We've been mining for a while at BTC Guild, but thought it was time to come out of the closet.

The deal's not in trouble.

We've moved a few key customers over, will announce more information soon.

We are in the market for a communications person -- send your resume's to support@coinlab.com.

Yep, see the top of the thread. The APIs will stay the same at launch. We will probably layer on FIX support for CoinLab customers.

HNW Individuals already invest in Bitcoin, but only really nerdy ones. They need simple handholding account managers and safe storage. And also integration with their existing brokerage accounts. It's not anything fancy, it's just blocking and tackling to get them access in the systems they are used to.

Well, that part is done already at coinlab.com, enjoy. We don't try and convert other currencies to USD for quotes, though.

Hi Bracek, what do you mean by 'access'? Do you mean read access? If so, then once we've transitioned, our chief compliance officer will have access to verification documents, or someone else on our AML/KYC team.

By 'access' to bitcoin and fiat deposits, do you mean current balances? We need a policy, we don't have one written up now, but I've flagged it in our launch TODO list. I would imagine a general policy is that most employees will be able to see deposit amounts but not identifying account information without customer permission.

The video has officially been projected on the wall at the CoinLab offices. Sigh.

Yes, the Foundation definitely needs full time executive leadership. Lindsay is great, but we need like five people there. I would love to get a full time director in there that's a good fit for the Bitcoin community. I have been thinking we'd talk more about it post-conference.

It's funny you say that, the data feed issue is a big one, actually. All I can say is we're working hard on this with Gox, and I feel your need.

Re: Nefario,

I think I can fairly characterize our decision as deciding to drop any plans to move ahead with him after he was barred entry in the states.

Re: Tihan, he invested in us first, we looked at Bitcoinica (and Tradehill) at CoinLab and passed on investing/buying/running them for a variety of reasons.

Also, it's weird to see video of oneself, but the linked youtube video up there is me; I'm much, much more excited about Bitcoins, though

Reserved

Hi guys,

I'll update the head with salient bullets and we'll try and stay on top of questions as they come up in the thread as well.

Let me start about by saying some bloggers have one thing really wrong so far, I seriously respect Gox' hard work on security and uptime and anti-fraud. Most of you have no idea how hard this is, and how well Gox does. The kind of attacks they withstand, social engineering, technical, financial, legal are non-trivial. I don't expect that CoinLab can or should be set up to duplicate that effort; we wanted to team up together because we can offer something that I think will turn that baseline into lots of value for our whole community.

How Will It Work? I've gotten a bunch of questions about this -- APIs, deposit mechanisms, web interface, etc.

In brief, on March 22, nothing about your interactions will change. You'll log in to Gox, do your trading, and go home. You might notice some rebranding on the website. You'll see a different wire-to address for instructions.

Your USD will be in the states at that point, and you'll be able to send to our SVB account for deposits. More about the bitcoins below.

We'll also be using something like trade.coinlab.com as the mtgox interface, at launch. We will be rolling out more features on our site, (beta.trade.coinlab.com?) incrementally and aim at a nicely UI-designed easy to work with site. To do that we'll be instrumenting the Gox site at some point, and figuring out how you all use it. Right now our analytics are fine from a marketing point of view, but we need to get better at knowing how you all use the site, and how we can make it better.

I don't trust CoinLab's Bitcoin or Web Security One thing we're exploring right now internally is leaving the Bitcoins with Gox at launch, and moving them over once we're sure we've got a battle-hardened high transaction volume system in place. Gox is happy either way, so I'm interested in feedback on this. We have a highly secure (I think best in class) storage system we're about to roll out, but it trades rapid response for security, and that won't work for all Gox customers, for sure.

As Mark and others at Gox know, we have a lot of respect for the work they've done. I have no intention of hurting customers by yanking that work; instead, we want to layer on top of it.

Deposit Timeliness
This should improve, if your customer profile is low risk. At the very least, you will be able to deposit at a US bank, rather than wire to Japan. We're doing our first run-throughs of the system at SVB next week with a few early adopters, and that will lead to more details as to what you can expect, but we did take a deposit today and cleared it onto the trading account in 30 minutes, so that's nice!

Often customers who complain on bitcointalk about delays have triggered some risk system at Gox; I can't go into detail, but let me just say, there are many, many bad folks who want to use the exchange. Some of them happily take their complaints here without explaining that they are using, say, fake documents, or are lying about one thing or another.

I credit Gox with simultaneously wading through these folks and trying to give legit customers a good experience, especially because it can hurt reputation to see these folks in the forums, and of course, given the nature of risk management systems, Gox cannot explain publicly why Jane identity thief in Serbia is not allowed to use the system.

I'm hoping we'll be able to communicate better with new customers and existing ones to sort of settle people down if they're freaking out, and meantime get legit and longtime customer transactions through at high speed; I know that will help. It's tough to watch the price move and be delayed, and have it be working hours in the states, and midnight in Japan.

How will this transition effect withdrawal limits?
Good question. At launch it won't effect withdrawal limits. The history of withdrawal limits has to do with some FinCEN rules about transaction size. We've registered with FinCEN as a seller of prepaid access, they do not distinguish MSBs that sell prepaid access by transaction size, so I would hope we'll see our way clear to increasing these limits or doing away with them.

There's also a risk-mitigation factor -- we'll probably always have a human look at large transactions going out. Think of the different attacks over the last few years and how many would have had little impact if there were systems to block large wallet transfers.

