or political crisis)

...

I agree with Sydorfunk. 

Quiet diversification is about the best that we can do as individuals to save ourselves and our families.  Smart BTC and gold accumulation as income permits increases ALL of our security.

FOFOA sez re gold that the more small holders of gold there are, the better.

OROBTC sez something similar re BTC!

exactly, they tax EVERYTHING nowadays just to keep you 'middle class' or lower.

Just so you have to spend your entire life working just to barely make a living, not being able to spend the time to do the things you actually want to do. Like spending time with friends and family.

Now i don't mind working at all, but i do mind having 50% of my income taxed away and 20% of my expenses taxed away, just to put it all into the pockets of the rich.

How the hell does a nation have debts to individuals anyway?

By the way, did you know, income tax started in the 20th century? It first started around WW1, and in most countries even later.


I mean how did they even pull this whole scam off? Most of the countries are a so called democracy, and yet in most of the countries the income tax is at least 40%~50%

I can't say it is good cause Ukrainian economics needs time to get up but on the other hand if btc would be the instrument which help them to get up when, I think, the govs would make it legit and it would be good btc

In the case of a full scale war between Russia vs UN/NATO forces, how safe would BTC-E be? (I assume BTC-E is based in Russia, correct me if I'm wrong) or should I withdraw everything from BTC-E now? any advice?

i think there is none of bitcoin's bussiness.

there isn't as much affect as you imagine.

http://invezz.com/analysis/forex/147-btc-e-anonymity-reigns-at-worlds-second-largest-bitcoin-exchange

"BTC-e – Anonymity reigns at world’s second-largest bitcoin exchange"

"The facts – such as they are

Its founders and owners are supposedly called Aleksey and Alexander, which could be pseudonymous, and they may or may not be young and/or Russian.

Its domain name is administered by the branch of an Australian domain-hosting company in Johnsonville, on the outskirts of New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington. Its support desk runs on a program supplied by an Indian company with an office in England and the content is in Russian and English. No physical contact details and/or phone numbers are provided on the website.
The payment collection service it uses operates out of Moscow, Russian Federation and Kiev, Ukraine. The operation itself may or may not be located in Cyprus but it apparently uses the services of a branch in the Czech Republic of a major German bank. Funds apparently find their way there via a UK financial services agency registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Welcome to the distinctly opaque world of BTC-e – with the seemingly terminal demise of MtGox now reputedly the world’s second-largest bitcoin exchange.

Then there’s the ‘Bulgaria connection’

The above insights have been harvested from a range of open sources on the World Wide Web. It’s not much to go on and, bizarrely, what we haven’t been able to find is more than a scintilla of evidence for the oft-repeated description (we ourselves are guilty) of BTC-e as ‘Bulgaria-based’.

But then, the other surviving major – Bitstamp – is equally routinely described as ‘Slovenia-based’, raising the spectre of south-east European domination of world bitcoin trading. Bitstamp indeed has a Slovenian founder and CEO – one Nejc Kodrič, whose photo on his linkedin.com page could have been taken for his high-school yearbook, he looks that young – but on the exchange’s website, in the only entry in the ‘About Us’ section, Bitstamp is placed in the picturesque village of Aldermaston in Berkshire, UK.

Back to BTC-e, and the purported Bulgaria connection, here’s an illustrative extract from a story running today at buzzfeed.com, about American Barry Silbert’s plans to establish a regulated US-based bitcoin exchange.

The two main Bitcoin exchanges aside from the crisis-ridden Mt. Gox — Bitstamp and BTC-e — are based in Slovenia and Bulgaria respectively.

Well, as mentioned earlier, we can’t find anything which puts BTC-e in Bulgaria in any shape or form.

BTC-e joins Facebook - perhaps
The exchange does have a page on Facebook though, as of Sunday last and as of this minute with six likes. It’s entirely possible that neither Aleksey nor Alexander had anything to do with that initiative because a feature of bitcoin is of course that everyone is allowed to do pretty much anything they want, and the page byline says that it’s ‘for BTC-E exchange traders’.

Regardless of who created that Facebook page, don’t bother going there if it’s substantive – or indeed any – information about BTC-e that you’re looking for. There isn’t any.

