Kraken Leader Jesse Powell Claims of Altcoin Season Hype ...

kraken.us Customer Support Number +1(888)-780-0222 Get Help Now If any Issues u/WeirdAcanthocephala6

📷 kraken Customer Support Number +1-888-780-0222
In this guide, we’ll learn everything there is to know about the Coinbase vs Kraken rivalry!
So, you’re on our way to becoming a crypto buff and you’re ready to get trading! But, where do you start?!
Cryptocurrencies aren’t like bread, eggs, and milk. We can’t go down to our local store to get them, and Amazon definitely isn’t sending them with next-day delivery! Instead, we need to go to an online cryptocurrency exchange.
Essentially, these exchanges help us swap our local currency into cryptocurrency. They also provide a platform for trading cryptocurrencies, selling them and storing them. But with so many options available, which should you choose?
Kraken and Coinbase are some of the largest and most reputable online currency exchanges. However, it’s also important to understand their differences.
Back in 2011, the founder of Kraken, Jesse Powell, was working at the largest cryptocurrency exchange of its time, Mt. Gox. There had just been two major hacks, and security was becoming difficult to manage. Bitcoins were going missing. If this continued, the future of crypto was bleak.
Jesse thought that he could do a better job. He knew he could create a secure cryptocurrency exchange which would help people trust in the system and bring crypto into the mainstream!
So, he created Kraken. He focussed on security when creating Kraken; hackers were never going to get past his security system. And so far, it has worked — Kraken has never been hacked.
Now, Kraken aims to be the exchange that offers the widest range of cryptocurrencies that you can buy using fiat currencies (USD, EUR, JPY, etc.).
After its public refusal, Kraken expressed an intentionto return service to New York residence pending the removal of what it perceived as unfair and counterproductive licensing.
Coinsetter, announced to clients in December 2015 that it would thenceforth impose a $65 fee to offset the cost of the very same BitLicense Kraken refused to afford.
In absorbing Coinsetter, and by extension Cavirtex, the following month, Kraken opened up its platform to residents of 37 other states, and to all Canadian residents.
Alongside this deal, Kraken announced partnerships with payment providers SynapsePay in the U.S. and Vogogo in Canada, in order to provide its newest clients with access to fiat deposits and withdrawals respectively.
One month later, Kraken announced the completion of its Series B round of investment lead by SBI Investment, a prominent Japanese venture capitalist firm under SBI Holdings. Following this investment round,
Kraken announced two major acquisitions that year: Dutch exchange CleverCoin, which was acquired in June, and Glidera, a wallet service allowing users to directly fund Glidera bank accounts with fiat for the purchase of cryptocurrencies on the Kraken exchange.
Kraken's reputation for security was challenged amidst 2016's buildout of partnerships and acquisitions.
Multiple claims emerged in the latter half of July via news media and social networks that clients’ accounts had been compromised and funds stolen.
As Kraken went silent reportedly for investigation, users threatened to alert and petition the FBI's Cyber Crimes Division for redress. Within a month,
Kraken presented clarification that ‘Kraken’ was never compromised; that is, after internal investigation, the
security team reached the conclusion that Kraken systems, servers, and databases were not accessed by malicious attackers due to any identifiable vulnerability for which they would be responsible.
The company attributed affected users’ missing funds to phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks, and stressed the importance of enabling
Kraken websites security features, such as two-factor authentication for withdrawals or the Global Settings Lock to restrict unfamiliar IP access.
In the aftermath of the hack that wasn't, Kraken asserted recognition of their continued responsibility to protect clients, and stressed equally so, the client's responsibility in protecting him- or herself.
submitted by WeirdAcanthocephala6 to u/WeirdAcanthocephala6 [link] [comments]

Since Jan 1st, 2019 These Things Have Happened:

If you would have mentioned Bitcoin or crypto in general being applied in the following ways in 2017, you would have been laughed out of the building, state, and probably your home country.
The only bearish thing about BTC (and crypto overall) right now is last year's dump.
Swiss Bank Julius Baer to Offer Digital Asset Services
SEC Chairman Confirms Cryptocurrencies Like Ethereum Are Not Securities
Blockchain-Focused ETF Arrives on London Stock Exchange
Samsung Unveils Cryptocurrency Wallet, Dapps for Galaxy S10 Phone
Fidelity Digital Assets “are live with a select group of eligible clients and will continue rolling out slowly. Our solutions are focused on the needs of hedge funds, family offices, pensions, endowments, other institutional investors.”
Major US Grocery Chain Kroger Ditches Visa, Discusses Accepting Bitcoin
Square Brought in Over $166 Million Through Bitcoin Sales Last Year
NASDAQ to Add Liquid Indices Tracking Value of BTC and ETH
BITCOIN WHALES QUIETLY STOCKPILED 150K BTC IN LAST TWO MONTHS
Ethereum's top 500 whales have increased their holdings 80% since Jan 2018.
Crypto Exchange Kraken Raises $100 Million, Acquires London Futures Firm
Coinstar machines will start selling Bitcoin at the grocery store
Crypto Victory: Colorado Exempts Cryptocurrencies From Securities Laws
(I'm sure I missed a ton of headlines, feel free to comment them and I will add to this list.)
submitted by moon_airspace to BitcoinMarkets [link] [comments]

The Great Bitcoin Bull Market Of 2017 by Trace Mayer

By: Trace Mayer, host of The Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast.
Originally posted here with images and Youtube videos.
I just got back from a two week vacation without Internet as I was scouring some archeological ruins. I hardly thought about Bitcoin at all because there were so many other interesting things and it would be there when I got back.
Jimmy Song suggested I do an article on the current state of Bitcoin. A great suggestion but he is really smart (he worked on Armory after all!) so I better be thorough and accurate!
Therefore, this article will be pretty lengthy and meticulous.
BACKGROUND
As I completely expected, the 2X movement from the New York Agreement that was supposed to happen during the middle of my vacation flopped on its face because Jeff Garzik was driving the clown car with passengers willfully inside like Coinbase, Blockchain.info, Bitgo and Xapo and there were here massive bugS and in the code and miners like Bitmain did not want to allocate $150-350m to get it over the difficulty adjustments.
I am very disappointed in their lack of integrity with putting their money where their mouths are; myself and many others wanted to sell a lot of B2X for BTC!
On 7 December 2015, with Bitcoin trading at US$388.40, I wrote The Rise of the Fourth Great Bitcoin Bubble. On 4 December 2016, with Bitcoin trading at US$762.97, I did this interview:

As of 26 November 2017, Bitcoin is trading around US$9,250.00. That is an increase of about 2,400% since I wrote the article prognosticating this fourth great Bitcoin bull market. I sure like being right, like usual (19 Dec 2011, 1 Jul 2013), especially when there are financial and economic consequences.
With such massive gains in such a short period of time the speculative question becomes: Buy, Hold or Sell?
FUNDAMENTALS
Bitcoin is the decentralized censorship-resistant Internet Protocol for transferring value over a communications channel.
The Bitcoin network can use traditional Internet infrastructure. However, it is even more resilient because it has custom infrastructure including, thanks to Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corrallo, the FIBRE network and, thanks to Blockstream, satellites which reduce the cost of running a full-node anywhere in the world to essentially nothing in terms of money or privacy. Transactions can be cheaply broadcast via SMS messages.
SECURITY
The Bitcoin network has a difficulty of 1,347,001,430,559 which suggests about 9,642,211 TH/s of custom ASIC hardware deployed.
At a retail price of approximately US$105/THs that implies about $650m of custom ASIC hardware deployed (35% discount applied).
This custom hardware consumes approximately 30 TWh per year. That could power about 2.8m US households or the entire country of Morocco which has a population of 33.85m.
This Bitcoin mining generates approximately 12.5 bitcoins every 10 minutes or approximately 1,800 per day worth approximately US$16,650,000.
Bitcoin currently has a market capitalization greater than $150B which puts it solidly in the top-30 of M1 money stock countries and a 200 day moving average of about $65B which is increasing about $500m per day.
Average daily volumes for Bitcoin is around US$5B. That means multi-million dollar positions can be moved into and out of very easily with minimal slippage.
When my friend Andreas Antonopolous was unable to give his talk at a CRYPSA event I was invited to fill in and delivered this presentation, impromptu, on the Seven Network Effects of Bitcoin.
These seven network effects of Bitcoin are (1) Speculation, (2) Merchants, (3) Consumers, (4) Security [miners], (5) Developers, (6) Financialization and (7) Settlement Currency are all taking root at the same time and in an incredibly intertwined way.
With only the first network effect starting to take significant root; Bitcoin is no longer a little experiment of magic Internet money anymore. Bitcoin is monster growing at a tremendous rate!!

