Yes, and youself give a good example by frighten us with old news.  

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/volumepie/

Huobi, OKCoin and BTCChina are chinese traders. Bitfinex are Hong Kong-based.

That's not all fake. They control a large part of the market. Mining now takes place in China on a large scale.

Bitstamp has 6% of the market and keeps as well 130,000 BTC.

wow. look at this:

https://blockchain.info/address/1L2JsXHPMYuAa9ugvHGLwkdstCPUDemNCf

Yes but if Bitcoin stays a relative low price for a while they may not benefit from it much especially if more people are afraid to trust other exchanges with a lot of bitcoins.

Of course I am, because an speculative bubble and a Ponzi scheme are not the same thing. Like, at all.



At the time Nakamoto pocketed his million coins he didn't laugh because guess what: they weren't worth a damned piece of shit. The only thing he did was launch an open experiment of a new kind of sound, digital money. He published a paper explaining how it all worked. He released the node's code. You could talk to him, spot bugs, send him patches. You could mine for worthless coins. At this stage just a handful of crypto-anarchists played with them as if they were exchanging peas or little river stones with each other. During roughly these first 2 years they were worth ZILCH, you can check it yourself. After all this time the coins started to gain some slight value due to sheer public interest, but before this point you could get a shitload of 'em for free using your crappy computer's CPU or simply asking "pretty please".

I don't know if he actually envisioned any of this and I guess we'll never know, but he was clearly not "premining valuable coins to dump them to idiots on day 1". Of course, this is actually the case of most other altcoins, whose creators just prey on fresh get-rich-quick fools who feel like they missed the Bitcoin train.







Why? Because SN was a God-like creature and not a dumbass troll as you are, that's why. If all wallets started with some coins in it then bitcoins would not be sound money and they'd still be worth nothing 6 years on (if they still existed at all). Alternatively, if only the X first wallets had coins in it then early adopters could have just created lots of them an claim most coins either way. Not that you can't create such an altcoin if you feel so inclined...

I think some are overeacting a bit. Bitstamp will be fine and the way they handled this issue they might just get the thieves.
And please dont compare Bitstamp with Mtgox, which was fuck up from the very beginning!

this whole BTC shit are starting to get annoying.
Im cashing out all my bitcoins soon before it gets to 200$ and before coinbase lose 20,00000 bitcoin something like that
f this shit I'll just invest in metals

Let's see. Hope this is not another BS. Though I have a relatively small amount with them compared to other members, it feels pretty crappy.

I went all the way down with Gox and believed and told such things. Stupid me. Today I wish I would have respected the warning signs. To late now. Gone.

I can not say much about Bitstamp. When I started they were out of the question. No hardware token, no API keys but clear text passwords in times of Heartbleed and a nearly empty order book.

After Gox they have grown and improved. But just like Gox they have peaked. They are much smaller than Gox. I think they have lost 15% of their coins or so now.
This is dangerous. As a customer I would use the next best opportunity and knocking off there. They have only 6% of the market. Nobody cares two hoots about it.
Today things are happening in China. Mining, Trading and maybe more. I don't know. I've given up trading on exchanges. For me, the past.

Professional traders (I'm not) can use CFDs today. No need for them to take the risk on an exchange. Fonds manager, if there are any, will give up Bitstamp. That should be quite clear.

Just my two cents on this.

Lol. A jug of fresh, drinkable water has more "intrinsic value" than a ton of printed paper  



Let me ask you a question. Do you think that stocks are Ponzi scams? What about IPOs, where the owners can "easily mine approx 1/3rd of the total potential supply before going public"?

That goes for anything. What's so fucking hilarious is that people think scraps of paper have innate value.

I agree that far too many people are spending too much time worrying about the price. Whether a bitcoin is worth $1 or $1000, it works the same way.

But, I would like to address the "created out of thin air" issue that people like to bring up. The fact is that all money is created out of thin air -- even gold. The difference between Bitcoin (and gold) and fiat currencies is that while they are all "created out thin air", the supply of bitcoins is not unlimited. This is an important advantage because the the value of a bitcoin cannot be diluted to nothing, unlike fiat currencies.

Indeed, my mistake.


That is a good question.  OKCoin and Huobi too received similar VC investment.  They have a much larger staff (Huobi claimed to have ~50 people just on customer support), but being in china all their costs should be even smaller than in Slovenia.

A company that moves that much money will need several people in finance and accounting.  They will need people to take care of AML/KYC, or (more likely) sub-contract a specialized company (which are said to be quite expensive).  

I would weakly defend my estimate of 5 M$ for expansion of operations and 1 year of expenses.  I cannot find fault with the lower estimates that people have posted (around 1 M$/year), but do not feel them compelling either.

What were their costs in 2013?

One thing to note is that most of the VC investments that were announced through 2014 were actually negotiated in late 2013 or early 2014.  (For example, OKCoin said that their 10 M$ investment, announced in Mar/2014, had been closed in Dec/2013). At that time, expectations for the growth of the bitcoin economy and price were still in outer space   (By May 2014, most bitcoin gurus and angels were still predicting 3'000 USD/BTC or much more by the end of the year.)  That may explain why the investments were so big compared to the current profits.

Stopped at May 27... Then figured I should read. I understand that yeah, they are probably going to cover it, but as an outsider, with NO inside information, how can you tell people their funds are safe, based off a May press release of a valuation.  There is a whole bunch of unknowns, and unless you are 100%  leave it up to their staff to guarantee people's money.  Yeah, most likely they will,  but this place doesn't seem to function based on what everyone knows or assumes on a daily basis.

I'm not sure the "too big to fail" scenario works in this case. Execs lose their jobs all the time. The only difference between them and a regular Joe is that their CV helps them land somewhere else pretty quickly.

It's the registered office (London), it doesn't have to be their operational office, and probably isn't.

Were did you get those 7 executives from? I only see 5 directors + 1 secretary (they don't have to be exec, and exec doesn't have to be official director).

Exec's salary is just a guessing game. It could be zero, or minimal wage (if the exec is also a shareholder, in such case he'll get most through dividends), it could be performance-related salary etc. They'd have to be really stupid to sign up an exec for ridiculous fixed salary without tying it to performance.