Bitcoin Forum

TorBroker is the first broker to offer Bitcoin users direct access to the world’s securities markets. Fund you account with bitcoins and start investing, hedging, or speculating in more than 1000 different stocks and ETFs, and best of all, cash out in bitcoins whenever you want.

http://s23.postimg.org/4oerdmvsr/hj53k45280h.png (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21xcZGXwEG8)

--------------------------------

Today global insolvency seems to justify increasingly desperate government actions such as confiscation of savings, unprecedented global money printing, interest rates suppression and knee-jerk attempts to regulate, incriminate and excessively survey ordinary financial transactions.

Bitcoin essentially empowers individuals to circumvent the consequences of these policies by combining unique attributes that set Bitcoin apart from all other mediums of exchange:
With Bitcoin there is no risk of third party seizure, no taxation, no arbitrary oversight, no unanticipated inflation, no chargebacks and almost no transaction fees. This is why businesses all around the world are increasingly recognizing and embracing bitcoins, but so far the gap between Bitcoin and the global securities markets has yet to be bridged. This is why we are developing TorBroker.  

At TorBroker we offer you the possibility to fund your account with Bitcoins, invest in almost 1000 different stocks and ETF’s and cash out in Bitcoin. Through the utilization of the Tor network, TorBroker offers you privacy when investing, harnessing one of the most important aspects of Bitcoin itself, privacy. Not only do we offer privacy, but TorBroker enters the underlying position in the real markets, giving you “non-synthetic” exposure towards the different securities we offer. Visit us at http://torbroker2ulwffg.onion/, fund your account with bitcoins, and take full control of your financial future.      

http://i46.tinypic.com/sff0qe.png (http://torbroker2ulwffg.onion/)

How does it work?
1. A) Go to http://torbroker2ulwffg.onion/ using the Tor browser (https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html).
2. Register an account with username and password.
3. Deposit bitcoins. Within 24 hours they will be credited your account in US dollars.
4. Pick a security to long or short. At the next market opening, we will mirror your position on the real market.
5. Exit the position. At the next market opening, we will exit our position on the real market and credit your account with the resulting gains or losses.
6. At any time you can choose to withdraw your US dollar balance to your bitcoin address. We will carry out your withdrawal within 24 hours.

What does it cost?
In this beta version we charge a 1% commission on any trade - that is both entering and exiting positions - with a minimum commission equivalent to 5 dollars per trade.

When is my trade executed?
In this beta version, in order to get your order executed on the day, you need to put in the order before 8:30 am EST and we will put in your trade as a pending order to be executed as soon as the markets open (9:30 am EST). Any order that is entered after this deadline (8:30 am EST) will not be executed before the next opening day. Thus we recommend that you wait until the markets close to enter your orders in order to ensure you that you get the opening market price. Any dividends will be added to your account balance when you exit your position.

The current TorBroker version is a manual proof of concept to test if there is demand for an online brokerage that accepts Bitcoins. We are currently implementing an automated trading service with instant execution to be released in the coming months.

Are my funds secure?
The bitcoins we receive are exchanged to dollars and withdrawn to our stock broker account as soon as any significant amount is reached. Therefore, only small amounts, which we guarantee out of our own pockets, are vulnerable to potential Bitcoin wallet related security issues with our Bitcoin setup or the Bitcoin exchange.

The TorBroker software is developed using best security practices by security professionals from the bottom up. All major functions are split between separate servers ensuring strict damage control. Access to services is strictly logged and reviewed regularly. Data is always encrypted when transferred across networks.

We exchange the bitcoins we receive to dollars within 24 hours to insure our customers that TorBroker won’t go broke due to exposure to the extreme volatility of the bitcoin price. To our knowledge no other bitcoin related broker offers this immediate hedging and by not doing so they put their customers at risk of a company default.

Who are you?
Three people in the TorBroker team are long-time members of the Bitcoin community with public identities and impeccable records from their earlier Bitcoin ventures. One team member has earlier experience in developing high-speed trading systems for a large financial company. Two other TorBroker team members have years of experience in portfolio management.

However, due to the current legal uncertainty regarding our business our names cannot be revealed at this point.

Can I trust TorBroker?
We believe this can be a profitable business and are in it for the long run. We will never betray the trust of our customers.

