@ freemanjackal
Yes you are right. I was asking about costs related to a small start up and grow with time


@ senyorito123
I agree. I think the partnership alliance is a good idea but at this stage it is just about trying to fathom estimated costs


@ shamzblueworld
I agree. Getting the right people in is one of the biggest issues and also obstacles to starting a project. Like you I also prefer to consider giving shares to developers rather than hiring them. I hope there might be some posts here that show examples of server costs and also server configurations.

Thank you for the link. I had seen your thread before but did not send a message as I have no desire to invest in it.

I wish you success in your business.

Many thanks frompublic. The costs quoted to you last year are similar to the mark coders were quoting a few years ago minus the legal fees.

Did you ever think of making the developers part owners of the business because doing so would have two significant benefits:

1) the majority of developer fees would be exchanged for shares/equity thus initial costs would be lowered
2) as developers would be shareholders they keep highly involved in the business as it benefits their own interests

In the event coders are simply "hired" they would need to be hired and re-hired as and when developments/modifications or security patches/updates are required and access will be left open to paid hired developers.

In my opinion one of the biggest security issues is that hired coders (as wonderful and great as many are) have the capability of keeping a backdoor open to access the site and therefore the wallets. I think it would be better to part with shares/equity than cash-for-paid-coders as it keeps the cash within and encourages the developers to stay on top. If I manage to get an exchange going I would be looking to make it my number one priority because developers would be essential for the security and coding of the whole project whereas I can simply fund it and project manage.

Thank you theroryshow. I am not sure but a few years ago it was some sort of introduction of pending regulations that forced the creators and owners of Coinpayments to sell up to a non-US based individual.

Regulations will no doubt also be coming in to the UK and EU but until then I think it is possible for the existing ones to operate and improve their services. In the event that you are correct about expenses skyrocketing after the introduction of future regulations then maybe it is better for any start-ups to open as soon as possible rather than later.

Maybe someone thinks it will cost $50,000 to set this up and run for 6 months on a 6x quad core load balanced server with 32GB ram and 60GB SSD with 2x failover MySQL DB servers running with 240GB SSD all behind hardware ASA 500x Cisco firewall. Maybe someone thinks it will cost $2,000 to set this up and run for 12 months on a 1x dual core server with 8GB ram, 500GB and running MySQL on localhost behind an IP based firewall. People will have their own opinions.

As mentioned in the opening post, it would be hard anyone for provide ballpoint figures but just as an estimate using BTC and LTC as the base and then say 5 popular altcoins to start with:

- If someone had the technical know-how and could set it up how much would be the minimum investment required to launch a crypto exchange?

- If someone did not have the technical know-how to set it up, how much would be the minimum investment required to launch a crypto exchange?

With regards to an starting my own exchange, I do not have the coding skills to launch one though I would like to be part of a project at some stage.


Hi LAETI, thank you for the reply. I am based in the UK. AMLs do not exist in every country. Many organisations are based in one country, have their servers/hosting in another country and register themselves as a limited company incorporated in a third offshore country/territory such as Jersey or Panama. When you say about Poloniex not having 40,000 to start, how much would you estimate their start up capital to be?

I am looking to invest in a crypto related business from anything such an exchange to a payment processor, I am open to any ideas for investment. I saw several posts on this forum for businesses looking for investment so I sent an interest offering to consider investing in them.

I will not be mentioning the name of the person that sent me the message nor mention the start-up by name however after I posted a message on his thread mentioning I would consider investing I received a message stating that he was looking for $40,000 as an initial milestone and then once that was reached it would be $200,000 for the next:
Hello, sorry for the delayed response. My email notifications stopped working for a few hours and I missed your message. We are looking for investors, our first milestone is setup at $40,000, but once that's hit it jumps to around 200k. If you're wanting to talk, I can give you my Skype or phone number and we can discuss over that? We are working on the drafted business plan to send to our potential investors and hoping to have that finished up shortly

This was my reply:
Hi, no problem about the delay, good to hear from you. Sorry but in my opinion $40,000 is a lot of money for the first milestone alone. People have launched their own exchanges for less than a tenth of that amount in the past and they are not worth $40,000 even after a significant time trading. I definitely would like to invest in a crypto exchange and maybe even merge own start up bitcoin payment processor for websites to integrate in to it at some stage but the figures stated do not make this a viable investment for me.

I wish you success in your project but I will not be able to invest.