SPECULATION
For the Bitcoin price to remain at $9,250 it requires approximately US$16,650,000 per day of capital inflow from new hodlers.
Bitcoin is both a Giffen good and a Veblen good.
A Giffen good is a product that people consume more of as the price rises and vice versa — seemingly in violation of basic laws of demand in microeconomics such as with substitute goods and the income effect.
Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases in an apparent contradiction of the law of demand.
There are approximately 16.5m bitcoins of which ~4m are lost, ~4-6m are in deep cold storage, ~4m are in cold storage and ~2-4m are salable.
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/lost-bitcoins-1.jpg)
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/lost-bitcoins-2.jpg)
And forks like BCash (BCH) should not be scary but instead be looked upon as an opportunity to take more territory on the Bitcoin blockchain by trading the forks for real bitcoins which dries up more salable supply by moving it, likely, into deep cold storage.
According to Wikipedia, there are approximately 15.4m millionaires in the United States and about 12m HNWIs ($30m+ net worth) in the world. In other words, if every HNWI in the world wanted to own an entire bitcoin as a 'risk-free asset' that cannot be confiscated, seized or have the balance other wise altered then they could not.
For wise portfolio management, these HNWIs should have at least about 2-5% in gold and 0.5-1% in bitcoin.
Why? Perhaps some of the 60+ Saudis with 1,700 frozen bank accounts and about $800B of assets being targetted might be able to explain it to you.
In other words, everyone loves to chase the rabbit and once they catch it then know that it will not get away.
RETAIL
There are approximately 150+ significant Bitcoin exchanges worldwide. Kraken, according to the CEO, was adding about 6,000 new funded accounts per day in July 2017.
Supposedly, Coinbase is currently adding about 75,000 new accounts per day. Based on some trade secret analytics I have access to; I would estimate Coinbase is adding approximately 17,500 new accounts per day that purchase at least US$100 of Bitcoin.
If we assume Coinbase accounts for 8% of new global Bitcoin users who purchase at least $100 of bitcoins (just pulled out of thin error and likely very conservative as the actual number is perhaps around 2%) then that is approximately $21,875,000 of new capital coming into Bitcoin every single day just from retail demand from 218,750 total new accounts.
What I have found is that most new users start off buying US$100-500 and then after 3-4 months months they ramp up their capital allocation to $5,000+ if they have the funds available.
After all, it takes some time and practical experience to learn how to safely secure one's private keys.
To do so, I highly recommend Bitcoin Core (network consensus and full validation of the blockchain), Armory (private key management), Glacier Protocol (operational procedures) and a Puri.sm laptop (secure non-specialized hardware).
WALL STREET
There has been no solution for large financial fiduciaries to invest in Bitcoin. This changed November 2017.
LedgerX, whose CEO I interviewed 23 March 2013, began trading as a CFTC regulated Swap Execution Facility and Derivatives Clearing Organization.
The CME Group announced they will begin trading in Q4 2017 Bitcoin futures.
The CBOE announced they will begin trading Bitcoin futures soon.
By analogy, these institutional products are like connecting a major metropolis's water system (US$90.4T and US$2 quadrillion) via a nanoscopic shunt to a tiny blueberry ($150B) that is infinitely expandable.
This price discovery could be the most wild thing anyone has ever experienced in financial markets.
THE GREAT CREDIT CONTRACTION
The same week Bitcoin was released I published my book The Great Credit Contraction and asserted it had now begun and capital would burrow down the liquidity pyramid into safer and more liquid assets.
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/Great-Credit-Contraction-Liquidity-Pyramid.jpg)
Thus, the critical question becomes: Is Bitcoin a possible solution to the Great Credit Contraction by becoming the safest and most liquid asset?
BITCOIN'S RISK PROFILE
At all times and in all circumstances gold remains money but, of course, there is always exchange rate risk due to price ratios constantly fluctuating. If the metal is held with a third-party in allocated-allocated storage (safest possible) then there is performance risk (Morgan Stanley gold storage lawsuit).
But, if properly held then, there should be no counter-party risk which requires the financial ability of a third-party to perform like with a bank account deposit. And, since gold exists at a single point in space and time therefore it is subject to confiscation or seizure risk.
Bitcoin is a completely new asset type. As such, the storage container is nearly empty with only $150B.
And every Bitcoin transaction effectively melts down every BTC and recasts it; thus ensuring with 100% accuracy the quantity and quality of the bitcoins. If the transaction is not on the blockchain then it did not happen. This is the strictest regulation possible; by math and cryptography!
This new immutable asset, if properly secured, is subject only to exchange rate risk. There does exist the possibility that a software bug may exist that could shut down the network, like what has happened with Ethereum, but the probability is almost nil and getting lower everyday it does not happen.
Thus, Bitcoin arguably has a lower risk profile than even gold and is the only blockchain to achieve security, scalability and liquidity.
To remain decentralized, censorship-resistant and immutable requires scalability so as many users as possible can run full-nodes.
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/ethereum-bitcoin-scability-nov-2017.png)
TRANSACTIONS
Some people, probably mostly those shilling alt-coins, think Bitcoin has a scalability problem that is so serious it requires a crude hard fork to solve.
On the other side of the debate, the Internet protocol and blockchain geniuses assert the scalability issues can, like other Internet Protocols have done, be solved in different layers which are now possible because of Segregated Witness which was activated in August 2017.
Whose code do you want to run: the JV benchwarmers or the championship Chicago Bulls?
As transaction fees rise, certain use cases of the Bitcoin blockchain are priced out of the market. And as the fees fall then they are economical again.
Additionally, as transaction fees rise, certain UTXOs are no longer economically usable thus destroying part of the money supply until fees decline and UTXOs become economical to move.
There are approximately 275,000-350,000 transactions per day with transaction fees currently about $2m/day and the 200 DMA is around $1.08m/day.
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/bitcoin-transaction-fees-nov-2017.png)
What I like about transaction fees is that they somewhat reveal the financial health of the network.
The security of the Bitcoin network results from the miners creating solutions to proof of work problems in the Bitcoin protocol and being rewarded from the (1) coinbase reward which is a form of inflation and (2) transaction fees which is a form of usage fee.
The higher the transaction fees then the greater implied value the Bitcoin network provides because users are willing to pay more for it.
I am highly skeptical of blockchains which have very low transaction fees. By Internet bubble analogy, Pets.com may have millions of page views but I am more interested in EBITDA.
DEVELOPERS
Bitcoin and blockchain programming is not an easy skill to acquire and master. Most developers who have the skill are also financially independent now and can work on whatever they want.
The best of the best work through the Bitcoin Core process. After all, if you are a world class mountain climber then you do not hang out in the MacDonalds play pen but instead climb Mount Everest because that is where the challenge is.
However, there are many talented developers who work in other areas besides the protocol. Wallet maintainers, exchange operators, payment processors, etc. all need competent developers to help build their businesses.
Consequently, there is a huge shortage of competent developers. This is probably the largest single scalability constraint for the ecosystem.
Nevertheless, the Bitcoin ecosystem is healthier than ever before.
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/bitcoin-ecosystem.jpg)(/images/bitcoin-ecosystem-small.jpg)
SETTLEMENT CURRENCY
There are no significant global reserve settlement currency use cases for Bitcoin yet.
Perhaps the closest is Blockstream's Strong Federations via Liquid.
PRICE
There is a tremendous amount of disagreement in the marketplace about the value proposition of Bitcoin. Price discovery for this asset will be intense and likely take many cycles of which this is the fourth.
Since the supply is known the exchange rate of Bitcoins is composed of (1) transactional demand and (2) speculative demand.
Interestingly, the price elasticity of demand for the transactional demand component is irrelevant to the price. This makes for very interesting dynamics!
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/bitcoin-speculation.jpg)
On 4 May 2017, Lightspeed Venture Partners partner Jeremy Liew who was among the early Facebook investors and the first Snapchat investor laid out their case for bitcoin exploding to $500,000 by 2030.
On 2 November 2017, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-02/blankfein-says-don-t-dismiss-bitcoin-while-still-pondering-value)said, "Now we have paper that is just backed by fiat...Maybe in the new world, something gets backed by consensus."
On 12 Sep 2017, JP Morgan CEO called Bitcoin a 'fraud' but conceded that "(http://fortune.com/2017/09/12/jamie-dimon-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-fraud-buy/)Bitcoin could reach $100,000".
Thus, it is no surprise that the Bitcoin chart looks like a ferret on meth when there are such widely varying opinions on its value proposition.
I have been around this space for a long time. In my opinion, those who scoffed at the thought of $1 BTC, $10 BTC (Professor Bitcorn!), $100 BTC, $1,000 BTC are scoffing at $10,000 BTC and will scoff at $100,000 BTC, $1,000,000 BTC and even $10,000,000 BTC.
Interestingly, the people who understand it the best seem to think its financial dominance is destiny.
Meanwhile, those who understand it the least make emotionally charged, intellectually incoherent bearish arguments. A tremendous example of worldwide cognitive dissonance with regards to sound money, technology and the role or power of the State.
Consequently, I like looking at the 200 day moving average to filter out the daily noise and see the long-term trend.
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/bitcoin-price-200dma-nov-2017.png)
Well, that chart of the long-term trend is pretty obvious and hard to dispute. Bitcoin is in a massive secular bull market.
The 200 day moving average is around $4,001 and rising about $30 per day.
So, what do some proforma situations look like where Bitcoin may be undervalued, average valued and overvalued? No, these are not prognostications.
(http://www.runtogold.com/images/bitcoin-price-pro-forma.png)
Maybe Jamie Dimon is not so off his rocker after all with a $100,000 price prediction.
We are in a very unique period of human history where the collective globe is rethinking what money is and Bitcoin is in the ring battling for complete domination. Is or will it be fit for purpose?
As I have said many times before, if Bitcoin is fit for this purpose then this is the largest wealth transfer in the history of the world.
CONCLUSION
Well, this has been a brief analysis of where I think Bitcoin is at the end of November 2017.
The seven network effects are taking root extremely fast and exponentially reinforcing each other. The technological dominance of Bitcoin is unrivaled.
The world is rethinking what money is. Even CEOs of the largest banks and partners of the largest VC funds are honing in on Bitcoin's beacon.
While no one has a crystal ball; when I look in mine I see Bitcoin's future being very bright.
Currently, almost everyone who has bought Bitcoin and hodled is sitting on unrealized gains as measured in fiat currency. That is, after all, what uncharted territory with daily all-time highs do!
But perhaps there is a larger lesson to be learned here.
Riches are getting increasingly slippery because no one has a reliable defined tool to measure them with. Times like these require incredible amounts of humility and intelligence guided by macro instincts.
Perhaps everyone should start keeping books in three numéraires: USD, gold and Bitcoin.
Both gold and Bitcoin have never been worth nothing. But USD is a fiat currency and there are thousands of those in the fiat currency graveyard. How low can the world reserve currency go?
After all, what is the risk-free asset? And, whatever it is, in The Great Credit Contraction you want it!
What do you think? Disagree with some of my arguments or assertions? Please, eviscerate them on Twitter or in the comments!
submitted by bitcoinknowledge to Bitcoin [link] [comments]

WSJ: A Crypto-Mystery: Is $140 Million Stuck or Missing?

