Winklevoss Twins Plan Regulated Bitcoin Exchange 80
itwbennett writes They of the square jaws and famous dispute with Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of Facebook, are also believed to be among the largest holders of Bitcoin in the world. Now they want to launch a regulated Bitcoin exchange—named Gemini, of course. To bolster confidence, they said they have formed a relationship with a chartered bank in the state of New York. "This means that your money will never leave the country," the twins wrote in a blog post. "It also means that U.S. dollars on Gemini will be eligible for FDIC insurance and held by a U.S.-regulated bank.
so many problems with this idea (Score:4, Insightful)
not least of which, allowing an organisation that is answerable to none but the United States Supreme Court to regulate a virtual currency that is in direct competition with its own pet, the Almighty Dollar.
Re:so many problems with this idea (Score:4, Insightful)
>a virtual currency that is in direct competition with its own pet, the Almighty Dollar.
This is what Bitcoin proponents would have you believe, but there is no competition at present, and the flaws inherent in the protocol mean there never will be.
Perhaps some other future crypto will be a competitor, but all Bitcoin does is spawn scams or payment gateways that evolve into PayPal equivalents (once they're big enough they cut Bitcoin out of the loop).
The "anything but PayPal" crowd (Score:2)
Bitcoin [spawns] payment gateways that evolve into PayPal equivalents (once they're big enough they cut Bitcoin out of the loop).
But the important part of these is that they cut PayPal out of the loop. I imagine that a lot of BTC adopters got burned by some policy ruling by PayPal.
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but all Bitcoin does is spawn scams or payment gateways that evolve into PayPal equivalents (once they're big enough they cut Bitcoin out of the loop).
Example of a gateway which spawned from Bitcoin and no longer supports Bitcoin?
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>a virtual currency that is in direct competition with its own pet, the Almighty Dollar.
This is what Bitcoin proponents would have you believe, but there is no competition at present, and the flaws inherent in the protocol mean there never will be.
Perhaps some other future crypto will be a competitor, but all Bitcoin does is spawn scams or payment gateways that evolve into PayPal equivalents (once they're big enough they cut Bitcoin out of the loop).
Bitcoin might be flawed or it might just be that it doesn't fit into a box and therefore most people, including Slashdotters reject it out of hand. What do you think about the $400m+ of venture capital invested in Bitcoin infrastructure in the last 18 months? Obviously not all investors share your convictions about the flaws.
Re:so many problems with this idea (Score:4, Informative)
not least of which, allowing an organisation that is answerable to none but the United States Supreme Court to regulate a virtual currency that is in direct competition with its own pet, the Almighty Dollar.
Right... because allowing a random guy in Asia to regulate the exchange worked out great?
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as opposed to a random guy in the United States? Or Europe?
Here's a completely crazy idea: how about we let the user community regulate it?
It worked for a bloody long time to pretty much fix the value of salt against any other given commodity.
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As I've said many times before - so long as you follow a few very simple rules and you pay your taxes in dollars, the US Goverment doesn't care if you conduct your daily business in dollars, Bitcoins, or jars of pickled hamster poop. They whole idea of "competition" has been created out of whole cloth by the Bitcoin Tinfo
Re: BTC Insured? (Score:3, Insightful)
The insurance is the least of their problems. For a good fee anything is insurable. The problem lies in the replacement. Banks/Feds/Insurance when losing money just replace the number in their databases or print the money, no insurance company nor bank nor the Feds actually has a reserve of cash to cover all their accounts in case of a massive hack that empties all their accounts. Not as easily done with cryptocurrency, once it is gone you can only replace it with more cryptocurrency. So you actually need t
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Your lack of understanding about what goes on in financial institutions is disturbingly terrifying.
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The lack of "understanding" of some poster on slashdot is so terrifying as to leave you mentally disturbed? Holy shit, how do you get out of bed in the morning?
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Please correct me then. After a bank robbery, the notes' serials get marked in a database and when they go out of rotation they are destroyed, the bank gets a new bag of notes and the FDIC assures that whatever happens your money is recovered - through another bank if necessary.
The entire economy is not backed by bullion in a bank's vault, 'losses' in the digital side are simply recovered by rolling back statements. If your account gets hacked and the money is transferred within the country, it can simply b
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You think banks keep a record of the serial number of every single note? You think there's a magical system somewhere of checking notes as they pass through POS terminals, ATM's, etc.? A bank gets robbed, and the serial numbers are NOT marked in a database unless the bank has recorded them, which I extremely seriously doubt they do, especially since of the millions or billions of dollars in a bank, the notes are mostly in denominations of $100 or LESS. You think there's an up-to-date moment to moment lis
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The thing is that you are guessing about how it might work, not actually knowing how it does work.
If your account gets hacked and the money is transferred within the country, it can simply be recovered by transferring the money back because all the accounts fall under the same 'governance', even internationally there are some agreements for returning stolen money.
On the startup podcast, one of their investors accidentally wired the money to the wrong account and they only got most (about 2/3) of their money back because the other side had withdrawn another portion. The bank and police offered no assistance in getting back the rest.
What about the block chain size? (Score:1, Interesting)
I've tried to use BTC recently. I think it's an interesting concept, but the block chain is goddamn awful to deal with as a normal user. It's fucking massive. We're talking about many gigabytes of data to download. BTC becomes a lot less convenient to me if I have to wait a day or more to fetch the block chain data just to begin using it! I know there are services out there that can help alleviate some of these problems, but that just defeats the whole purpose of BTC. Not having to depend on third parties i
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Any user should be able to install the Bitcoin software, and then be able to transact instantaneously.
How? Without third parties, you won't have any BTC to spend.