We believe it is important to make our business case clear to our customers. By knowing we are making a profit by running TorBroker in a fair and justified manner, you know it is in our best interest to keep the service running professionally and retain the trust of our customers to maximize our reputation and profit.

For all anonymous services that have to decide whether they should be honest or fraudalent, it comes down to the time preference of the operators. Do they prefer (a) smaller profit now by running away with customer money, or (b) larger profit by running a reliable service for years and years.

For it to be more profitable for us to run a long-term service, with our 1% fee on trades, we only need to expect that we will have a future volume for eternity of at least 100x the current holdings of our customers. Considering we plan to offer leveraged trading in the future, this is actually not a lot. We would have to be quite short-sighted to not run a reliable business for the long term.

While we could also talk about how our team is firmly grounded in libertarian moral theory and we despise fraud as much as violence, the above is the strongest argument for our honesty, because it only relies on the premise of us trying to maximize profits.

Upcoming features
TorBroker is currently in the beta stage and undergoing active development. Features to be implemented soon include:

• Automated instant trading
• Margin trading
• More informative portfolio interface
• Google two-factor authentication
• More securities in more markets

I’m ready to trade real securities with my bitcoins
Go to http://torbrokerge7zxgq.onion using the Tor browser (https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html).

Get updated about new features and securities
Twitter (http://twitter.com/TorBroker)

Good timing. Checking out now.

This looks fun

GLBSE reloaded, bigger and badder   :D

It would be wonderful if TorBroker had trustworthy intentions AND were able to remain anonymous so as to prevent being shut down by the SEC. It is unlikely that they are both trustworthy and can remain anonymous, as I will explain.

On the question of being trustworthy and well intentioned, let's compare TorBroker to Silk Road, another anonymously run business that has proven to be trustworthy. Silk Road holds modest amounts of user funds for relatively short periods of time, whereas TorBroker is designed to hold large amounts of savings for long periods of time. This gives TorBroker a much greater incentive to take the money and run at some point. The ratio of funds held : future possible profits is much higher than Silk Road.

If they cannot remain anonymous, they will likely be shut down and depositor funds will be very much at risk. TorBroker states that they sell the bitcoins for dollars, deposit them in a brokerage account and purchase the underlying security. This is traceable activity subject to AML requirements and would be difficult to hide long term. Law enforcement could open TorBroker accounts, make trades and try to find the corresponding trades made through mainstream brokerages.

My guess is this is a scam and the plan is to take the money and run at some point, though I hope I'm wrong. 

Nah, you don't buy securities, you can only long / short them.

Yes, you go long or short, but TorBroker trades the securities in the real world, which is a traceable activity not amenable to anonymity.

An excerpt from the original post:

4. Pick a security to long or short. At the next market opening, we will mirror your position on the real market.
5. Exit the position. At the next market opening, we will exit our position on the real market and credit your account with the resulting gains or losses.

Holding large amounts of savings for long periods of time is one way to use our service but far from the only one. It is entirely possible to deposit today, enter a position for 1 day, and then cash out gains. With our upcoming support for leveraged trading this will be even more attractive.

In fact, from the general security principle of decentralization, we want to encourage customers to hold their own funds if they are not actively trading.

Also note that it is currently not possible to hold Bitcoin balances at TorBroker - all balances and positions are denominated in USD. If we wanted to build up a large amount of customer holdings to run away with, we would probably have allowed customers to keep balances in BTC, because our target segment is generally long BTC.

However, we think the most important argument for our trustworthiness is the transparency of our business model. With a 1% commission on all trades (with a current minimum of $10), it is simply much more profitable for us to run a long term sustainable business than to deceive our customers.


Even though the activity of TorBroker is in a grey zone because ownership of securities are never legally transferred from us to customers and thus not a subject for law enforcement to scrutinize, this is a very important issue to raise and something that we have thought extensively about and which we will address in the following way:

All activity in the regulated markets is registered and potentially subject to examination by suspecting regulatory parties. In order to prevent third parties from linking the trading activity at TorBroker to activity in the real markets, TorBroker will randomly split all orders up and execute these through different legal entities on different brokers. Significant activity also allows us to subtract opposite customer positions from each other, obfuscating even further the origin of our activity in the regulated markets.