After I sent a PM back, politely declining to invest I received this reply:
I wasn't asking you to invest that much at all, was just stating our first milestone. And with all due respect, I don't think you have any idea how much an exchange costs to startup. You do realize this is a financial corporation, correct? $4,000 (your one tenth proposal) is maybe enough to cover C-Corp and lawyer fees. Developers, marketers, legal advisers, care agents, do not work for free. Development is not free, and neither are servers. Getting booths at Bitcoin and digital conferences worldwide, is not free. Not sure if you were misunderstanding the business type, or though we may have been another alt coin or what, but this is a multi-million dollar company, and if you think $40,000 is too much then you are in the wrong field to be investing in. $40,000 for a startup is actually significantly low to bankers and investors, not quite sure you are ready to be playing in the game yet. Once again, not trying to be rude or anything, however I'm also not going to be soft about it. You're not ready for any financial investment until you get a better understanding of how actual, legal businesses operate within the United States.

Now, I am not going to comment on the condescending aspects of the reply vis-a-vis my the polite message I sent wishing him success. I would however take the opportunity to advise anyone who considering investing in any business here to think long and hard about it.

This one claims to be a multi-million dollar company yet is seeking $40,000 as a first milestone then even though it claims to be a multi-million dollar company will further seek $200,000 for the next milestone.

Apart from researching the viability of any business, my advice is to try to get to the know the temperament of those running the project because if they have a superiority complex or anger management issues then they probably will not be the sort of people you want to be dealing with regardless of whether things go positive or negative with the project.

In most cases I see no difference between the "hype" generated by the get rich quick altcoin launches from a few years ago or most ICOs today, with any business claiming they will be a certain success when they have not even traded.

In my opinion, in alot of (not all) cases it would be better to have a project manager as an investor/shareholder, then have the technical team as shareholders within the business too rather than ask for people to invest unless significant funds were required. Like I said, in my opinion and also not in all cases.

Keeping all that aside, what costs do you think are involved in starting up an exchange nowadays? As a start up, how much do you think exchanges such as Nova, Polo and Yobit invested to get off the ground? What sort of costs are involved for example, if say an exchange launches covering just a few altcoins then continues adding 5 or 6 altcoins a month to increase customer options and along with it also increases the hosting capacity for extra traffic and daemons. What about dedicated server hosting costs, benefits, pros/cons versus AWS EC2 and alike? Legal fees would be minimal. Thanks to forums like this and various social media it would be free to get the word out there literally.

In your opinion when Coinpayments was started as a payment processor by two brilliant coders from this forum a few years ago, how much do you think they invested money-wise to get going? They probably did not start with 60+ currencies at launch so must have added them step by step. Also the manner in which they hosted their daemons may have changed over time and evolved too. All that shows you can start a business and grow with a small investment rather than pump money in to a business that quite frankly, has not even started and has no proven track record. When I was thinking to start my own bitcoin payment provider for ecommerce websites, I used two servers. One server ran the php UI website for the sign-up process and client account. The other ran the bitcoin daemon which generated wallets for new customer transactions then updated the php server with the bitcoin confirmations, updated the order for the client UI and sent sent the cap number of bitcoin offshore in the event of a hack. Both were for test purposes only and hosted at AWS at minimal costs. I am now reviving that project and might launch it.

It would be hard anyone for provide ballpoint figures but just as an estimate using BTC and LTC as the base and then say 5 popular altcoins to start with:

- If someone had the technical know-how and could set it up how much would be the minimum investment required to launch a crypto exchange?

- If someone did not have the technical know-how to set it up, how much would be the minimum investment required to launch a crypto exchange?

Thanks

@ dinofelis
True. Where in the real world can a person go to exchange their RubyCoin, PutinCoin, SuperCoin, TittieCoin and all the rest of them? What is the point of them would be the next question but you listed them so aptly in your post


@ NaXxow
Point taken, in majority of cases it seems all about profit or ego (or both), there is nothing or very with regards to emotional attachment from the developers. There are exceptions to the rule, of course.

I have a similar mindset to yours. I am not a fan of ICOs.

Keeping that in mind (ahem), in my opinion there has to be something exceptional on offer for me to consider investing in an ICO as there can be exceptions to the rule. All project managers claim to have something "unique" or claim their coin has a "USP" but when you look at the detail it seems they are more or less doppelgangers of each other.

Exactly what input developers and project manager may put in pre and post ICO depends on them as they will have significant options. On one hand the changce to exchange over inflated priced coins for bitcoins and cut and run, or stay and try to develop the project. The temptation for many a few years ago that had fancy logos and catchphrases was the former. There have been several successes with the latter but I am not highly sceptical of ICOs.