Blockchain on capped Internet (Score:2)
By this definition, your Internet service provider is a third party. If the blockchain is really several gigabytes, that can be more than a month of the typical data quota on cellular Internet, satellite Internet, or Iowa DSL [slashdot.org], all of which are billed by the bit.
seizure-ready (Score:4, Insightful)
It also means when the time comes for the traditional banking institutions to lobby the authorities to seize all the assets of this "illegal currency", they can easily do so.
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seizure in the usa is already way out of control
the recent federal review of asset seizure laws is welcome, but weak:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
worrying about banks seizing funds is the least of your problems
So like regular money (Score:1)
So like regular money, only fun. But wait... nothing in the park accepts Itchy and Scratchy money...
Tech world (Score:2, Interesting)
Nobody should trust these scammers (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would trust them?
First this: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/ed... [sec.gov]
(bitcoin trust)
Then this: http://www.investopedia.com/ar... [investopedia.com]
(bitcoin payment system)
Now this thing... ("regulated" exchange that can't leave the US for an international virtual decentralized currency...)
Perhaps they just didn't get that memo about their relevance having tanked somewhere after they wanted to
renege on their FB settlement and go for a do-over uh-gain:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
Their fifteen minutes of fame is up. The harder they try and bring themselves
into relevance the funnier it gets. The bell has rung. Time to get off the stage little boys.
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Re:Nobody should trust these scammers (Score:4, Funny)
They should have just called their new product "Facecoin"
Otherwise known as "money shot" - or so I've heard.
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Oh wait, I was looking at an oil chart. n/m
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Which is what the rest of us are doing.
Re:Nobody should trust these scammers (Score:4, Interesting)
Those links are intriguing as are (Score:3)
Your money will never leave which country? (Score:1)
As a citizen of an european state, having a guarantee that my money will never leave the US is a problem, not a feature.
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Dogecoin to the moon!
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I don't know which dumbass keeps modding me "overrated"... don't you know that people with an excellent karma automatically post with a score of 2?
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I don't mind if I get an "overrated" to cancel the moderation made by someone else, but my baseline "2" is neutral and doesn't have any significance (insightful or whatever).
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the New York Stock Exchange seems to be doing well, even on the back of all that banking fraud that you seeem to have slept through.
A currency exchange designed by TWO guys (Score:2)
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call it zuckerbucks
it's for zuckers
So the twins want to open an exchange ... (Score:1)
Now all the Winklevoss twins need to do is find is a reason for the average American consumer to buy BTC and use them, instead of using credit cards and debit cards that are protected from fraud and loss by federal law. Bitcoin may be a great deal for businesses, but it is a terrible deal for consumers, and without people on both sides of the economic equation it is slowly dying (witness the long slow decline in price, and the fact that a few hundred thousand people at most possess all the BTC in circulati
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A long time ago, gold was only used to make jewelry and trinkets, and few people had use for it. But it was rare, so demand always outstripped supply which meant the price stayed relatively high. It was also lightweight, durable, easy split, and comparatively easy to distinguish the real thing versus fakes. It was around the best store of value available in the day. So eventually people who had no need for it's original uses as jewelry, used it as such. This increased the amount of value a piece of gold cou
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But what about first mover advantage? The stability and security of bitcoin is far ahead of all the other crypto currencies.
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Except you can clone it into an instant competitor and the ming speculators will follow you screams like gold prospectors
Sure, lots of me-too clones have cropped up - however, the vast majority of investors/users aren't fooled. Alt-coins make up less than 10% of the market, all combined. Clearly first mover has a ton of advantage in terms of adoption, investment and developer time.
Pump and dump (Score:1)
So what they want to do is pump the value of BTC up so they can dump their 'largest holding of bitcoin'.
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I heard they want to exchange their Bitcoins for Dogecoins.
Dogecoins to the moon!
bitcoin is circling the drain, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
If the Winkletwins want to hype it up long enough so that I can dispose of the last of my BTC stash while 1BTC is still over US$200, I'm game.
Having bitcoins kept in a US bank seems to defeat the purpose of bitcoin, but it it helps me with my previous point, then by golly, full speed ahead.
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And that's the entire point.
The WInklevoss bought BTC when it was probably $500 or higher - and supposedly they own around 10% of all BTC.
And now that the price crashed from $1300 each to $250 or so, well, damn, they lost
Knock off the bullshit ... (Score:1)
... the whole point of BTC was to "Silk Road" stuff.
I said at the outset that BTC would die a painful death the minute it grew an appendage that touched any real currency.
That has already happened and now they want to tie it to a goddam legitimate bank and guarantee it?
Why in Sam Hill would anyone want to use Monopoly play money as a transient carrier for real money?
Dude ... the emperor ain't got no clothes.
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define "real money"?
The US Dollar is backed against itself. It is a fiat, or debt currency.
As is Sterling (which used to be backed by the Gold Standard, then it was the Silver Standard, now it's backed by guarantee of the Treasury which means about as much as... well, not a lot, actually).
As is the Euro.
The last time any Western economy had a real currency was 1914 when the Bradbury was issued. This was backed by the authority of the Crown, hence everything owned by the Crown, and was initially intended sol
I sense a shitstorm approaching (Score:2)
Twins? (Score:2)
They are both actually the same person.
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First off, the name, "Coin" is used in the name "Bit Coin" to refer to some form of currency, and is treated as such, thus it is a form of currency.
Secondly, bit-coin doesn't fit the common definitions of commodity:
noun a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee.
Another definition of commodity is: an article of trade or commerce, especially a product as distinguished from a service.
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Winklevoss Twins win again with this one (Score:1)