In this way the trading activity of TorBroker will “show up” in the real market as an unintelligible and untraceable mosaic of transactions by various smaller entities. TorBroker has a huge vested interest in evading the potential wrath of regulators and we will carefully seek to minimize the systemic risks of our service.

I've been predicting this kind of thing would happen for a long long time (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7985.0)

Good luck to you!

Very interesting, I can certainly see an advantage.

My curiosity is simply in how the taxes would work since when you normally sell a stock for cash you pay large capital gains taxes, as much as 40% for short term. If you are selling for bitcoins though you wouldn't have to necessarily.

The legal risk for the people operating this is massive though. At a 1% commission right now it is a -EV game, in the future this could be quite promising.

I don't know TorBroker or any of the people behind it,  but about a month and a half
ago they contacted me,  and at least one other well known member of the
Bitcoin community and asked us to publicly hold 1,000 BTC as a security
bond that would be used to refund customers if TorBroker ever disappeared
with their customers money.

While I fully support TorBroker's efforts to bring additional economic
freedom to traditional financial markets,  legally it didn't seem safe
for me to be the front man for this.

The fact that they were looking for someone to hold this bond seems to
be a strong indication that they are in this for the long term,  and do not
intend to disappear with everyone's money.
If the regulators are able to uncover the true identities of the
TorBroker accounts,  I am sure that they (the regulators) will steal everyone's money though.

I wish TorBroker the best of luck,  and financial tyrants the worst.

While I like and support this venture my intuition and common sense will not allow me to deposit any money, especially considering the amount of people / companies on these forums that turned out to be scammy, despite having their identities known by the community and being in possession of impeccable reputation. Nonetheless, I wish you good luck.

Thank you for sharing this!

Thanks, Roger.

However, we disagree on the following:
 





Our lawyer has been in contact with the financial regulators in our local jurisdiction. He was given the information that at the moment there are no actual laws that explicitly forbid individual or company traders from passing on gains/losses to a third party that has no legal ownership of the traded securities. Furthermore, there is no regulation regarding deposits in unregulated currencies (bananas, seashells, bitcoins). However, they stated they would look negatively on such a service, but they wouldn’t be able to legally take action against it as is.

This means that they would have to change the legal framework before they could actually impede upon TorBroker’s activities. And even if they did change the regulation, the consequence would most likely be a fine to TorBroker and not a confiscation of customer funds. In the event of a change of legislation, TorBroker would alert customers.

We know that it will take time to build our reputation, but rest assured that we welcome any question regarding our service and are determined to prove to the community that we are in it for the long run.

What about taxes on short-term capital gains?

Are you asking if you should pay taxes on your gains on TorBroker? That's a case between you and the tax authorities in your area that you choose to inform about your gains. It will vary depending on location and we can't advise on it.

Or are you asking if TorBroker is paying taxes on gains from customer positions in our accounts? Our accounts are in jurisdictions with no capital gains taxes, so we can pass on the full profit to our customers.

This actually seems like a pretty good execution of an interesting/dangerous idea.  Good luck to ya!

Kind of disappointed this service announcement has been relegated to the "Gambling" section.  :(

If these guy's have 1,000BTC to put up for insurance then they can also buy their own offshore fully legal brokerage/securities trading financial services company (http://www.slogold.net/belize_brokerage_license_offshore_financial_company_international.html) and do this on clearnet. Nothing illegal about anonymous directors running a brokerage service in Belize, Panama, Seychelles, or even New Zealand if you have a local employee there. As long as you are licensed in that country you can operate. Hell you could operate a legal brokerage out of Liberia.

also... that site also looks awfully similar (https://bitcoin-24.com/more) to bitcoin24, and since one of them 'coded financial trading engines' cat is clearly out of the bag.

This is really good for insider trading. Gordon Gekko is pleased.

Just one question: are you all fucking crazy?

I'm interested, but can you respond have you considered that^^, and why you are not implenting this that^^ way?

In other thoughts, I'm pretty sure that this is going to be one of the main reasons when the feds start their attack on bitcoin.

Care to elaborate?

We are fully aware of such offshore companies. However, according to our research, being a registered broker in any of the jurisdictions we have looked into requires you to perform time-consuming and intrusive KYC.

