Dear Community,
On behalf of the Bitcoin7.com team we would like to comment officially on the events which followed our beta launch a week ago.
We kept silence on most of the topics, as hard as it was to read such criticism (although some points were correct and needed our closer attention).
We wanted bitcoin7.com to present a nice, new, professional alternative to Mtgox, the market almost 95% of the bitcoin supporters use. We wanted to try and offer faster support, faster reaction on add/withdraw funds request. These milestones are still our goal.
We launched the platform as a demo run, but the heat on the forum after its launch made us turn it to an official launch and work 24/7 on the immerse cases we had to solve.
After the launch there was a wave of hate across the Bitcoin.org forum accusing Bitcoin7 in many things, coming from many people, most of who have not even tried the service.
That's why we decided to back off a little and respond officially to all of them. Now let us answer all of the negative questions we encountered:
1. Who is Bitcoin7.com, complete stranger to the community?It is true, our staff was not heavily involved in the daily discussion in this forum. By the time of our beta launch we didn't even had a whitelisted account so we could defend ourselves in opened topics about us. However our team consists of bitcoin-idea enthusiasts supporting smaller sites, writing local news even tried to launch smaller services like local mining pools.
A lot of the misunderstandings would have been cleared much faster if we were well known to this community, we admit that as our fault.
Bitcoin7.com is a joint venture of 2 companies (US and EU) and more people behind them.
We are working on a blog/press release section on Bitcoin7.com where we will publish more information about the identity of the people behind Bitcoin7
2. Does Bitcoin7 really exist, do they have an office as they claim? Yes we really exist. Our HQ is in Sofia, Bulgaria.
3. Is it legal?As a Bitcoin user you probably understand that operating with the brand new decentralized virtual currency is still not an exact subject of almost any legislation. We are subject to the Bulgarian tax and audit authorities, as being part of the EU we are also responsible under the EU jurisdiction. At the moment Bitcoin7's entity is licensed as a deposit collector and trader and we have applied for special revision of the online matching system (trading with user offers) and confirmation if additional license is needed. Bitcoin7 does not allow directly currency exchange of fiat currency, therefore we don't need such license. We are out of the US and unless there is a multinational agreement in force between US-Bulgaria or US-EU, we can't be held responsible for it. This of course doesn't mean we won't be willing to cooperate. Important part of our mission is to defend and improve the Bitcoin image as a whole.
4. Do you have AML policy? (Anti Money Laundering)Yes we have. We started with no conditions as we monitor each withdraw manually and contact the people with larger amounts over email directly. The current automated conditions are:
- 1000$ per day/individual
- 10 000$ per month
These limits can be lifted upon proper identification. To lift your limits contact us.
Your acquisitions of us being illegal because we started without AML are not correct. At the moment we are being audited and wait for the final report which will tell us which actions we didn't take properly according to our current jurisdiction. During this audit we can operate (being solely responsible for any penalties we might be applied with).
5. Bitcoin7's entity is a Bulgarian company, Bulgaria is well known for its cyber crimes!In one of the forum's topics there were 3 pages of offensive posts about our nation. We admit that Bulgaria has a bad control over IP and IT piracy, but that doesn't mean every single business is fraudulent. Are there fraudulent, phishing, spamming illegal porn or gambling sites in the US? Or in any other country with decent internet society? Yes there are.
Out of pure patriotic feeling we would like to remind you that the most famous Bitcoin miner - Poclbm was created by a remarkable Bulgarian developer - m0mchil (Momchil Georgiev, applause!) and many of you owe your mined coins to his creation. Don't underestimate the enthusiasm of our local community
)
6. Security flaws. Did you really had security gaps once you started?We can't guarantee 100% bulletproof-ness and we strongly believe that everyone who claims that is lying. We admit that there was a single CSRF security gap in our code, which was immediately closed upon reporting. We would like say a big THANK YOU for the forum users who didn't took part of the ugly, offensive posts versus Bitcoin7, speculating with the security issues and took their time helping us improve the security. We are the first bitcoin exchange to implement personal id certificates, we are manually monitoring most of the operations, we do invest most of our time on that matter. We have still a lot to do to improve the security of the whole platform and we hope that you will support us and help us eliminate any future threat.
7. Did you really started with ripped-off texts from another website?As shameful and painful as it is we have to admit our guilt here. We contracted copywriters to assist us with the content of the website. We didn't check the validity and originality of the texts and we ended having a great designed website with stolen texts... We have been working on that since we learned about it. Most of the texts have been rewritten, the rest are being finished as we write this topic. I hope you even the original creators of the texts will understand us - it's not logical to create a new service, much more beautiful and useful in terms of UI than the current alternatives, to translate it on 20 languages .... and to have non-original texts (it really doesn't make any sense). This is a fault we admit as well. I hope our fast reaction on this topic will return your fate in us.
8. Do you really store values in floats?Yes we did. Now we don't. By the time of our launch we kept most of the data with greater accuracy in integer format. However there were parts which used floats to preserve data. After some sleepless hours we rewrote everything which was stored as float. We can't show any extract of the DB or code as this could compromise our security. We hope, admitting our initial mistake and making up for it asap, would be enough for you to trust us on this matter.
9. Did you really reverted 4 transaction on your Euro market?Yes we did. We had a problem with a local payment method, which we couldn't identity fast enough. The decision we made was to revert 4 deals on the Euro market in order to keep the buyer and seller 100% safe from fraud. We take this very seriously and if we need to protect the users rights and funds we will do everything possible to.
We removed the questionable payment method anyway, so we don't anticipate such situation to repeat itself.
10. Did you hacked Mtgox? 3 days after your launch the biggest exchange got hacked.No, we didn't. We support the free trade, evidence for that is having the Mtgox payment API integrated as a payment method in our own system. We would gladly partner with any other exchange network. If you wish to talk more about it, please send us an email.
We believe that these answers cover all the bad, stupid non-sense (plus the correct acquisitions versus us) the last week.
We would STRONGLY appreciate if you test our system before commenting or posting. We would also very much appreciate if the moderators of this forum could keep the topic clean of any non useful comments. We would gladly receive any feedback, even if harsh criticism - as long as it's coming from someone who actually know what he is talking about.