I have both cash to invest and also php skills to invest. I am actively looking to invest in a crypto currency related business.

I will send you a PM.

@ Colton
Is there any scope for investment? I have cash available and am looking to invest in a cryptocurrency business. Please reply with a PM.

@ HI-TEC99
Ah that explains things more, thank you. I will try and do this later today if I get a chance otherwise maybe tomorrow.

@ HCP
I was a little surprised to receive an email out of the blue. I wrote back thanking him but I politely declined. I do not know anyone here now, all the names are new since I was last here years ago.

Thank you for the tip though, I agree in that people who offer "services" via unsolicited PM's are very rarely genuine... #justSaying indeed


@ vh
You are right this is dragging a lot. I looked at the screen on the lappy just now, it is at 56.28% and think the trusted friend of a heating laptop deserves better... 100% over days upon days it a lot

When I was using an EC2 instance previously to test some code it took around two day mark or so for Bitcoin to fully sync in order to run a daemon

It seems I probably will not be able to get the bitcoins back but the only way to be sure is either send them off to someone who has a syncd wallet or wait for the remaining 43.72% or so to sync before I start swapping wallets. I think the latter is preferred

As I get more and more active here on this forum and take more and more of an interest in altcoins again after spending time away, the more things are coming back to me. I even dug out my old Bitcoin business website project which I put away thinking it would not work when the price dropped but have started coding it again as of today. Surprisingly it seems over 90% was completed before I shelved it. I think I can probably have it up and running for kind people here to test and then provide feedback within a couple of weeks if I worked a few hours a day on it

Yes, it is all is beginning to feel familiar again... including the syncing of blockchains

I read it and concluded it is a bad idea ground up. I never made claims about your or Manx Funds goals, on the contrary I wished you and still wish you success in your venture.

I bought thousands of XRP over 3 and half years ago and have no intention of selling them because the framework involved (and thankfully later Google invested) means there is something there worth keeping focus on and investing in.

If I were forced to increase my XRP or BTC or any other balances by 2% per every set period regardless of how they performed otherwise I would be penalised, is not a good model at all regardless of what else is or is not on offer.

I bought many coins years ago that failed,they are worthless now so if I was forced to buy in order to avoid penalties would actually be a disastrous model for the coin. Granted you think your coin will do great and shke up the crypto universe but let us say if it fails, ho will buy when they get dumped?

In my opinion your set up is fundamentally flawed and will fail sooner rather than later. In your opinion your set up is a great idea. Time will tell.

Thank you for letting me know. I am on 51% download on my laptop as I type. I will check this out and update here.

Instead of receiving replies here I actually received a PM from someone asking me to send my wallets to him so he could recover my bitcoins for me as it would take 4 hours for me to decrypt and then encrypt my wallets and he said it was a complicated procedure

You directed me to the white paper instead of answering me but having said that, thank you. I checked it and it does seem in theory 'niche'. The fact coin holders will have to top up with 2% of their balance otherwise they will be penalised is scandalous in my opinion.

The way I see it, the penalty system will keep potential investors like me away both pre-IPO and post-IPO.

I also think it will force investors who were gullible enough to obtain them to get rid of them as soon as they realise the penalty system involved. That is my opinion but it does not mean I do not wish you success. I wish you prove me wrong and your coin is a success.

I already asked this question to the Project Manager (p4ntos) but did not receive a response: Please give your views on why people should invest in any pre-mined project and why they should invest in this one over so many others that have been announced

I am looking in to cryptocurrencies after a several year break. I hoped things had changed but like you I am also tired of the number of announcements of coins being launched.

Thank you for the offer but I will not be investing. From what information has been released I see nothing that makes me believe this will succeed in such a saturated market. I wish you success.

@ Red-Apple
Very well said. I agree with all you said especially the fact that ICO and pre-mining is not a fair, logical distribution is essential. Can you believe one of the yet to be released coins has raised $4m in an ICO? I am not knocking them at all, I wish them and all associated success but the evolution of altcoins is also evolving new ways of people to generate more and more money from cryptocurrencies when most have little no value in the first place.


@ zend7
I also think that Bitcoin will be around for a long time to come. I think it will hold very high value as time goes by and I agree that all these coins have no real value on their own and only seem good for exchanging in to Bitcoin. I mean, where exactly in the real world and cyber world can you go and spend 0.01 bitcoin? Many places right? Where can anyone go to spend 50Million Paccoin, 50Million PinkDog, 50Million NeoCoin and alike?