Also, if it is publicly known which companies are handling TorBroker accounts, our employed brokerages could be facing political pressure to close our accounts. We would also be attracting the attention of the authorities in the local jurisdiction where these companies are operating. With our current model, there is no political entity that the major securities regulators can pressure.

What makes me suspicious is the 1% fee. I would believe in the service more if it had 5% fee.

Edit: not that I would still put any money to this.

He means this is so obviously a scam you'd have to be about as dumb&deluded as Kludge to miss it.

Alternatively, Personal responsiblity and the Ponzi scam (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=106391.0); So you think you're going to start a Bitcoin business, right? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124441.0)

Note there is currently a minimum of $10. For small orders the commission is therefore larger than 1%. For large orders it is 1%.

BTW, it is not obvious we would profit more from a 5% fee. There is an optimum price point where if you both go lower or higher you will make less money. Determining it requires experimentation.

Might be interesting to have a kind of bitcoin bond held in a 1-of-2 signature address against the account to reduce the trust required on the user side.

Say like user has $20k in stock positions in their account then there is a btc 1-of-2 address with $2k worth of btc (10%) that has both user and tor-broker as signors ... or something like that, maybe use a 3rd party independent arbiter as signor for 1-of-3 multi-sig so that either party can get the bonded funds out if it all turns to custard.

TorBroker

First of all, I'm very interested in idea of your project.
As non-US citizen, I see a good opportunity to avoid many annoying meaningless bureaucratic obstacles.

BUT how do you proof that I will trade at real stock markets through TorBroker (i.e. is it a bucket shop or not)?

There is probably no way for us to prove it. But if we did not hedge customer positions on the real markets, we would be taking on significant risk when our customers do well and request payout from us.

It comes down to what is in our long term interest. With our current fee structure (1%, minimum 10USD, on trades), and with full hedging in the real markets, we are guaranteed to make money on every trade that our customers perform. This is unlike some other Bitcoin trading platforms out there with non-transparent business models that have a high risk of losing money. The way we do it, we have a financial incentive to hedge every position and keep running for the long term.

Platform enhancements, fees promotion, and video

TorBroker is releasing a new update of our trading platform today. Enjoy these compelling new features:

• Better securities list interface
• Improved order system
• Performance and stability enhancements
• Lower fee: Pay a minimum of only $5 on trades for the next month (Promotion ending on the 11th of July)

And to bring private, unbureaucratic trading to more people, we will be spreading this short promotional TorBroker video. Please share!

http://s23.postimg.org/4oerdmvsr/hj53k45280h.png (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21xcZGXwEG8)

Do you plan to add international securities?

It will meet same fate as the others, crackdown, forced verifications or simple poof...

Don't expect it to last

I found a security hole (http://tedjonesweb.blogspot.com/2013/06/torbroker-security-vulnerability-found.html):


Anyone who run a tor exit node can change this script and make some bad things.

Also this:


is actually a link to Google (according to a Firefox browser):


and not to


as you may think.

Loading a JavaScript thought an insecure tor exit node can be very dangerous.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TmmYpaY6slI/UbhVt8gZ0ZI/AAAAAAAAADM/Tx_1waB_ozY/s1600/torbroker-bug-proof.png

Regarding scam warnings:

If they're paying dividends (or even equity voting rights) for securities they're doing passthru for, it's legit.

Otherwise just another bucketshop.

I thought that bucket shops pay dividends... Can you point out one bucket shop that do not pay dividends?


They cannot provide voting rights because if they do, they can expose themselves to the regulators.

Then it's not a bucketshop, as far as user is concerned, it's a passthru, regardless of whether it's held or not - there is no difference to be told from the outside.

Usually one has to wait for large dividend which the bucketeer cannot cover from his profits, and at that moment they're exposed.


That's why "even", but don't oversimplify, there are bearer instruments ...

How you resolve the problem with multiple fees you should pay for every transaction? For example if you split one order into 3 parts you should pay 3 times minimum fee required by the broker and the overall fee may exceed $10 (your fee).


This will work only if you accumulate significant amount of customers (active traders).

The real bucket shops can cover any amount of dividends because for every long position there is a corresponding short position. When someone is receiving dividend, other is paying dividend. For example when John has 100 long shares, Thomas has 100 short shares. Of course there is exceptions but statistically the profit from non-hedged big positions will be almost equal to the losses from non-hedged big positions.