Paywall free link: https://outline.com/V5j2uZ
Original link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-crypto-mystery-is-140-million-stuck-or-missing-11549449001
A Crypto-Mystery: Is $140 Million Stuck or Missing?
PAUL VIGNA FEBRUARY 06, 2019
A Canadian cryptocurrency exchange says about $140 million worth of customers’ holdings are stuck in an electronic vault because the company’s founder, and sole employee, died without sharing the password.
But two independent researchers say publicly available transaction records associated with QuadrigaCX suggest the money may be gone, not trapped.
They say it appears Quadriga transferred customer funds to other cryptocurrency exchanges, although it isn’t clear what might have happened to the money from there.
Their research is the latest twist in what is shaping up to be a bizarre case, even within the often murky and unpredictable world of cryptocurrencies.
Gerald Cotten launched Quadriga in December 2013. The exchange claimed to be one of the largest in Canada, allowing customers to trade a handful of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and ether.
On Jan. 15, the company announced on its website that Mr. Cotten had died on Dec. 9 from complications related to Crohn’s disease while building an orphanage in India. He was 30 years old. Two weeks later, the exchange filed for bankruptcy protection in a Nova Scotia court.
Quadriga said its customers have accounts with a total balance of about C$250 million. Only about C$70 million of those customer funds is in cash. About C$180 million, or about $140 million, is in cryptocurrencies held in a reserve account maintained on Mr. Cotten’s laptop, the company said in its bankruptcy filing. Quadriga would need control of that account to send those cryptocurrency funds to customers.
Mr. Cotten ran the business out of his home in Fall River, Nova Scotia, his widow, Jennifer Robertson, stated in an affidavit. Ms. Robertson said Mr. Cotten was the only person who moved funds from an active account—called a “hot wallet” in crypto circles because it is connected to the internet—to the reserve account, which is an offline “cold wallet.” The company said it has been unable to break into Mr. Cotten’s laptop to try to recover the access keys.
If the laptop can’t be accessed, the funds could be permanently frozen. On Tuesday, a judge in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia granted the company a 30-day stay of proceedings as it tries to untangle its finances.
There are no standards or regulations in the cryptocurrency world that would prevent a situation such as at Quadriga, where one person runs an exchange that handles millions of dollars in virtual currencies using a laptop computer, and has sole access to crucial passwords.
Some cryptocurrency specialists aren’t waiting for Quadriga to figure things out. James Edwards, a cryptocurrency analyst who publishes research on a website called Zerononcense, said he reviewed the exchange’s claims based on an examination of publicly available transaction histories.
He says he found no evidence that Quadriga controlled any wallets that held the large amounts the company claims. “It appears that there are no identifiable cold wallet reserves for QuadrigaCX,” he wrote in a report. Quadriga didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The analysis Mr. Edwards performed is possible because bitcoin and other virtual currencies have publicly available digital records that allow anybody to trace the entire transaction history of a specific currency. This type of forensic analysis has become more common over the past few years in the cryptocurrency world.
Mr. Edwards collected information from more than 50 Quadriga clients and then performed an analysis of those transactions, drawing a picture of Quadriga’s money flows. Transactions from the customers to Quadriga revealed the existence of its active accounts. But Mr. Edwards couldn’t find any transactions going to the kinds of reserve accounts Quadriga says it has.
If the reserve accounts existed, Mr. Edwards said, then at some point transactions either to or from the active accounts should have appeared.
“None of the withdrawal addresses provided by customers led to a wallet that could be considered anything comparable to a ‘reserve’ wallet,” Mr. Edwards wrote. Mr. Edwards told The Wall Street Journal there was evidence wallets once existed that had larger balances, but those balances were currently much lower. The largest wallet currently, he said, appeared to be the hot wallet, or the one used for transactional purposes.
The exchange appeared to be satisfying withdrawal requests from the hot wallet, he said, but only after enough new deposits came in from other customers to cover the withdrawals.
Mr. Edwards focused mostly on Quadriga’s bitcoin holdings. Another analytics firm, Elementus Group, traced the exchange’s ether holdings, and came to the same conclusion.
“It is extremely likely that there aren’t any cold wallets,” CEO Max Galka told the Journal. Most of the funds appeared to be going out to other exchanges, he said, including Bitfinex, Poloniex, and ShapeShift.
Poloniex said it identified accounts that could be related to Quadriga, and is working with appropriate authorities. Bitfinex did not immediately reply to a request for comment. ShapeShift declined to comment.
Jesse Powell, the CEO of online exchange Kraken, also doubted Quadriga’s claims. He said on Twitter Sunday that his exchange had wallets known to belong to Quadriga and was investigating the “bizarre” story. He suggested the Royal Canadian Mounted Police contact him. Mr. Powell declined to comment.
The researchers’ analysis isn’t conclusive, though. “In my opinion, that’s an impossibility to determine,” said David Jevans, the CEO of CipherTrace, another firm that does analytics in the sector. It is possible Quadriga had a number of accounts that served as cold wallets, rather than one, which wouldn’t have shown up in the searches of Mr. Edwards and others. “It very well could be they took the money, moved it out to the cold wallets, and tragedy happened,” he said.
While those suspicious of Quadriga acknowledge the public transactions don’t provide certainty, some say there is a way to determine if the exchange’s money is indeed trapped. A crypto developer named Amaury Sechet suggested Quadriga should publish the addresses of the cold wallets. This would allow anyone to see how much cryptocurrency is in them, even if they couldn’t access it.
Poloniex said it identified accounts that could be related to Quadriga, and is working with appropriate authorities. Bitfinex did not immediately reply to a request for comment. ShapeShift declined to comment.
“Over time trust will build as the coins remains (sic) untouched,” he wrote on Twitter. “If they cannot do this, their story is not credible.”
(credit to u/quippurr in /QuadrigaCX2, the non-Quadriga controlled reddit)
submitted by LonelyGuava to QuadrigaCX [link] [comments]

Beginner’s Guide to Exchanges – Part 1

Beginner’s Guide to Exchanges – Part 1

Hola Compadres! It is me u/poop_dragon here with another guide. Today I would like to run through a list of ETH exchanges. This is just Part 1 of this list, and it covers established exchanges. Soon I will post Part 2 and 3 which will go into some other types of exchanges (derivative markets, coin converters, decentralized, and foreign exchanges) Side note, I have given rating to these exchanges based on some comparisons, news, and information which I have found online. Recently, EVERY exchange has been slow/unresponsive in their customer service due to the huge influx of new users. My intention is to help educate new users about the exchanges available. I am not trying to discredit, advertise, pump up, or damage reputations. If you feel something is inaccurate, please respectfully bring it up in the comments. I will be editing as we go. Last thing of note, I have only included the lowest level trading tier to calculate trading fees, which assumes the highest rates. Most exchanges offer lower fees for bigger orders, but I have gone with the assumption that everyone here is not dropping whale amounts of cash.

00 – Concepts and Definitions

01 –Digital Exchanges

Poloniex

Exchange Type Maker Taker
All Currencies .15% .25%
Feature Details
2FA Google Authenticator Available
Wallet Security ‘Majority’ of Funds in cold storage
Personal Information Encrypted and Stored Off-Site
Tier Level Name Email DOB Phone Address Official ID Bank Info KYC Limits
Level 1 X X $2,000 USD Daily Withdrawal Limit
Level 2 X X X X X X $7,000 USD Daily Withdrawal Limit
Level 3 X X X X X X $25,000 USD Daily Withdrawal Limit
Level 4 X X X X X X X X >$25,000 USD Daily Withdrawal Limit
What is a KYC? It stands for Know Your Customer Documentation. This varies between exchanges. However, like most things, if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it.

