TradeHill - Who we are

[nakowa]

I don't trust Tradehill who acts in such a snaky way...

Some would even suspect the hacker might well come from a competitor...

[LightRider]

Dear Members of the Bitcoin Community, Customers, Partners, and Friends!
Many of you are aware that TradeHill opened up last week just before ‘Black Friday’. To say the least, it kept us extremely busy. Now that we are caught up, we thought to formally introduce ourselves.

But first, our principles. Summed up by the following quote:

“Truth — more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality—
is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.”
Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates.

In the spirit of the above words, we promise our full skills, abilities and values to ensure accuracy, responsibility, and honesty in dealing with each other, our customers, our partners, and the world.

Adam Stradling
Co-founder at TradeHill.


Five years experience as a Business Development Executive in banking, finance and technology. Over the last 3 years he has been working at Evalueserve consulting with major investment banks and hedge funds to build offshore research centers focusing on quantitative finance, data analytics and investment technology. Previously worked for General Electric in Schenectady, NY (during college), then at Terrapinn in Manhattan, NY, NY. Currently working toward his Certificate of Quantitative Finance. He graduated with a degree in Materials Science & Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He lives in Chile, and is an NYC expat.

Francisco Dagnino
Co-founder at TradeHill.

Recently left his full-time job working with one of the top three largest retail and commercial banks on their data analytics and database engineering team at Evalueserve. Seven years professional experience working on technological projects as an analyst and manager.  Francisco has programming skills in SQL, VBA, and more. He has left EVS to work full-time on building Tradehill. He lives in Chile and is a native. 


MJD
Co-founder at TradeHill.


Serial entrepreneur having started multiple successful companies including an automated trading firm, an engineering consulting firm, and a mobile software company boosting over 300 iPhone Applications.  Previously the head of software development for a Los Angeles based start-up commercial spaceflight company. Background in cognitive science and computer engineering.


Jered Kenna
Co-founder at TradeHill.

Former Marine and professional soldier in Afghanistan. After serving his country, he was lured into working for Halliburton. During which, he developed a palpable distaste for unethical and fraudulent business practices and a strong dislike for LCBs. He is originally from Independence, Oregon (the end of the Oregon Trail if you remember that). He lives in Chile. Jered and Adam have been friends for 10 years.


We are all 29 to 31 years old.
We are keeping an open mind to working with different individuals/firms so we encourage people to introduce themselves.
We would like to thank all of our new customers, partners, and friends. We are excited, motivated, and focused on working toward the end goal.
Please let us know if you have any questions.

Thank you!
The TradeHill Team

For posterity.

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

Hi Nakowa,

You are entitled to your own opinion.

I will restate myself again – On the premise and principles outlined by TradeHill, we have acted in accordance with our previous posts.

We wrote our ‘Who we are’ post LAST NIGHT for today.

We wrote an array of other posts LAST NIGHT including one titled “Task Force for Exchange Security” – I can provide the emails of the people we had a discussions with on this. In fact, I am going to bring up those emails NOW and post them.

We would NEVER steal and we HATE thieves.

Look up my LinkedIn, if you think I am afraid of having people knowing who I am, see all my personal information where 3000+ people can see me!

We are here to do business in accordance with the principles set out at the beginning of this email - PERIOD!

Regards,
Adam Stradling

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

Can I suggest creating both a twitter account and a presence in an IRC channel (ex: #TradeHill)?

You can use these two to communicate with your customer base in the event something were to happen to tradehill like just happened to MtGox. Twitter is fantastic for getting out quick "we know it - were working on it" snippets to ease people's fear.

Noted - thank you for the feedback and we will implement is expeditiously.

Regards,
Adam Stradling

[done]

I wish Tradehill nothing but success.

[paulie_w]

tradehill guys:

this seems to me like the opportunity of a lifetime. please sort this mess out for the whole community. put some dollars behind your marketing and pr and calm the waters a bit. be a public face to reassure the masses.

[schnak]

lets take out the accounts.csv leak and apply the recent events to tradehill.

lets say a  tradehill Client/customer account is used by unauthorized person to enact a major market move (either a spike or crash) similar to what we saw today.

What is tradehill going to do in response? Halt trading after X%? Freeze the individual account for suspicious activity? revert all trades like MtGox is doing?

[gigitrix]

Make sure you can friggin withstand an SQL injection attack at the very least...

Also, have a big red button/script you can press to "stop" the whole thing.

[newguy05]

I use tradehill and dont have any problems, compared to mtgox it's like night and day.

However for tradehill to go prime time, it needs to do the following:

1) Upgrade the server/hardware and be hosted in professionally managed data center, it's way too slow right now, i often see timeouts.

2) Security.  People can deal with the crappy customer service, the crappy user interface etc..but if security is comprised it's the end.  No offense but your security is a joke right, i understand you dont have the resources/money but it needs to be looked at seriously as the #1 priority.

