Great analysis of the situation.

However, I think there is at least one other reason why they decided to set up shop in the British Virgin islands
apart from the "rubber stamp regulation". If you are running a questionable business it makes sense to incorporate in
one of these exotic islands, because it is incredibly hard, expensive and tiresome to litigate against an offshore business.

In the hypothetical case that Bitfinex will face lawsuits by investors or traders they are pretty safe, because not many
are going to be willing or even be able to sue them before a court in the British Virgin islands.

Therefore I´d argue that the two big reasons to incorporate in the BVIs are the lax regulation and the protection
from lawsuits that offshore jurisdictions offer.

It seems pretty obvious that they don´t allow VPN if you get an error message like this.
I would actually be sympathetic to a VPN ban - at least for users, who use their account
to play poker at Nitrogensports.

Otherwise it would be too easy to multi account by simply playing using a VPN
from one device and by your real IP from another device.

@Nitrogensports
Have you considered lowering the minimum dice bet that is eligible for winning the Dice jackpot?
Due to the BTC price rise in 2017 you have already adjusted the minimum stake for sport bets and
the poker rake. I think it would be appropriate to lower the dice limits as well.

Besides, it would be great if you could do one of the following two things:
-remove the 0.01/0.02 Omaha Poker game and replace it with a 0.02/0.04 Poker game that is eligible for the Bronze Poker challenge
-add a 0.02/0.04 Omaha poker game and maintain the 0.01/0.02 table

As it is now, Holdem players can participate in the Bronze challenge by playing 0.02/0.04 and seeing at least 100 flops, while Omaha players
don´t even have a 0.02/0.04 table available.

Thank you for considering my feature requests.

I have read several warnings about Wagecan as a debit card provider. Not sure how reliable these reports are,
but other Bitcoin debit card providers have less accusations against them.

Besides, it is not really feasible for small amounts as they charge a 162 $ sign-up fee for their debit card.
On top of that you would have to pay a 2,5 % fee for every ATM withdrawal in addition to charges by the
ATM operator if there are any. All in all, the fees of the Wagecan card are really steep compared to
other debit card providers.

However, as far as I know this is currently the only option for non-EU and outside of the US (as a US citizen
you have options like the Bitpay debit card).

I´m envious of your good memory!

However, I think even if you are able to memorize the mnemonic seed you should still keep an additional backup somewhere.
You have no guarantee that your memory will work as good as it does now when you are older. This is not even taking into account
the onset of an illness that would compromise your ability to successfully retrieve the mnemonic seed (e.g. Alzheimer or dementia).

I concede that the use of a brain wallet is great for carrying a huge amount of BTC across a border. This should be doable within a few hours
and therefore the potential pitfalls of a brain wallet like the onset of an illness or an accident and so on don´t really apply.

If this was the case, you should be easily able to name 3 companies that were affected by the banking issues in Taiwan aside from Bitfinex and Tether.
I´m waiting for your reply.


Irrespective of the verisimilitude of this statement, this is pretty alarming. After all many people have claimed for months that institutional investors are buying
all these Tether and they are the ones, who are easily able to wire money in and out of Tether. Now we see that the entity that purchases all the USDT is actually
Bitfinex itself and not the institutional investors that people were ecstatic about.

This is a huge red flag and doesn´t alleviate my doubts about the whole Tether situation at all.

The juice/vig (house advantage) of the bookmaker is way too high for obscure bets like this. You are essentially
burning money by betting on any of these bets. Even if you would have some kind of insider information
you probably could only bet like 10 pounds on a bet like this. The odds are bad, the betting limits are low, which
makes this a horrible bet.

If anyone wants to bet on this you should set up a market at Fairlay where you would be able to
get much better odds and also more liquidity.

Interestingly, the two exchanges that you mention are actually deeper entwined than you think.

https://twitter.com/btcecom/status/853142083527245824?lang=de

Take a look at this tweet from April. This was only a few days before US law enforcement shut down BTC-E.
It is entirely possible that the law enforcement agencies of the US are already investigating Tether. Especially,
because they can always maintain that Tether can be used for money laundering.

I would be very cautios with the reincarnation WEX as well. It is possible that the US are using it as a kind
of "honeypot" to catch money launderers or hackers that sell their ransomware proceeds. After all
BTC-E used to be the main destination for these kind of clients.

Yes, they are mainly worried about this aspect of the advent of cryptocurrencies.

Most countries in the world are mired in debt and only remain in power due to the ability
to borrow money. This deficit spending is enabled by the printing presses of central banks
all over the world and artificially low interest rates.

Sound money like Bitcoin can´t be easily inflated, which would make deficit spending impossible.

Do you have an estimate when Roulette will go live? The roadmap page at the following website is still
displaying an intended launch in the 3rd quarter of 2017:
https://betking.io/roadmap/

I think having studied economics for so long and having worked in the financial industry for decades can warp
your mind in a weird way.