How will this transition effect the verification process?
My hope is that it will drastically improve the process in terms of simplicity, ease of understanding, communication about the process and shortening of wait times. We've been batting around figuring out how to just do it on a video camera live, how awesome would that be?

How will this transition effect users [that] have already gone through the verification process with MtGox?
We are still spot auditing Gox' AML documents to make sure they are up to our promised standards. If they are, (and I have no indication they are anything but excellent), I would expect that users would stay at the same verification level you have now. TL;DR: Hopefully, once is enough.

Will this transition remove the ability to use Dwolla for withdrawals?
No. It is possible we'll have a small delay while we make sure we're comfortable with the Dwolla withdrawal API, we're still talking to the Dwolla folks right now. That said, we want to support Dwolla, and Dwolla wants to work with us, so I don't anticipate major changes. I agree that once you've got the accounts set up, the fees at Dwolla are rocking.

Is Peter Vessenes twitchy and high energy?
I think so. I'll ask employees for comments. Update General Response is "yes."

Did Mark sell my personal data to CoinLab without my $#!$ permission?
Quoting Mark: "MtGox did not sell users identities, and acted in the best interest of its users to ensure CoinLab had no access to said data.  None of users private information will be shared with CoinLab until the user accepts CoinLab's ToS on the site. If you choose to never accept CoinLab's ToS, then your data will never be shared with CoinLab."

Will My History be available post transition?
Yes, you'll still be able to log in and see all the same data.

More Coming
Our folks will start slotting in questions here, and I'll respond throughout the day; from here on out, I will try to not respond to other threads about the transition, and just keep everything here, so post away.
Thanks for all the support so far! We're all really excited.

Peter Vessenes
CEO, CoinLab

Evolve: you'll be able to use the same gox interface. I agree with you on Gox' proven security, we'll have more to say about that soon.

Hi all,

I'm loving the discussion here, and appreciating the feedback. We got caught blind by the early announcement, so we've been heads-down today, sorry about that. I'll circle back this evening pacific time and try and hit up questions, perhaps in a new thread so that we can edit the head post.

Best,

Peter

Just to jump in and agree with Mike; I would guess the Foundation would prefer not to participate in this as well; you only need to get named in one suit before it just isn't worth it.

Or, put another way, the risk, terms of service, and general impact on operations for the Foundation indicates to me someone else should probably do this. It's not required for Bitcoin's ongoing growth and safety, and is out of our mission therefore.

In this case, though, there might be a business case to be made for an escrow shop or business to do bonded verification. It depends how 'distributed' you want to make things. On balance, I'm not sure why paying miners directly is a bad idea, unless you can work a decentralized scheme where the fidelity bond buyer gets paid back if there are no claims.

Hi all,

I understand the API control is important to you. I think we can commit to having this sort of control in a v1 release, although maybe not in the beta. We have generally planned on having a bit more intelligence baked in to the custom client, and less in Con's core, but what you want matters, for sure.

One thing to note, though, is that this is all bitcoin stuff, there's also the computational market side of control, like how we (and you) will decide to switch over to work that pays differently than bitcoin. I'm more focused on getting this side of it right than fan control right now, because I think the final margins will be bigger.

We're about to get started with a university program that's going to be tapping the GPUs for some large-scale distributed work, so I'd guess in the next eight weeks or so, some of these non-Bitcoin work questions are going to get real. We're shooting to have the alpha/beta client out and to you all for testing before that happens, so that we can make sure mining is working properly first.

Anyway, just to say "I hear you!" and we'll keep you posted on the exact specs. There's no reason internally to not give you sophisticated users the ability to tweak out your setups.

We had two major load spikes today; the first was at 12:46pm Pacific, something in our servers borked so we had major getwork latency, up to 10seconds per request for a little bit.

The second was at 2:38pm pacific. About the same load; we did better, latency was maxing at 3.3 seconds. We'll post here when we're ready for round three -- hopefully you all can hammer things a bit more!

Jon sent me by here and asked for my comments.

I don't know if I fit your ideological requirements personally, but my first reaction is that I think you'll get what you want -- the individual member seats seem pretty well situated for trustworthy (from your perspective) representation right now, with Gavin and Jon. In other words from your own description, we have your two favorite people representing you at the Foundation. That said, I anticipate that members might want someone different in those seats at some point; it's why we settled on a term limit and elections.

I think if there's agreement that Corporations should also participate in this opt-in process of protecting, promoting and standardizing Bitcoin (and I understand that many here do not believe that should be the case) then they should also have some say in choosing who they wish to represent them.

Anyway, I drill down what you're saying to be that individuals as a membership class should have more influence than Corporations over the Foundation. I'm not sure I agree with that, partly because of the time and capital investment these businesses make as compared to most of the individual members, and partly because I can't think of strong arguments for it that couldn't be turned around to argue for more corporate influence instead, and partly because I think it's less important to tweak any initial representation than it is to just forge ahead and try and get something done with the members we've got, and let the community at large decide if they want to join, denigrate or hamper us.

Anyway, if our members come forward and say that the board structure is broken, I'm sure we'll want to discuss that. I don't think we've given it nearly enough time though, it's been two days! What I've learned so far is the initial board members are passionate, generally kind rational debaters who are willing to put in yeoman's effort talking about this. A good indication for the future, but not as great as getting our list of To-Do's done. :-)

I liked the AMA format. Accounts are even easier to get at reddit than here; overall, I appreciated the questions and discourse. So, I would call it a success.

Hi all, I'll be answering questions on Reddit at 10:30 am pacific time here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/10mezg/iam_peter_vessenes_executive_director_of_the/

I'm looking forward to it!