Bittrex

Exchange Type Maker Taker
All Currencies .25% .25%
Feature Details
2FA Google Authenticator Available
Wallet Security Multi-stage wallet Majority’ of Funds in cold storage
Personal Information IP Whitelisting restricts trading from new addresses
Tier Level Name Email DOB Phone Address Official ID Bank Info KYC Limits
Basic X X X 3 BTC or less daily
Enhanced X X X X X X 100 BTC or less daily

02– Fiat Exchanges - USA

Coinbase (GDAX)

Country Credit/Debit Linked Bank Account Wire Transfer
Australia 3.99% - -
Canada 3.99% - -
Europe 3.99% 1.49% SEPA- Free (€0.15)
Singapore 3.99% 1.49% -
UK 3.99% - SEPA Free (€0.15)
US 3.99% 1.49% $10 Deposit / $25 With / ACH Free
Exchange Type Maker Taker
ETH/FIAT 0% .30%
ETH/BTC 0% .30%
Tier Level Name Email DOB Phone Address Official ID Bank Info KYC Limits
Level 1 X X X
Level 2 X X X X X Crypto Only
Level 3 X X X X X X X Fiat Enabled
Level 4 X X X X X X X X Higher Fiat Limits
Feature Details
2FA Google Authenticator, Authy, SMS
Wallet Security 98% Assets in Cold Storage
Personal Information 3rd Party Verified, Secured, Stored Offline
Digital Currency Insurance Fully Insured by Lloyd’s of London
Fiat Insurance Up to $250,000 by FDIC
Bug Bounty Multiple bounties up to $10,000

Kraken

Country Linked Bank Account Wire Transfer
EUR Free SEPA €5-10 (€0.09 Withdrawal)
US Free SWIFT $10 ($60 Withdrawal)
UK Free SWIFT £10 (£60 Withdrawal)
CAN Free SWIFT Free ($10 Withdrawal)
Exchange Type Maker Taker
ETH/FIAT .16% .26%
ETH/BTC .16% .26%
Tier Level Name Email DOB Phone Address Official ID Bank Info KYC Limits
Level 0 X No Trading Allowed
Level 1 X X X X No Fiat, Unlimited Crypto
Level 2 X X X X Fiat $2,000Day/$10,000Mo
Level 3 X X X X X X Fiat $25,000Day/$200,000Mo
Level 4 X X X X X X X X Fiat $100,000Day/$500,000Mo
Feature Details
2FA Google Authenticator, Master Key Available
Wallet Security Majority Assets in Cold Storage
Personal Information PGP Encrypted Emails, Global Settings Lock
Digital Currency Insurance Maintain Full Reserves
Bug Bounty Multiple bounties

Gemini

Country Linked Bank Account Wire Transfer
USD Free Free
Exchange Type Maker Taker
ETH/ALL .10-.25% .25%
Tier Level Name Email DOB Phone Address Official ID Bank Info KYC Limits
Individual X X X X X X X None - Except for ACH
Feature Details
2FA Google Authenticator, Authy Available
Hot Wallet Security Hot Wallet Hosted by Amazon Web Services
Cold Wallet Stored in 2 tiers of cold and 'cryo' multi-sig storage
Personal Information Encrypted in Transit and Stored Offline
Digital Currency Insurance Fidelity bond by 'top-tier insurance company'
Fiat Insurance Up to $250,000 by FDIC

03– Fiat Exchanges - Hong Kong

Bitfinex

Country Credit/Debit Bank Transfer Express Bank Transfer
ALL - .1% ($20 Minimum) 1% ($20 Minimum)
Exchange Type Maker Taker
ETH/ALL .10% .20%
Tier Level Name Email DOB Phone Address Official ID Bank Info KYC Limits
Individual X X X X X X (2) X X No Stated Limits
Feature Details
2FA Google Authenticator, Twilio Available
Account Security New IP Addresses locked for 24 hours, require verification and detection
System Security Hosted and Backed-up on Linux, protection from DDoS
Personal Information Email encryption with OpenPGP
Wallet Security Only .5% of funds are stored in hot wallets
EDIT : Thank you to u/Ginger_Bearded_Man for the suggestion. Bittrex has been added.
submitted by poop_dragon to ethtrader [link] [comments]

In case you missed it: Major Crypto and Blockchain News from the week ending 12/14/2018

Developments in Financial Services

Regulatory Environment

General News

​
submitted by QuantalyticsResearch to CryptoCurrency [link] [comments]

Day-2: Here are combined contacts for Kraken. If everyone who reads this takes just 2 minutes to communicate their support for BIP148, we will be a force they can't ignore.

You can read about my full rationale here, but essentially (shills aside) we all believe in UASF - if we coordinate our efforts and pick one major wallet/exchange per day and bombard them with demands to support BIP148, we can make a real impact. Yesterday was Coinbase and it went great. Today let's target Kraken.
Here, I've made it easy for you:
Tweet to them.
Send them an email.
Write to them on Facebook.
Tweet at their CEO, Jesse Powell.
Ideally do all the above.
Let them know you support BIP148 and segwit. Let them know their users risk losing all their bitcoins if they do not. If you are a customer, let them know that you will withdraw all your funds unless they commit to supporting BIP148. Be polite, but firm.
No-one is asking them to support bip148 in exclusion to the legacy coin, we're only asking that, come August 1, they list bip148 coins, to give users the option to trade them. Supporting BIP148 is very low cost, so let them know how important it is to users.
If you've been out of the loop and don't know what all this BIP148/segwit/UASF business is about, to put it simply: Segwit is a technical change to the protocol that will provide a long-term solution for scalability, decrease transaction fees and stop ASIC Boost (a mining trick that gives some an unfair advantage). As (some) miners benefit tremendously from the status quo, they have blocked implementing Segwit. UASF/BIP148 is a new way to implement Segwit.
I highly recommend the following links to educate yourself more fully:
https://www.uasf.co
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjZk7N7RXfA
https://www.weusecoins.com/uasf-guide/
https://medium.com/@lukedashjbip148-and-the-risks-it-entails-for-you-whether-you-run-a-bip148-node-or-not-b7d2dbe85ce6
https://medium.com/@elombrozo/why-i-support-bip148-4b4c0a9feb4d
submitted by thread314 to Bitcoin [link] [comments]

Made a Cryptocurrency Wiki, since Bitcoin Wiki is censored and didn't cover intertwined connections, which to me is very interesting

I know today hurts us in our portfolios but hey, let's focus on building the ecosystem instead of focussing on price drops like the ones today.
This collection of information started out as a way to aid my own memory since there is so much happening in this crypto space. Can’t remember every technical term, name and connection, right?
https://zdl-crypto.wikia.com/wiki/ZDL_Crypto_Wiki
Some of this info is not necessarily my own opinion plus I have tried to stay as neutral as possible.

The wiki is divided in 4 sections:

Jargon/Various

In which you will find explanations on often used terms and slang. Stuff like Whales, UASF's, what a nonce is and many Proof-of's).

Coins/Tokens

A long list of many cryptocurrencies and all the info I have come upon. Big ones like Bitcoin) and Monero). And smaller ones like FlorinCoin) or Veritaseum). Scams are also warned for.

Companies/Organisations

The many groups and projects that circle around this Crypto mania. Exchanges like Kraken, wallets like Jaxx, see all the intertwined links a company like Digital Currency Group has. But also big known names like Google and Microsoft have a lot of links with crypto projects these days.

People

Where you can read that Jesse Powell played Magic the Gathering with Roger Ver in highschool or how many projects Anthony Di Lorio is involved in. Get to know Steven Nerayoff, a man who advises at least 9 projects.
Like I said, it started out as just something I made for myself, but grew, and now friends and also anons use it to quickly check something out or refreshen their memory.
I am only human, so if there are mistakes, or something that is outdated, or is missing, hit me up or help out!
Found this helpful?
You might wanna check out my Medium account, I made a couple pieces to help out new beginners, stuff like and introduction to Crypto, how to accept crypto in your own business, and also a checklist to use before you invest into a coin. They were made back in early 2017, so some information might be a bit dated, but they have helped out many people I met at meetups and stores or online.
Have a good one fellow blockchain fanatics!
submitted by DVrij to CryptoCurrency [link] [comments]

Evolution of Exchanges

Swap.Online delves into the background of centralized and decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges. As decentralization is our name for the game, we would primarily like to find out whether it was inevitable or not.

From Childhood to the Golden Age: DCEs and CEXs

The first centralized cryptocurrency exchanges had two main pre-historical roots of origin. Ideologically, they originated from the e-commerce exchange services of the early 2000s. Digital Currency Exchanges, or DCEs, were particularly popular in the U.S. and Australia. GoldAge Inc., E-Gold Inc., Liberty Reserve were frequently seen in the headlines mostly due to legal issues, as the U.S. SEC, as well as the Australian ASIC failed many times over to figure out whether the e-gold exchange was a form of banking, money laundering, non-licensed remittances or illegal entrepreneurship. These services exchanged fiat money on different digital currencies (1MDC, E-Gold, eCache etc.) and, in a way, fulfilled the demand of New World and EU citizens for anonymous transactions of digital and fiat money.
But, in fact, the first significant cryptocurrency exchange arose from a surprising source… The website of the online game “Magic: The Gathering Online”. This game’s name refers to a magical world, where the currency system is represented in the form of cards. Jed McCaleb, the programmer from San Francisco and future contributor for Ripple and Stellar, developed the Mt.Gox project with the purpose of trading these cards like traditional stocks. In January 2007, he purchased the domain name mtgox.com, but in 2008, he abandoned the project as a premature venture. One year later, he used this domain to advertise his own online game. In the year of 2010, he read about the concept of Bitcoin and decided to launch the Mt.Gox exchange and exchange rate service allowing to trade Bitcoin freely. The project was released on July 18, 2010.
Rapid commercial growth started when the product was sold to the French-Japanese developer Mark Karpeles in January 2011. It was the year 2011 when Mt.Gox demonstrated the main security challenges that traditional centralized exchanges will encounter all along their development path in the future. These included direct thefts from the platform’s wallets, attacks with multiple ‘ask’ orders, malefactor invasions resulting in price drops (one day, in the spring of 2011, 1 BTC was worth less than 0.01 USD) etc. By the way, the dramatic collapse of February 2014, with more than 750K BTC lost and the $65M civil suit in Tokyo court were still to come. During the years 2012–2013, every 3 of 4 Bitcoins in the world was sold via Mt.Gox, and it was a real success story.
The years 2011–2012 gave birth to the bulk of top centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. BTCC was founded in June 2011 as the first exchange for the Chinese market. At the same time, American developer Jesse Powell had spent a month visiting Mt.Gox offices to offer assistance in the aftermath of the first hack. He was unsatisfied with the level of business organization, and that was how Kraken was founded in July 2011. The infamous BTC-e platform for exchanging rubles for BTC was also launched in July 2011. In late 2011, the largest American exchange BitInstant was founded and started selling Bitcoin via WalMart and Walgreen. 2012 became the year of origin for Bitfinex, Coinbase (first Ethereum marketplace) and LocalBitcoins.