Trying to nail down where BTC-e might be found by using the website’s ip address, publicly available at whois, didn’t help. The site uses the Cloud Flare CDN service and in consequence returns a different IP depending on where you query from. If you request that site from Europe, as we did, it returns the content of the site from Cloud Flare servers in Europe. Ditto if you’re in the United States – you get a US ip address. In fact the BTC-e.com site could be located anywhere in the world. That’s the Cloud for you.

Aleksey and Alexander speak to the media - apparently

How do we even know that BTC-e’s proprietors are Aleksey and Alexander? Only because – and to the extent that – some e-money media say so. On 11 December last, coindesk.com ran an item about ‘recent banking issues’ experienced by BTC-e customers and indicated that they – coindesk.com – actually got voice-to-voice with Aleksey and Alexander, though “they wouldn’t share their surnames”.

But coindesk.com felt able to write:

At least one of the banks involved in the process is located in the Czech Republic; the BTC-e site references Bulgaria in its SEO descriptions; the founders, Russian programmers Aleksey and Alexander, honed their skills at the Skolkovo tech park; and the BTC-e managing company is based in Cyprus.

That’s true by the way about BTC-e search engine results. If you google the name, you get under the website url the statement that it’s ‘a cryptocurrency exchange based in Bulgaria where users can trade Bitcoins’ and other things. You just don’t find that statement on the website itself.

For the ignorant on point, the ‘Skolkovo tech park’ mentioned by coindesk.com is more formally known as the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, a Russian government initiative being progressively developed just outside of Moscow, with the broad objective of lifting the Russian Federation’s game across all technology sectors. It does sound like the sort of place where Aleksey and Alexander might have indeed ‘honed their skills’.

Does it matter?

Should we – or anyone – care who is behind BTC-e or where it operates from? Knowing that MtGox.com had an office in Tokyo and a real face – that of the now much-hounded Mark Karpeles – hasn’t stopped that particular bitcoin exchange from shutting its doors, in all probability terminally and with significant loss to its clientele. And given that it is an absolute tenet of the bitcoin faith that no government controls it, the concomitant surely is that anyone shafted by the MtGox debacle or any other bitcoin-related shenanigan is entirely on his or her own.

It seems though that BTC-e itself cares. For just yesterday, a statement appeared in the News section of its website concerning the MtGox shutdown. After making predictably reassuring noises about the BTC-e operation, the statement says this:

The company plans to start publishing financial statements, verified by an external audit, on a regular basis.
Presumably those auditors will want to know, and may even insist on exchange users knowing, who calls the shots at BTC-e.

Interestingly, there’s a similar MtGox-induced statement at Bitstamp.net, also in News and also from yesterday:

Bitstamp is now performing quarterly financial audits and will post our financial reports on our website.

It’s scarcely credible to us here at iNVEZZ.com that any investor would entrust either fiat money or bitcoins to an exchange about which not one iota of information is volunteered on the exchange website, so thumbing its nose at any suggestion of accountability should things go pear-shaped.

Seemingly Aleksey and Alexander, or whoever they are, did come out from under their particular rock to talk to coindesk.com but that is hardly a substitute for transparency – perhaps ‘glasnost’ is the more apt term here – in the operation of a major financial exchange.

Maybe ‘they’ know

It’s occurred to us that there is perhaps some underground current of knowledge surrounding BTC-e.com that we’re not privy to but that is shared by a cognoscenti within that exchange’s clientele. Certainly perusal of a sample hour of chatter early today on the BTC-e chat forum hosted by dcaz.net gave no indication that the exchange’s anonymity – or integrity come to that - is a live issue.

Which is fine for them, if such an in-crowd exists. But it’s not for the poor schmucks who may hereafter be induced to go trading on BTC-e, should it then follow MtGox into oblivion."

War and uncertainty are both good for the price of BTC.

If there any any type of war over the Ukrane then it will be good for BTC.

War creates uncertainty. Uncertainty over both the US and Russian economy will hurt each of those respective economys.

Do you remember what happened when currency controls were implemented in Europe last year? What happened to the price of BTC?

People in the Ukraine and in Russa would like wish to buy bitcoin with their local currency to protect themselves from drops in the value of their own currency