The wise bucket shops will hedge too big positions that cannot be hedged within the bucket shop.

To exploit this vulnerability an attacker would have to control the specific exit node the targeted TorBroker user is currently exiting through. This is not easy to accomplish, so we do not consider this to be a critical vulnerability. However, given the nature of our service we insist on providing the best possible security for our customers, so we have updated the code to remove this point of attack.

Thank you for the report!

Thanks for the fast reaction. I can confirm that there is no external scripts now:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EO9qQWw2pTw/UbhzCTTIcUI/AAAAAAAAADs/se54X3zYA_k/s1600/ok.png

Also, found minor bug:


There is one additional "</li>".

TorBroker is featured in an article on Bitcoin Magazine: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/torbroker-anonymous-finance-and-trust/

slacker, thanks. It should be noted that it only relates to layout, not to functionality or security.

Did you ask the Tor people about this name?

https://www.torproject.org/docs/trademark-faq.html.en

I don't think torservers.net or tormail or torpm asked either

Don't you need to pay some kind of capital gain taxes, if your customers make profits?

Anyone using this still?

I'm starting to test it. I share the concerns of many here regarding the possibility of it being a scam... however I would very much like to see TorBroker succeed. There's nothing more annoying and intrusive of privacy than opening a brokerage account, especially internationally.

A few questions..

Is there a minimum deposit?
Is leverage available?
When are real time trades going to be enabled? (Not next-day trades)
Is there some kind of demo account to test the system with?
Will bonds, FX and commodities be available at some point?

Thnks  :) what are your thoughts on functionality?

No, but since our minimum fee on trades is 10USD (currently a 5USD promo), small trades of less than 50USD become relatively expensive.

Not yet, but this is on the top of our to do list.

By offering leverage we can lower the amount that people will need to deposit with us in order to make significant trades, thus also lowering the amount of trust that people need to have in us. As you mention, people are naturally reluctant to deposit significant amounts with an anonymous service, so offering leverage is a top priority for us.

This is also on our to do list, but you should expect this to take longer for us to implement than leveraged trading.

At the moment no. But you can of course create an account for free and take a look around the interface.

This is also planned. But note that to some degree you can already get exposure in these areas through ETFs.

Question:  Where is the withdraw funds button?  

Deposits seem to be working fine... but I can't seem to find the withdrawal option...

Update Found it. Apparently it takes time for funds to be confirmed and the withdrawal button doesn't appear until your BTC are turned into $ balance.

This seems risky located on TOR and all.  Do they have BTC held by someone trusted as was suggested in earlier post or decided not to?

Maybe that's why it's in the Gambling section. :)

This service is definitely useful and the business model seems solid, so they can have a nice steady profit, if it kicks in - unfortunately that is the only thing we have to relay on, as a trust measure.
I'm careful myself, but I just love this idea and could not resist...
Anyway, so far so good - that's all we know.

New securities added & commission lowered during the rest of 2013

TorBroker is happy to announce the following platform updates:

* +350 ADRs (American Depositary Receipts) added enabling exposure to international stocks such as Rio Tinto (RIO), Sony Corporation (SNE) and Royal Dutch Shell plc (RDS-A)
* Minimum commission lowered to 5$ during the rest of 2013
* Extended order window meaning orders are now executed at the following market opening if placed before 9:00 EST am

Furthermore, we are working hard to bring live trading, automated transactions, margin trading and a better and more informative interface to TorBroker in the following months!

I knew this service was very ambitious to be running from the start.  Glad to see you're still up!

Definitely an ambitious and exciting service.  Glad to see it.  This sort of investing is key to growing bitcoin, and creating "100,000 little links" with the legacy financial world.

Problem #1:  impossible to prove this is not a scam, besides actual service testing and observing the results.

Problem #2:  US capital gains tax liability, which the operators presumably must pay

Problem #3:  Bitcoin income/exchange tax liability, and other regulatory risk.  Move any significant amount of money into TorBroker, and it is noticable that you are suddenly appearing at your brokerage's doorstep with USD cash from already-watched bitcoin exchange sources.