Pros and Cons of Centralized Exchanges

We are now six or seven years away of those days. Today, hundreds of centralized exchanges are offering the services of exchanging BTC, ERC-20 and another cryptos. We can even hardly classify them. Usually, specialists speak about three mainstream types of centralized exchanges.
Trading platforms. They connect buyers and sellers to each other, allowing them to publish trading orders and take some transactional fees (most commonly 0,3 per cent from the taker of the liquidity). For example, Cex.io, BitFinex, BitStamp belong to this group. Usually, these platforms are characterized by a complicated interface, which is not suitable for newbies.
Cryptocurrency brokers. If a trading platform is a local market where you buy goods from their producers, the broker is a small player on the market. They sell coins at definite prices while setting high fees, but allow acquiring cryptos in a simpler manner. Moreover, most of them support a broad range of payment tools. Coinbase, Coinmama, Coinhouse are among the most popular brokers.
Peer-to-peer-services. They simply allow their users to publish announcements about operations with cryptos. The buyer and the seller directly negotiate the prices. It is even possible to find one selling crypto for cash in your neighborhood. The most remarkable example here is LocalBitcoins.
As one can see, now the range of services offered is truly broad. By the way, there is a list of common complaints regarding centralized exchanges both from traders and crypto theoreticians.
Safety. Even a single point of centralization can lead to the massive theft of users’ funds and keys. More than a million BTCs have been stolen by the time of writing of this article.
Regulation. If the center (or even one of the centers) of a CEX is physically located in some country, the position of this country’s government on ICOs and crypto related issues becomes crucial for the future of the project. Legal restrictions in this sector are now imposed in the U.S., China, South Korea, India etc. When your exchange is centralized, the officials can arrest your cryptos for no reason. Moreover, the administration of the exchange can be involved in fraud with your private information and money.
Speed. We have conducted some particular research on the speed of popular CEXs (Binance, Huobi, Poloniex, see p. 11). The results are sad: you can wait dozens of minutes waiting for the pending of your transaction.
KYC/AML. There is nothing to talk about in this regard, we suppose. If you must send someone your photo, a scanned copy of your ID or even proof of income wanting nothing in return but to withdraw your own funds, it is not OK.

Decentralization: The Solution

Decentralization, as the initial meaning and internal essence of blockchain, smart-contracts and cryptocurrencies, was first italicized by Satoshi Nakamoto and even Nick Szabo in 1990–2000-s. The rise of CEXs resulted in an obvious contradiction, because blockchain-based currencies are being operated via centralized mechanisms just like Visa or MasterCard, but much slowly. Is it normal? Where is the next stage of evolution or, does it even exist in the first place?
The answer was the main point of arguments in the crypto community during the year of 2017. In February, Vitalik came out with the suggestion about the nature of blockchain’s decentralization: “Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure), but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computer)”.
The only possible expression in the commercial implementation of ‘architectural decentralization’ is the decentralized exchange of cryptocurrencies.
And the most advanced technology in this case is that of the Atomic Swaps — the direct peer-to-peer instant cross-chain transaction.
CEXs were the natural and inevitable stage of development for cryptocurrency exchanges. By the way, the DEXs are coming: we found them (namely IDEX, EtherDelta and Waves DEX) on the list of the top-100 exchanges on Coinmarketcap.
So, the Swap.Online team is on the right track. Get ready for ERC-20 ⇔ BTC, ETH ⇔ BTC, USDT ⇔ BTC, EOS ⇔ BTC trading directly from your browser with neither middlemen nor a centralized infrastructure.
See you on the mainnet on August 27, 2018,
Swap.Online Team
submitted by noxonsu to SwapOnline [link] [comments]