[flug]

It's great that we've got TradeHill as well as Mt.Gox, but TradeHill is no more a saviour than Mt.Gox is the anti christ. I don't for one moment believe that TradeHill isn't vulnerable to an attack, and the ultimate answer is to have a thriving market of 100+ substantial exchanges. Until then it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

I wish Tradehill nothing but success.

Thank you BTCBOOK,

We wish for excellent results to those individuals who interact with the world in harmony with principles.  

We have received many Task Force emails. Thank you very much and we look forward to working with you. However, since the Task Force will be a post recovery/post aftermath initiative, please allow us to deal with urgent items now – we promise to respond tomorrow with next steps and we assure that no one will be overlooked (to participate - send an email to info@tradehill.com with Task Force in the title).

However, we need to address urgent issues arising from this unfortunate event. Again, we regret this debacle and want to help as much as possible. If there is something we can immediately do, then please send an email to info@tradehill.com with “Emergency Help” in the title and we will respond immediately.

Additionally, here is my personal phone numbers:  
US: +1 917 675 3492
Chile O: +56 32 3140 930
C. (M): +56 96 656 9878

Regards,
Adam Stradling

[655321]

putting my tinfoil hat on, this all seems very strange.

Mtgox is hacked/crashed - goes offline

Mass of threads/posts about how Mtgox was hacked, unsafe etc.

Mass of threads/posts about how we should all switch to Tradehill

Introduction thread about who tradehill is, within several hours of Mtgox going offline.


The chance of this all being coincidence doesn't seem very high, this definitely looks like a duck to me.

Its called marketing, Jesus Christ.

[paulie_w]

hey jared, you have a huge number of posts here.

how long have you been working on tradehill? how long have you been involved in bitcoin?

[655321]

the classy thing to do would be to just ease up while Mtgox is being attacked, instead of jumping in like sharks smelling blood in the water. "This PR spree" reflects poorly on your company.

I don't see how this looks "poorly" on TradeHill at all. This looks good to me. Not many people were even aware of MtGox alternatives, and TradeHill is simply letting people know that they have options.

MtGox is fucking DOWN right now. Do you think it reflects positively for the development of BitCoin in general if there WASN'T another trade site that can keep this market alive? For fuck's sake people.

[qikaifu]

I want to ask a few questions about your company.

What's the number of the owners' equity on the Blance Sheet of your comapny, say, how much money have you founders invested?

How many fulltime stuff are there in you company?

Is there any founders are not fulltime?

Are you going to raise larger venture capital soon?

How many years have you founders know each other, have you guys teamed up before?

[evoorhees]

TradeHill - thank you for producing an alternative exchange. May the marketplace bless you with profits =)

It's inspiring to see new business rising every day in wild this new economy. Cheers!

[PHPAdam]

Why post your names and info, but previously buy a domain via "domains by proxy"?
Where is "TradeHill Co. Ltd" registered?

I notice your hosting with a "cloud" company in Sweden, give them a kick as you don't have enough resources and if your on "the cloud" how can that be simply throttle up.

I wish you all the best, their needs to be a solid alternate to MtGox, but I would not count MtGox down and out yet.

[elggawf]

*Whisles*

Looks like I cashed out some of my GPU fund to Dwolla just in time - looks like they're halting them for now. Probably for the best.

[Piper67]

Hey Tradehill:

Here's an idea to help those of us trying to fund our accounts from Canada. For some reason, Canadian banks won't allow me to make an international transfer to your account in the US. But they would allow one to Chile.

If you opened a local account with a Chilean bank, it would be reasonably easy to fund it. Then again, if you could open an account with a Canadian bank, we'd be able to transfer money to and from it in a matter of minutes!

Keep up the good work.

[iCEBREAKER]

We can accept international wires. If you want to buy Bitcoin with any currency.
Go to your bank, buy USD and then wire it in.
SEPA is coming ASAP, we are growing as fast as possible.
We don't want to over extend ourselves and fail. We would much rather provide a reliable service.

In regards to the servers we're on it. It's one thing to grow quickly and another to have the entire Bitcoin world try to log in at once.

When is TradeHill going to pay for, and publish results from, a professional security audit?

If you want to be a real online broker, you need to invest in Wells-Fargo levels of vulnerability analysis.

Start with NTOSpider On-Demand, http://www.ntobjectives.com/ntoondemand, to get an idea of where you stand.

Next, hire an experienced consultant to make sure everything is absolutely bulletproof.

I HIGHLY recommend Strategic Data Command of Oakland, CA.  Larry Suto is among the best at what he does.

It might cost you a small fortune, but if you want results you need to call in world-class experts.

I posted this same bit of advice to our MtGox rep. as well.