Even assuming 100% honest site operators, a more realistic fee seems like it would be closer to 33% to cover all taxes, since operators seem unlikely to be able to prove to the IRS that receiving thousands/millions of dollars in bitcoins is not income.

Disclaimer:  Of course, for legal and risk related reasons, I do not plan to actually connect to the website.

I'm sure it would be trivial to discover the owner by making signature investments on certain scales and identifying the pattern on an exchange.

I asked this question before, but it stayed unanswered.
Maybe they are just located in one of the countries that does not have capital gain taxes - in such case they would not say and I can understand it somehow.

But as for the service itself, assuming it isn't a scam, IMHO it is the second best bitcoin-only service in the existence.
Just don't ask me to mention the first one :P

+1

I was also curious about dividends.

That would be ideal:  a [non-anonymous, sorry TorBroker] service that allowed me to

• deposit bitcoins
• trade US securities
• receive dividend payments, instantly converted to bitcoins, and credited to a bitcoin balance
• withdraw bitcoins

Yeah. But then you need to assume that they are stupid and so when you say them "buy 1264 shares of ABC and 1734 of DEF" (where ABC and DEF are a rarely traded assets), they are actually buying the exact amount of both of them... which they should not, if they are smart and don't want to get busted.

It is tough to do real-time trading and avoid that problem.

Well if you have 1% commission in + 1% out, you have about 2% of "space" to modify the order volumes, while statistically you should break even anyway, despite of the provision, just by choosing the direction up/down randomly.
And the more the service gets popular, the more the volumes add up, the harder it is for anyone to match them with a single account requests.
But that is also why I don't think they will ever switch to an actual real-time trading - it must always be somehow delayed, in order to combine requests from different accounts.

Another trick you could use is to spread the requests among different brokerage accounts.

These are just ideas from the top of my head, but I'm sure if I had built such a service, I'd probably have more security related countermeasures in my head.

Yes, we've been thinking hard about how to overcome this. Our first approach was to contact high profile Bitcoin community members and ask them to hold a bond, but unfortunately no one were willing to hold it. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159237.msg1745116#msg1745116)

We're working to introduce leveraged trading soon. If we offer you X times leverage, then you can essentially trust us with an amount of funds equal to 1/X and still get the same exposure in the markets as now.

We answered that here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159237.msg1749334#msg1749334): "Our accounts are in jurisdictions with no capital gains taxes, so we can pass on the full profit to our customers." The income/exchange tax is also not an issue in our jurisdictions.

We should probably feature our answer somewhere more prominent, because it gets asked a lot.

Dividends are currently added to your balance when you sell the security. Unlike capital gains, some US dividends are taxable no matter the jurisdiction you're trading from, and we will subtract the taxes we pay before paying out to you. Stay tuned for the details about this.

We are aware of this potential pattern recognition problem and think we have it solved. We can't go into details, but essentially there is a lot you can do to add randomness across multiple accounts.

Also, we're primarily staying under the radar to avoid political pressure to pass new regulation. To the best of our knowledge, passing on gains from securities trading with no legal ownership of securities given to our customers does currently not require a license in our jurisdictions.

A 15% dividend tax applies to US stocks. ADRs representing companies in other countries may be subject to dividend taxes of their local jurisdictions as well - we recommend you investigate the rate for the jurisdiction of the specific company you want to buy. Dividend taxes are subtracted before we receive the dividends in our accounts. Whatever amount we receive we simply add to your TorBroker USD balance.

We've set up www.torbroker.info (http://torbroker.info) to promote the service to people not yet familiar with Tor. Let us know what you think!

I apologize for having to ask this, but,

Please remove "BitPay" mention if you would, any comments I make are my personal opinion, and not an official company endorsement.

We didn't intend for it to look like a company statement but rather just information about who you happen to be. We've removed it now. Looks OK?

TorBroker is currently experiencing downtime regularly. We will soon be upgrading our infrastructure which should eliminate these outages. Sorry for the inconvenience.

TorBroker is running much better yet again, thanks for your patience. Stay tuned for some exciting updates to come.

This is so fucking epic! Well done guys

If you can't reveal your company name, then how is your firm going to deal with a huge capital gains tax?

Are you trading as an individual or an entity?

If you are withholding the tax, are you guys doing some form of tax arbitrage? How do you intend to make a profit?