If you have read stuff for decades that says that all currencies must be issued by a central authority you may already
be indoctrinated too deep to understand the Bitcoin design.

I think new generations will be raised with a different understanding and these old economists and banksters will simply die
in the next 1-2 decades anyway.

I recently read an article somewhere that posed a hypothesis that is somewhat related to this.
The author argued that even if Bitcoin won´t succeed in the future, the introduction of Bitcoin
will nevertheless have beneficial implications for people all over the world, because it may force
fiat currencies to improve as well.

If cryptocurrencies pose a competitor to central banking it is entirely possible that central banks will have to
change some of their current policies (e.g. don´t siphon off as much of the productivity increase through
seigniorage as they are doing now ).

Someone should tell these economists that people are drawn to Bitcoin due to its predictable monetary policy.
The predictable issuance of new coins combined with the hard cap of 21M BTC is the main feature of Bitcoin.

The problem with the current financial infrastructure is not the efficiency and speed of payments, credit
and debit cards work just fine for that.

I strongly advise everyone to be very careful with these forks. If the recent history
of BTC forks like Bitcoin Gold has shown anything it is that there are many scammers, who
release wallets that contain malware or create phishing links in order to scam you out of your
real Bitcoin.

I also expect that in the future these unprofessional forks won´t be of much use and eventually
most reputable exchanges will not even list them.

I think you are badly mistaken here. BTC and other cryptocurrencies are great for oligarchs. Just look
at the recent events in the Ukraine. The cabinet members had to disclose their BTC holdings and there
were many ministers, who owned the BTC equivalent of several million $ or more.

And this is only what has been published, many people probably haven´t been caught or didn´t report their full cryptocurrency holdings.
I assume that the politicians in Russia are as heavily involved as their Ukrainian equivalents.

If you would get a bribe would you prefer a BTC payment or a wire transfer?

You should all read some of Rogoff´s articles. Afterwards you will see why he is really advocating for digital currencies.
He isn´t interested in the predictable monetary policy of Bitcoin or the advantages of its decentralized nature, but
only wants the shift away from fiat due to the opportunities it creates for the central banks.

Right now many central banks have problems with enforcing their negative interest rates policies, because banks
can still decide to store their holdings in fiat and circumvent the negative interest rates by doing this. If the world
would adopt digital currencies it is much easier to expand the negative interest rates without any loopholes for the banks.

This is one of the innovations that BTC exchanges have created. No fiat broker allows you to lend out funds to other users for the purpose of margin trading.
The guys at Bitfinex and Poloniex (I´m not exactly sure, which of both exchanges had P2P margin funding before the other), who came up with this idea
are really bright. This has brought in a huge amount of users, which would otherwise have used alternative exchanges.

Let´s be realistic here. If a user is already lending out at one of the exchanges it is much more likely that he will conduct his trading at the same
exchange as well due to pure convenience. 

I would avoid using Paysafecard and Ukash vouchers. These can be bought online in some countries, which enables
people with nefarious intentions to buy them with stolen credit card data and hacked e-wallet accounts.

If you buy a Paysafecard voucher from one of these people law enforcement will come to you if you are the one
who redeems the voucher.

Moneygram or Western Union are probably a better way for a non refundable payment option.

I concede that the users, who trade these more or less obscure altcoins on margin (as if this wasn´t speculative enough without leverage)
should have known the risk.

However, this really seems to have been a problem of the Bitfinex platform. Because if the platform worked perfectly the price of e.g. NEO would have never dropped
to 4 $, because the arbitrage bots would have prevented the flash crash by arbing against the exchanges where NEO was still trading for +25$ / NEO or more.

I would have handled the situation like Coinbase did with their ETH flash crash:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/24/coinbase-is-reimbursing-losses-caused-by-the-ethereum-flash-crash/



I know that Bitfinex isn´t obligated to do this, but with the profits that they are making in legimate and unlegitimate ways it should be easy to pay out the
people affected by this using a similar accommodating arrangement.

I´m actually not sure if the CME Group futures will be that bullish for the BTC price in the short term.
Sure, the prise has surged today due to the news of the approval, but there are at least two
problems in my opinion.

1. Institutional investors are not stupid for the most part. They are not going to buy at unprecedented highs (=all-time highs)
and instead are going to enter the market after a correction. It is entirely plausible that the BTC price will drop when
people realize that the institutional money is waiting instead of buying in directly.

2. The futures at CME Group are the first reliable way of shorting BTC. Previously, you had to use a more or less sketchy
BTC exchange with a lot of counterparty risk. CME Group is on another level and this could imply that some of these billionaires
that were vocal about BTC being a bubble can now actually short it reliably.

Do you have any plans to extend your services to Europe as well? Or will you only
serve the US and Japan for the foreseeable future?

I have heard only good things about bitFlyer, but unfortunately I reside neither
in Japan nor in the US.