The wilkelvoss are trying to make bitcoin legit according to esquire magazine

Every idea needs a face, even if the faces are illusory simplifications. The country you get is the president you get. The Yankees you get is the shortstop you get. Apple needed Jobs. ISIS needs al-Baghdadi. The moon shot belongs to Bezos. There's nothing under the Facebook sun that doesn't come back to Zuckerberg.
But there is, as yet, no face behind the bitcoin curtain. It's the currency you've heard about but haven't been able to understand. Still to this day nobody knows who created it. For most people, it has something to do with programmable cash and algorithms and the deep space of mathematics, but it also has something to do with heroin and barbiturates and the sex trade and bankruptcies, too. It has no face because it doesn't seem tangible or real. We might align it with an anarchist's riot mask or a highly conceptualized question mark, but those images truncate its reality. Certain economists say it's as important as the birth of the Internet, that it's like discovering ice. Others are sure that it's doomed to melt. In the political sphere, it is the darling of the cypherpunks and libertarians. When they're not busy ignoring it, it scares the living shit out of the big banks and credit-card companies.
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It sparked to life in 2008—when all the financial world prepared for itself the articulate noose—and it knocked on the door like some inconvenient relative arriving at the dinner party in muddy shoes and a knit hat. Fierce ideological battles are currently being waged among the people who own and shepherd the currency. Some shout, Ponzi scheme. Some shout, Gold dust. Bitcoin alone is worth billions of dollars, but the computational structure behind it—its blockchain and its sidechains—could become the absolute underpinning of the world's financial structure for decades to come.
What bitcoin has needed for years is a face to legitimize it, sanitize it, make it palpable to all the naysayers. But it has no Larry Ellison, no Elon Musk, no noticeable visionaries either with or without the truth. There's a lot of ideology at stake. A lot of principle and dogma and creed. And an awful lot of cash, too.
At 6:00 on a Wednesday winter morning, three months after launching Gemini, their bitcoin exchange, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss step out onto Broadway in New York, wearing the same make of sneakers, the same type of shorts, their baseball caps turned backward. They don't quite fall into the absolute caricature of twindom: They wear different-colored tops. Still, it's difficult to tell them apart, where Tyler ends and Cameron begins. Their faces are sculpted from another era, as if they had stepped from the ruin of one of Gatsby's parties. Their eyes are quick and seldom land on anything for long. Now thirty-four, there is something boyishly earnest about them as they jog down Prince Street, braiding in and out of each other, taking turns talking, as if they were working in shifts, drafting off each other.
Forget, for a moment, the four things the Winklevosses are most known for: suing Mark Zuckerberg, their portrayal in The Social Network, rowing in the Beijing Olympics, and their overwhelming public twinness. Because the Winklevoss brothers are betting just about everything—including their past—on a fifth thing: They want to shake the soul of money out.
At the deep end of their lives, they are athletes. Rowers. Full stop. And the thing about rowing—which might also be the thing about bitcoin—is that it's just about impossible to get your brain around its complexity. Everyone thinks you're going to a picnic. They have this notion you're out catching butterflies. They might ask you if you've got your little boater's hat ready. But it's not like that at all. You're fifteen years old. You rise in the dark. You drag your carcass along the railroad tracks before dawn. The boathouse keys are cold to the touch. You undo the ropes. You carry a shell down to the river. The carbon fiber rips at your hands. You place the boat in the water. You slip the oars in the locks. You wait for your coach. Nothing more than a thumb of light in the sky. It's still cold and the river stinks. That heron hasn't moved since yesterday. You hear Coach's voice before you see him. On you go, lads. You start at a dead sprint. The left rib's a little sore, but you don't say a thing. You are all power and no weight. The first push-to-pull in the water is a ripping surprise. From the legs first. Through the whole body. The arc. Atomic balance. A calm waiting for the burst. Your chest burns, your thighs scald, your brain blanks. It feels as if your rib cage might shatter. You are stillness exploding. You catch the water almost without breaking the surface. Coach says something about the pole vault. You like him. You really do. That brogue of his. Lads this, lads that. Fire. Stamina. Pain. After two dozen strokes, it already feels like you're hitting the wall. All that glycogen gone. Nobody knows. Nobody. They can't even pronounce it. Rowing. Ro-wing. Roh-ing. You push again, then pull. You feel as if you are breaking branch after branch off the bottom of your feet. You don't rock. You don't jolt. Keep it steady. Left, right, left, right. The heron stays still. This river. You see it every day. Nothing behind you. Everything in front. You cross the line. You know the exact tree. Your chest explodes. Your knees are trembling. This is the way the world will end, not with a whimper but a bang. You lean over the side of the boat. Up it comes, the breakfast you almost didn't have. A sign of respect to the river. You lay back. Ah, blue sky. Some cloud. Some gray. Do it again, lads. Yes, sir. You row so hard you puke it up once more. And here comes the heron, it's moving now, over the water, here it comes, look at that thing glide.
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The Winklevoss twins in the men's pair final during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. GETTY There's plenty of gin and beer and whiskey in the Harrison Room in downtown Manhattan, but the Winklevoss brothers sip Coca-Cola. The room, one of many in the newly renovated Pier A restaurant, is all mahogany and lamplight. It is, in essence, a floating bar, jutting four hundred feet out into the Hudson River. From the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It feels entirely like their sort of room, a Jazz Age expectation hovering around their initial appearance—tall, imposing, the hair mannered, the collars of their shirts slightly tilted—but then they just slide into their seats, tentative, polite, even introverted.
They came here by subway early on a Friday evening, and they lean back in their seats, a little wary, their eyes busy—as if they want to look beyond the rehearsal of their words.
They had the curse of privilege, but, as they're keen to note, a curse that was earned. Their father worked to pay his way at a tiny college in backwoods Pennsylvania coal country. He escaped the small mining town and made it all the way to a professorship at Wharton. He founded his own company and eventually created the comfortable upper-middle-class family that came with it. They were raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, the most housebroken town on the planet. They might have looked like the others in their ZIP code, and dressed like them, spoke like them, but they didn't quite feel like them. Some nagging feeling—close to anger, close to fear—lodged itself beneath their shoulders, not quite a chip but an ache. They wanted Harvard but weren't quite sure what could get them there. "You have to be basically the best in the world at something if you're coming from Greenwich," says Tyler. "Otherwise it's like, great, you have a 1600 SAT, you and ten thousand others, so what?"
The rowing was a means to an end, but there was also something about the boat that they felt allowed another balance between them. They pulled their way through high school, Cameron on the port-side oar, Tyler on the starboard. They got to Harvard. The Square was theirs. They rowed their way to the national championships—twice. They went to Oxford. They competed in the Beijing Olympics. They sucked up the smog. They came in sixth place. The cameras loved them. Girls, too. They were so American, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, they could have been cast in a John Cougar Mellencamp song.
It might all have been so clean-cut and whitebread except for the fact that—at one of the turns in the river—they got involved in the most public brawl in the whole of the Internet's nascent history.
They don't talk about it much anymore, but they know that it still defines them, not so much in their own minds but in the minds of others. The story seems simple on one level, but nothing is ever simple, not even simplification. Theirs was the original idea for the first social network, Harvard Connection. They hired Mark Zuckerberg to build it. Instead he went off and created Facebook. They sued him. They settled for $65 million. It was a world of public spats and private anguish. Rumors and recriminations. A few years later, dusty old pre-Facebook text messages were leaked online by Silicon Alley Insider: "Yeah, I'm going to fuck them," wrote Zuckerberg to a friend. "Probably in the ear." The twins got their money, but then they believed they were duped again by an unfairly low evaluation of their stock. They began a second round of lawsuits for $180 million. There was even talk about the Supreme Court. It reeked of opportunism. But they wouldn't let it go. In interviews, they came across as insolent and splenetic, tossing their rattles out of the pram. It wasn't about the money, they said at the time, it was about fairness, reality, justice. Most people thought it was about some further agile fuckery, this time in Zuckerberg's ear.
There are many ways to tell the story, but perhaps the most penetrating version is that they weren't screwed so much by Zuckerberg as they were by their eventual portrayal in the film version of their lives. They appeared querulous and sulky, exactly the type of characters that America, peeling off the third-degree burns of the great recession, needed to hate. While the rest of the country worried about mounting debt and vanishing jobs, they were out there drinking champagne from, at the very least, Manolo stilettos. The truth would never get in the way of a good story. In Aaron Sorkin's world, and on just about every Web site, the blueblood trust-fund boys got what was coming to them. And the best thing now was for them to take their Facebook money and turn the corner, quickly, away, down toward whatever river would whisk them away.
Armie Hammer brilliantly portrayed them as the bluest of bloods in The Social Network. When the twins are questioned about those times now, they lean back a little in their seats, as if they've just lost a long race, a little perplexed that they came off as the victims of Hollywood's ability to throw an image, while the whole rip-roaring regatta still goes on behind them. "They put us in a box," says Cameron, "caricatured to a point where we didn't really exist." He glances around the bar, drums his finger against the glass. "That's fair enough. I understand that impulse." They smart a little when they hear Zuckerberg's name. "I don't think Mark liked being called an asshole," says Tyler, with a flick of bluster in his eyes, but then he catches himself. "You know, maybe Mark doesn't care. He's a bit of a statesman now, out there connecting the world. I have nothing against him. He's a smart guy."
These are men who've been taught, or have finally taught themselves, to tell their story rather than be told by it. But underneath the calm—just like underneath the boat—one can sense the churn.
They say the word—ath-letes—as if it were a country where pain is the passport. One of the things the brothers mention over and over again is that you can spontaneously crack a rib while rowing, just from the sheer exertion of the muscles hauling on the rib cage.
Along came bitcoin.
At its most elemental, bitcoin is a virtual currency. It's the sort of thing a five-year-old can understand—It's just e-cash, Mom—until he reaches eighteen and he begins to question the deep future of what money really means. It is a currency without government. It doesn't need a banker. It doesn't need a bank. It doesn't even need a brick to be built upon. Its supporters say that it bypasses the Man. It is less than a decade old and it has already come through its own Wild West, a story rooted in uncharted digital territory, up from the dust, an evening redness in the arithmetical West.
These are men who've been taught, or have finally taught themselves, to tell their story rather than be told by it. Bitcoin appeared in 2008—westward ho!—a little dot on the horizon of the Internet. It was the brainchild of a computer scientist named Satoshi Nakamoto. The first sting in the tale is that—to this very day—nobody knows who Nakamoto is, where he lives, or how much of his own invention he actually owns. He could be Californian, he could be Australian, he could even be a European conglomerate, but it doesn't really matter, since what he created was a cryptographic system that is borderless and supposedly unbreakable.
In the beginning the currency was ridiculed and scorned. It was money created from ones and zeros. You either bought it or you had to "mine" for it. If you were mining, your computer was your shovel. Any nerd could do it. You keyed your way in. By using your computer to help check and confirm the bitcoin transactions of others, you made coin. Everyone in this together. The computer heated up and mined, down down down, into the mathematical ground, lifting up numbers, making and breaking camp every hour or so until you had your saddlebags full of virtual coin. It all seemed a bit of a lark at first. No sheriff, no deputy, no central bank. The only saloon was a geeky chat room where a few dozen bitcoiners gathered to chew data.
Lest we forget, money was filthy in 2008.
The collapse was coming. The banks were shorting out. The real estate market was a confederacy of dunces. Bernie Madoff's shadow loomed. Occupy was on the horizon. And all those Wall Street yahoos were beginning to squirm.
Along came bitcoin like some Jesse James of the financial imagination. It was the biggest disruption of money since coins. Here was an idea that could revolutionize the financial world. A communal articulation of a new era. Fuck American Express. Fuck Western Union. Fuck Visa. Fuck the Fed. Fuck the Treasury. Fuck the deregulated thievery of the twenty-first century.
To the earliest settlers, bitcoin suggested a moral way out. It was a money created from the ground up, a currency of the people, by the people, for the people, with all government control extinguished. It was built on a solid base of blockchain technology where everyone participated in the protection of the code. It attracted anarchists, libertarians, whistle-blowers, cypherpunks, economists, extropians, geeks, upstairs, downstairs, left-wing, right-wing. Sure, it could be used by businesses and corporations, but it could also be used by poor people and immigrants to send money home, instantly, honestly, anonymously, without charge, with a click of the keyboard. Everyone in the world had access to your transaction, but nobody had to know your name. It bypassed the suits. All you needed to move money was a phone or a computer. It was freedom of economic action, a sort of anarchy at its democratic best, no rulers, just rules.
Bitcoin, to the original explorers, was a safe pass through the government-occupied valleys: Those assholes were up there in the hills, but they didn't have any scopes on their rifles, and besides, bitcoin went through in communal wagons at night.
Ordinary punters took a shot. Businesses, too. You could buy silk ties in Paris without any extra bank charges. You could protect your money in Buenos Aires without fear of a government grab.
The Winklevoss twins leave the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2011, after appearing in court to ask that the previous settlement case against Facebook be voided. GETTY But freedom can corrupt as surely as power. It was soon the currency that paid for everything illegal under the sun, the go-to money of the darknet. The westward ho! became the outlaw territory of Silk Road and beyond. Heroin through the mail. Cocaine at your doorstep. Child porn at a click. What better way for terrorists to ship money across the world than through a network of anonymous computers? Hezbollah, the Taliban, the Mexican cartels. In Central America, kidnappers began demanding ransom in bitcoin—there was no need for the cash to be stashed under a park bench anymore. Now everything could travel down the wire. Grab, gag, and collect. Uranium could be paid for in bitcoin. People, too. The sex trade was turned on: It was a perfect currency for Madame X. For the online gambling sites, bitcoin was pure jackpot.
For a while, things got very shady indeed. Over a couple years, the rate pinballed between $10 and $1,200 per bitcoin, causing massive waves and troughs of online panic and greed. (In recent times, it has begun to stabilize between $350 and $450.) In 2014, it was revealed that hackers had gotten into the hot wallet of Mt. Gox, a bitcoin exchange based in Tokyo. A total of 850,000 coins were "lost," at an estimated value of almost half a billion dollars. The founder of Silk Road, Ross William Ulbricht (known as "Dread Pirate Roberts"), got himself a four-by-six room in a federal penitentiary for life, not to mention pending charges for murder-for-hire in Maryland.
Everyone thought that bitcoin was the problem. The fact of the matter was, as it so often is, human nature was the problem. Money means desire. Desire means temptation. Temptation means that people get hurt.
During the first Gold Rush in the late 1840s, the belief was that all you needed was a pan and a decent pair of boots and a good dose of nerve and you could go out and make yourself a riverbed millionaire. Even Jack London later fell for the lure of it alongside thousands of others: the western test of manhood and the promise of wealth. What they soon found out was that a single egg could cost twenty-five of today's dollars, a pound of coffee went for a hundred, and a night in a whorehouse could set you back $6,000.
A few miners hit pay dirt, but what most ended up with for their troubles was a busted body and a nasty dose of syphilis.
The gold was discovered on the property of John Sutter in Sacramento, but the one who made the real cash was a neighboring merchant, Samuel Brannan. When Brannan heard the news of the gold nuggets, he bought up all the pickaxes and shovels he could find, filled a quinine bottle with gold dust, and went to San Francisco. Word went around like a prayer in a flash flood: gold gold gold. Brannan didn't wildcat for gold himself, but at the peak of the rush he was flogging $5,000 worth of shovels a day—that's $155,000 today—and went on to become the wealthiest man in California, alongside the Wells Fargo crew, Levi Strauss, and the Studebaker family, who sold wheelbarrows.
If you comb back through the Winklevoss family, you will find a great-grandfather and a great-great-grandfather who knew a thing or two about digging: They worked side by side in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. They didn't go west and they didn't get rich, but maybe the lesson became part of their DNA: Sometimes it's the man who sells the shovels who ends up hitting gold.
Like it or not—and many people don't like it—the Winklevoss brothers are shaping up to be the Samuel Brannans of the bitcoin world.