----
If I'm trading from Australia, as a foreigner I can't get dividends, but if I trade with you, do I get the dividend?

For a normal foreign investor there is no point collecting the dividend or not because they can't claim any tax offsets (e.g. franking credits)... However, TorBroker may be able to claim it and benefit, but don't know the insides of the U.S. tax system.

I already sell and then buy back my US shares on interactivebrokers each time there is a dividend.

TorBroker operates from jurisdictions with no capital gains tax.

Dividends are currently added to your balance when you sell the security. A 15% dividend tax applies to US stocks. ADRs representing companies in other countries may be subject to dividend taxes of their local jurisdictions as well - we recommend you investigate the rate for the jurisdiction of the specific company you want to buy. Dividend taxes are subtracted before we receive the dividends in our accounts. Whatever amount we receive we simply add to your TorBroker USD balance.

Happy New Year!

We are still working to introduce exciting new features to TorBroker. Expect to see live trading, margin trading, and a better portfolio interface in the coming months.

If you don't have the TorBrowser, you can now also access the website in your regular browser through: https://torbrokerge7zxgq.onion.lu
However, please note that this requires some trust in the owner of the onion.lu proxy as he can snoop your login credentials.

Also, we've decided to keep the $5 minimum trade commission for the entirety of 2014.

May 2014 be the year of financial freedom and prosperity!

TorBroker

Is it just me or can I not access both the Tor and non-Tor based versions of the site anymore? Just worried about my investment there, to say the least...

Is it considered as gambling?

Trading stocks could be called as a risky investment, or better yet a gamble. ;)

EDIT: The website is also up now. :P

Is this still working? Can't see any securities in the list.

Absolutely. Are you sure Javascript is enabled in your browser?

Oh, it's never enabled. No way around it? :(

Currently you need Javascript enabled to use TorBroker. We may look at implementing a fallback in the future, but right now automatic and leveraged trading is our priority.

I can't access the site right now, is it still up?

Works from here. Can you access now?

Yep, thanks

TorBroker is back on a new address. Trade thousands of stocks at: http://torbroker2ulwffg.onion/

The URL has been changed because of the recent Heartbleed issue.

Connecting to your service seems like a lottery these days.
Is it going to be fixed one day?
It's really annoying, when you need to keep pressing on reload.

Any timeframe for when live trading and shorting can be added?

anyone tested this ?

withdrawed?
earned?
invested?

I placed a exit order on May 13, order ID 1126264310, but the order status still says processing. I thought that sell orders were processed the next business day? The stock price dropped by 16% since then, I hope the order gets completed soon...

Why is your informational site disabled?

Seems like there was a processing order with my exit order?

I bought 43 shares of CO (China Cord Blood Corp) in February, at a price of $4 which results to $4.28 after fees. I exited on May 13, and it was finally processed today, and I was credited $77.62 which results to $1.80. I don't know what real market price you use, but the current price today is $4.33 at closing. I certainly also don't believe the $5 trading fee and 1% processing fee would take that much out. I should have been credited $186.19, not just $77.62.

There isn't any other method of contact besides Twitter, so here I am.

As some of you have noticed, we are currently experiencing some performance issues. Sorry for the inconvenience - we hope to have it solved soon.

leancuisine, thank you for the report. We will look into what happened to your order ASAP. BTW, the best way to reach us is through the internal TorBroker mail system.

leancuisine, you're right, an error had occured in our processing of your trades. We have credited your account with additional dollars including a refund of our normal trading fee as an apology. We've sent you a mail on the internal TorBroker mail system with details. Sorry for the inconvenience.

/TorBroker

That was very much appreciated, thank you for that.

We are investigating this and expect to reach a conclusion soon. We have also messaged you on the internal TorBroker mail system. Thank you for your patience.

tpguy, we've sent you a BitcoinTalk PM.

Service is currently down. We expect to be back up within a couple of days.

tpguy, we have returned your bitcoins now to your withdrawal address.

Sorry for the long wait. We're having technical difficulties, but we hope you will return to use our service when we are fully up and running again.

/TorBroker

Any updates from traders? Experiences and feedback? Any problems with withdrawals of all sizes?

the site seems to have been working stable now, for the last couple of days.