Nine months after being portrayed in The Social Network, the Winklevoss twins were back out on the water at the World Rowing Cup. CHRISTOPHER LEE/GETTY They heard about it first poolside in Ibiza, Spain. Later it would play into the idea of ease and privilege: umbrella drinks and girls in bikinis. But if the creation myth was going to be flippant, the talk was serious. "I'd say we were cautious, but we were definitely intrigued," says Cameron. They went back home to New York and began to read. There was something about it that got under their skin. "We knew that money had been so broken and inefficient for years," says Tyler, "so bitcoin appealed to us right away."
They speak in braided sentences, catching each other, reassuring themselves, tightening each other's ideas. They don't quite want to say that bitcoin looked like something that might be redemptive—after all, they, like everyone else, were looking to make money, lots of it, Olympic-sized amounts—but they say that it did strike an idealistic chord inside them. They certainly wouldn't be cozying up to the anarchists anytime soon, but this was a global currency that, despite its uncertainties, seemed to present a solution to some of the world's more pressing problems. "It was borderless, instantaneous, irreversible, decentralized, with virtually no transaction costs," says Tyler. It could possibly cut the banks out, and it might even take the knees out from under the credit-card companies. Not only that, but the price, at just under ten dollars per coin, was in their estimation low, very low. They began to snap it up.
They were aware, even at the beginning, that they might, once again, be called Johnny-come-latelys, just hopping blithely on the bandwagon—it was 2012, already four years into the birth of the currency—but they went ahead anyway, power ten. Within a short time they'd spent $11 million buying up a whopping 1 percent of the world's bitcoin, a position they kept up as more bitcoins were mined, making their 1 percent holding today worth about $66 million.
But bitcoin was flammable. The brothers felt the burn quickly. Their next significant investment came later that year, when they gave $1.5 million in venture funding to a nascent exchange called BitInstant. Within a year the CEO was arrested for laundering drug money through the exchange.
So what were a pair of smart, clean-cut Olympic rowers doing hanging around the edges of something so apparently shady, and what, if anything, were they going to do about it?
They mightn't have thought of it this way, but there was something of the sheriff striding into town, the one with the swagger and the scar, glancing up at the balconies as he comes down Main Street, all tumbleweeds and broken pianos. This place was a dump in most people's eyes, but the sheriff glimpsed his last best shot at finally getting the respect he thinks he deserves.
The money shot: A good stroke will catch the water almost without breaking its seal. You stir without rippling. Your silence is sinewy. There's muscle in that calm. The violence catches underneath, thrusts the boat along. Stroke after stroke. Just keep going. Today's truth dies tomorrow. What you have to do is elemental enough. You row without looking behind you. You keep the others in front of you. As long as you can see what they're doing, it's all in your hands. You are there to out-pain them. Doesn't matter who they are, where they come from, how they got here. Know your enemy through yourself. Push through toward pull. Find the still point of this pain. Cut a melody in the disk of your flesh. The only terror comes when they pass you—if they ever pass you.
There are no suits or ties, but there is a white hum in the offices of Gemini in the Flatiron District. The air feels as if it has been brushed clean. There is something so everywhereabout the place. Ergonomic chairs. iPhone portals. Rows of flickering computers. Not so much a hush around the room as a quiet expectation. Eight, nine people. Programmers, analysts, assistants. Other employees—teammates, they call them—dialing in from Portland, Oregon, and beyond.
The brothers fire up the room when they walk inside. A fist-pump here, a shoulder touch there. At the same time, there is something almost shy about them. Apart, they seem like casual visitors to the space they inhabit. It is when they're together that they feel fully shaped. One can't imagine them being apart from each other for very long.
The Winklevoss twins speak onstage at Bitcoin! Let's Cut Through the Noise Already at SXSW in 2016. GETTY They move from desk to desk. The price goes up, the price goes down. The phones ring. The e-mails beep. Customer-service calls. Questions about fees. Inquiries about tax structures.
Gemini was started in late 2015 as a next-generation bitcoin exchange. It is not the first such exchange in the world by any means, but it is one of the most watched. The company is designed with ordinary investors in mind, maybe a hedge fund, maybe a bank: all those people who used to be confused or even terrified by the word bitcoin. It is insured. It is clean. What's so fascinating about this venture is that the brothers are risking themselves by trying to eliminate risk: keeping the boat steady and exploding through it at the same time.
It is when they're together that they feel fully shaped. One can't imagine them being apart from each other for very long. For the past couple years, the Winklevosses have worked closely with just about every compliance agency imaginable. They ticked off all the regulatory boxes. Essentially they wanted to ease all the Debting Thomases. They put regulatory frameworks in place. Security and bankability and insurance were their highest objectives. Nobody was going to be able to blow open the safe. They wanted to soothe all the appetites for risk. They told Bitcoin Magazine they were asking for "permission, not forgiveness."
This is where bitcoin can become normal—that is, if you want bitcoin to be normal.
Just a mile or two down the road, in Soho, a half dozen bitcoiners gather at a meetup. The room is scruffy, small, boxy. A half mannequin is propped on a table, a scarf draped around it. It's the sort of place that twenty years ago would have been full of cigarette smoke. There's a bit of Allen Ginsberg here, a touch of Emma Goldman, a lot of Zuccotti Park. The wine is free and the talk is loose. These are the true believers. They see bitcoin in its clearest possible philosophical terms—the frictionless currency of the people, changing the way people move money around the world, bypassing the banks, disrupting the status quo.
A comedy show is being run out in the backyard. A scruffy young man wanders in and out, announcing over and over again that he is half-baked. A well-dressed Asian girl sidles up to the bar. She looks like she's just stepped out of an NYU business class. She's interested in discovering what bitcoin is. She is regaled by a series of convivial answers. The bartender tells her that bitcoin is a remaking of the prevailing power structures. The girl asks for another glass of wine. The bartender adds that bitcoin is democracy, pure and straight. She nods and tells him that the wine tastes like cooking oil. He laughs and says it wasn't bought with bitcoin. "I don't get it," she says. And so the evening goes, presided over by Margaux Avedisian, who describes herself as the queen of bitcoin. Avedisian, a digital-currency consultant of Armenian descent, is involved in several high-level bitcoin projects. She has appeared in documentaries and on numerous panels. She is smart, sassy, articulate.
When the talk turns to the Winklevoss brothers, the bar turns dark. Someone, somewhere, reaches up to take all the oxygen out of the air. Avedisian leans forward on the counter, her eyes shining, delightful, raged.
"The Winklevii are not the face of bitcoin," she says. "They're jokes. They don't know what they're saying. Nobody in our community respects them. They're so one-note. If you look at their exchange, they have no real volume, they never will. They keep throwing money at different things. Nobody cares. They're not part of us. They're just hangers-on."
"Ah, they're just assholes," the bartender chimes in.
"What they want to do," says Avedisian, "is lobotomize bitcoin, make it into something entirely vapid. They have no clue."
The Asian girl leaves without drinking her third glass of free wine. She's got a totter in her step. She doesn't quite get the future of money, but then again maybe very few in the world do.
Giving testimony on bitcoin licensing before the New York State Department of Financial Services in 2014. LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS The future of money might look like this: You're standing on Oxford Street in London in winter. You think about how you want to get to Charing Cross Road. The thought triggers itself through electrical signals into the chip embedded in your wrist. Within a moment, a driverless car pulls up on the sensor-equipped road. The door opens. You hop in. The car says hello. You tell it to shut up. It does. It already knows where you want to go. It turns onto Regent Street. You think,A little more air-conditioning, please. The vents blow. You think, Go a little faster, please. The pace picks up. You think, This traffic is too heavy, use Quick(TM). The car swings down Glasshouse Street. You think, Pay the car in front to get out of my way. It does. You think, Unlock access to a shortcut. The car turns down Sherwood Street to Shaftsbury Avenue. You pull in to Charing Cross. You hop out. The car says goodbye. You tell it to shut up again. You run for the train and the computer chip in your wrist pays for the quiet-car ticket for the way home.
All of these transactions—the air-conditioning, the pace, the shortcut, the bribe to get out of the way, the quick lanes, the ride itself, the train, maybe even the "shut up"—will cost money. As far as crypto-currency enthusiasts think, it will be paid for without coins, without phones, without glass screens, just the money coming in and going out of your preprogrammed wallet embedded beneath your skin.
The Winklevosses are betting that the money will be bitcoin. And that those coins will flow through high-end, corporate-run exchanges like Gemini rather than smoky SoHo dives.
Cameron leans across a table in a New York diner, the sort of place where you might want to polish your fork just in case, and says: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." He can't remember whom the quote belongs to, but he freely acknowledges that it's not his own. Theirs is a truculent but generous intelligence, capable of surprise and turn at the oddest of moments. They talk meditation, they talk economics, they talk Van Halen, they talk, yes, William Gibson, but everything comes around again to bitcoin.
"The key to all this is that people aren't even going to know that they're using bitcoin," says Tyler. "It's going to be there, but it's not going to be exposed to the end user. Bitcoin is going to be the rails that underpin our payment systems. It's just like an IP address. We don't log on to a series of numbers, 115.425.5 or whatever. No, we log on to Google.com. In the same way, bitcoin is going to be disguised. There will be a body kit that makes it user-friendly. That's what makes bitcoin a kick-ass currency."
Any fool can send a billion dollars across the world—as long as they have it, of course—but it's virtually impossible to send a quarter unless you stick it in an envelope and pay forty-nine cents for a stamp. It's one of the great ironies of our antiquated money system. And yet the quark of the financial world is essentially the small denomination. What bitcoin promises is that it will enable people and businesses to send money in just about any denomination to one another, anywhere in the world, for next to nothing. A public address, a private key, a click of the mouse, and the money is gone.
A Bitcoin conference in New York City in 2014. GETTY This matters. This matters a lot. Credit-card companies can't do this. Neither can the big banks under their current systems. But Marie-Louise on the corner of Libertador Avenue can. And so can Pat Murphy in his Limerick housing estate. So can Mark Andreessen and Bill Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs. Anyone can do it, anywhere in the world, at virtually no charge.
You can do it, in fact, from your phone in a diner in New York. But the whole time they are there—over identical California omelettes that they order with an ironic shrug—they never once open their phones. They come across more like the talkative guys who might buy you a drink at the sports bar than the petulants ordering bottle service in the VIP corner. The older they get, the more comfortable they seem in their contradictions: the competition, the ease; the fame, the quiet; the gamble, the sure thing.
Bitcoin is what might eventually make them among the richest men in America. And yet. There is always a yet. What seems indisputable about the future of money, to the Winklevosses and other bitcoin adherents, is that the technology that underpins bitcoin—the blockchain—will become one of the fundamental tenets of how we deal with the world of finance. Blockchain is the core computer code. It's open source and peer to peer—in other words, it's free and open to you and me. Every single bitcoin transaction ever made goes to an open public ledger. It would take an unprecedented 51 percent attack—where one entity would come to control more than half of the computing power used to mine bitcoin—for hackers to undo it. The blockchain is maintained by computers all around the world, and its future sidechains will create systems that deal with contracts and stock and other payments. These sidechains could very well be the foundation of the new global economy for the big banks, the credit-card companies, and even government itself.
"It's boundless," says Cameron.
This is what the brothers are counting on—and what might eventually make them among the richest men in America.
And yet. There is always a yet.
When you delve into the world of bitcoin, it gets deeper, darker, more mysterious all the time. Why has its creator remained anonymous? Why did he drop off the face of the earth? How much of it does he own himself? Will banks and corporations try to bring the currency down? Why are there really only five developers with full "commit access" to the code (not the Winklevosses, by the way)? Who is really in charge of the currency's governance?
Perhaps the most pressing issue at hand is that of scaling, which has caused what amounts to a civil war among followers. A maximum block size of one megabyte has been imposed on the chain, sort of like a built-in artificial dampener to keep bitcoin punk rock. That's not nearly enough capacity for the number of transactions that would take place in future visions. In years to come, there could be massive backlogs and outages that could create instant financial panic. Bitcoin's most influential leaders are haggling over what will happen. Will bitcoin maintain its decentralized status, or will it go legit and open up to infinite transactions? And if it goes legit, where's the punk?
The issues are ongoing—and they might very well take bitcoin down, but the Winklevosses don't think so. They have seen internal disputes before. They've refrained from taking a public stance mostly because they know that there are a lot of other very smart people in bitcoin who are aware that crisis often builds consensus. "We're in this for the long haul," says Tyler. "We're the first batter in the first inning."
GILLIAN LAUB The waiter comes across and asks them, bizarrely, if they're twins. They nod politely. Who was born first? They've heard it a million times and their answer is always the same: Neither of them—they were born cesarean. Cameron looks older, says the waiter. Tyler grins. Normally it's the other way around, says Cameron, grinning back. Do you ever fight? asks the waiter. Every now and then, they say. But not over this, not over the future.
Heraclitus was wrong. You can, in fact, step in the same river twice. In the beginning you went to the shed. No electricity there, no heat, just a giant tub where you simulated the river. You could only do eleven strokes. But there was something about the repetition, the difference, even the monotony, that hooked you. After a while it wasn't an abandoned shed anymore. College gyms, national training centers. Bigger buildings. High ceilings. AC. Doctors and trainers. Monitors hooked up to your heart, your head, your blood. Six foot five, but even then you were not as tall as the other guys. You liked the notion of underdog. Everyone called you the opposite. The rich kids. The privileged ones. To hell with that. They don't know us, who we are, where we came from. Some of the biggest chips rest on the shoulders of those with the least to lose. Six foot five times two makes just about thirteen feet. You sit in the erg and you stare ahead. Day in, day out. One thousand strokes, two thousand. You work with the very best. You even train with the Navy SEALs. It touches that American part of you. The sentiment, the false optimism. When the oil fields are burning, you even think, I'll go there with them. But you stay in the boat. You want that other flag rising. That's what you aim for. You don't win but you get close. Afterward there are planes, galas, regattas, magazine spreads, but you always come back to that early river. The cold. The fierceness. The heron. Like it or not, you're never going to get off the water—that's just the fact of the matter, it's always going to be there. Hard to admit it, but once you were wrong. You got out of the boat and you haggled over who made it. You lost that one, hard. You might lose this one, too, but then again it just might be the original arc that you're stepping toward. So you return, then. You rise before dark. You drag your carcass along Broadway before dawn.
All the rich men in the world want to get shot into outer space. Richard Branson. Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. The new explorers. To get the hell out of here and see if they—and maybe we—can exist somewhere else for a while. It's the story of the century. We want to know if the pocket of the universe can be turned inside out. We're either going to bring all the detritus of the world upward with us or we're going to find a brand-new way to exist. The cynical say that it's just another form of colonization—they're probably right, but then again maybe it's our only way out.
The Winklevosses have booked their tickets—numbers 700 and 701—on Branson's Virgin Galactic. Although they go virtually everywhere together, the twins want to go on different flights because of the risk involved: Now that they're in their mid-thirties, they can finally see death, or at least its rumor. It's a boy's adventure, but it's also the outer edge of possibility. It cost a quarter of a million dollars per seat, and they paid for it, yes, in bitcoin.
Of course, up until recently, the original space flights all splashed down into the sea. One of the ships that hauled the Gemini space capsule out of the water in 1965 was the Intrepid aircraft carrier.
The Winklevosses no longer pull their boat up the river. Instead they often run five miles along the Hudson to the Intrepid and back. The destroyer has been parked along Manhattan's West Side for almost as long as they have been alive. It's now a museum. The brothers like the boat, its presence, its symbolism: Intrepid, Gemini, the space shot.
They ease into the run.
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Jesse Powell is Building a Culture of Crypto Values at Kraken BTCK 221 - Kraken CEO Jesse Powell On Scalability FOLLOW THE COIN AT CES 2015: Interview with Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken Kraken CEO Jesse Powell Talks Bitcoin, Gold and Money ... Kraken’s Jesse Powell Says Bitcoin (BTC) Will Exceed $100K This Cycle Huge Influx of New Traders