When will real-time trading become available?

We've made some infrastructure upgrades. We expect TorBroker to be much more stable and responsive now! Try it out and let us know your suggestions.

Recent stability issues have taken some time away from implementing automated trading. We're still working on automated and leveraged trading, but we're not ready to commit to a date.

We've been running for more than a year now. While there have been a couple of cases of delays, we honor all withdrawal requests. TorBroker is a long term business for us.

How long does it usually take to process withdrawals?

Potential investors:
just think about how hard it would be to run a service through which you could actually invest in real stock, whoever runs the service must get dollars and use traditional channels to buy the stock. You would run into so many difficulties and terrible risk.

Most people will not make profit trading in the stock market. That means it would be easy for TorBroker not to hold any real stock, just say so and pay people from their own investments, while still making it possible to allow people to withdraw. Kind of simulated betting. On top of that, they charge fees so it is even easier. They could be paying from their own pockets, too, since this is the kind of scam that would be worth for the scammer to invest their own money in.

Consider that it is a damned Tor hidden service where you're sending your money.

One business day.

We fully hedge customer positions. Something that indicates that this is true is that we "only" offer >1000 securities. If we didn't actually enter customer positions then we could easily offer any imaginable security in any market in existence.

TorBroker will be unavailable for an expected 4 hours today for planned maintenance. Thank you for your patience.

Don't panic, it will be fine.

Q Where do you find 'gullible' in the dictionary?
A Between 'Bitcoin and Jesus'.

2 years and 9 months since launching TorBroker, we are selling the most secure and privacy-conscious trading platform in the world. We are looking for a buyer for:

* TorBroker name and brand
* User account software system
* Deposits and withdrawals software platform
* Securities list and price management system

To continue operating TorBroker it will be up to the buyers to establish trading accounts on their own to hedge customer positions.

The reason for selling is that the current management team has become occupied with other endeavors.

If we find a buyer we will make an announcement a few weeks before handing over control of TorBroker to the new operators.

Interested parties can contact torbroker@safe-mail.net for more information.

Best
TorBroker

Dear TorBroker, can you please process pending orders? :)

After nearly 3 years, TorBroker will be closing down due to lack of interest. The closing will proceed as follows:

From today and until 30 days from now: Bitcoin deposits disabled. You can still exit positions and perform Bitcoin withdrawals.

In 30 days: The site will be disabled. Any remaining positions will be closed, and any remaining Bitcoin balance will be sent to the Bitcoin withdrawal address specified in your account.

From 30 days from now until 90 days from now: Account holders that still have a Bitcoin balance but that had not specified a Bitcoin withdrawal address in their account may send an e-mail to torbroker@safe-mail.net to prove their account ownership to receive their remaining Bitcoin balance. Please provide as much detail as possible about your account including username, creation date, funding history, and trade history.

90 days from now: TorBroker will cease operations entirely.

A big thank you to our customers. It was a pleasure to serve you.

TorBroker

Can you PLEASE execute pending orders then... before you shut down? We're going on 2.5 weeks here now.

Please check again if your order has been processed now. Thanks.

Thank you! (Hopefully I won't have to come here to have further orders filled. ;D)

Check your private messages and/or email ASAP.

The service has been down for over a week already - that's I guess according to the plan.. but my withdrawal address hasn't seen a penny.
What's up with it?

Hello

We will proceed with closing positions and delivering BTC to withdrawal addresses today or next week. Sorry about the delay.

TorBroker

You should now have received your positions and USD balance less any fees to exit positions.

Sorry, but I still have not received anything

Please e-mail torbroker@safe-mail.net with your TorBroker username and which positions and balances you want to claim.

/TorBroker

Why tor?

All liabilities have now been paid.

Is TorBroker perhaps the first Tor based financial service ever to cease operations while leaving customers intact?

yes.
thank you

Some explementary behaviour of treating customers fairly right here. Wish we had more like this in the bitcoin ecosystem, it would have been a much friendlier space.

Is the site down ? can t reach it .
Yes , I m useing TorBrowser ;)

It quite is, yes. Props for that!

This is just a bucket shop which allows you to trade real stocks with bitcoin.
The big exchanges do not allow you to invest in bitcoin so this is why bucket shops begin to exist.