Official site: https://krakenbtc.com As the cryptocurrency space has grown, exchanges have become the dominant juggernauts of the industry. One of the earliest and most reputable exchanges is Kraken. From the company’s formation in 2011, Kraken has grown to 4m users and almost 1,000 employees. We are joined by Kraken Founder and CEO Jesse Powell. We Jesse is the CEO of Kraken.Kraken is the best Bitcoin exchange for converting to and from US dollars, euros, British pounds and Japanese yen. Founded in 2011, San Francisco based Kraken is consistently rated the top Bitcoin exchange by independent news media and was the first Bitcoin exchange listed on Bloomberg terminals. Jesse Powell strongly believes that all the hype about Altcoins would soon fade off. The majority of Altcoins has dropped by 95% from their previous high rankings. He stated, “We definitely have way more demand, to go long Bitcoin, but we’ve only got so many dollars in the system. In the beginning, Kraken’s parent company, Payward, was planning to provide a bitcoin wallet service, like Coinbase. Powell’s experience in 2011, though, helping out Mt. Gox with its early ... Jesse Powell: Tether Is Not Influencing Bitcoin Nick Marinoff · July 2, 2019 · 5:00 pm Recently, Live Bitcoin News published a piece that suggested the current bitcoin price rally may have been ...

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Jesse Powell is Building a Culture of Crypto Values at Kraken

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