I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but this is my recollection of Buttercoin's history. Please reply with corrections, and I'll edit.
Mtgox crash about 1 year ago, when their trade engine could not keep up with the large number of transactions. Later we found out that Mtgox could not handle more than something like 50 transactions / second. Buttercoin was a developer's response to Mtgox's crash. To build a better mouse trap that could handle 100x more trade volume than Mtgox.
It was originally supposed to be open source, to improve the underlying machinery for all bitcoin exchanges. There were some really bright and ambitious people involved in the beginning too. Somewhere a couple months in, the core developers took VC money, and decided to launch their own exchange instead. I haven't kept up with the project enough to know if they are holding to the initial open source exchange source code promises, but I'm not surprised at all that they want to cash in on becoming a big centralized exchange.
It'd probably be hard to be VC funded, while also giving away their competitive advantage (highly scalable trade engine source code) for free.
1) Buttercoin does not appear to be a registered money transmitter. They've known about this requirement for months, they've had the financial capabilities to do this for months...and yet they haven't bothered so far. See http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstatesel....
2) They started off as open source, took a bunch of free code, and then ended the open source aspects of the project.
3) They took a substantial amount of BTC donations (even more substantial now with the higher F/X rate) and never returned those donations when the project pivoted from an open source software project to a V/C funded business.
One of these red flags is bad enough, but 3 together is a big, red, flashing "STAY AWAY".
They clearly don't have the professionalism or the wherewithal to handle the basic foundational aspects of their professed industry. I recommend staying away from them before they become the next MtGox.
So is AirBnb with one of the coowners listed on top 100 FBI cyberscammers list.
Im sorry but having a rubberstamp of PG is not the same as having blessing of Elon Musk, for example. PG seems to be drifting into the dark side. What worked for Airbnb (scamming people on craiglist to solicit airbnb) worked as charm on SocialCam when the idea was to scam as many of your Facebook friends as possible.
> I think people will be wondering if this resembles the founders' ideas when they were funded by [PG], and if this represents the kind of company you wish to be funding.
Its a matter of how much "hustling" you like. Someone that hacks a traffic lights and show you how cool they drive and remotely change their lights to green, or someone that hacked a traffic lights and show you how cool sixty cars, twenty dead drivers pileup looks like....
Can you link to the top 100 FBI cyberscammers list? I did a bit of googling and was unable to find it. Also which owner of AirBnB is on the list? By owner do you mean a founder or one of their investors?
#2 is why the Affero GPL was invented. When you contribute to open source, be aware of what you are agreeing to, with respect to folks who might want to take and not share alike.
Hi gamblor956, your concerns are all valid. I'll do my best to address them inturn.
1. We'll be disclosing our approach to applicable licenses at launch within our FAQ. Keep in mind, each country has different requirements. We're rolling out globally and will use a different approach in each country we launch in.
2. Regarding the open source parts of Buttercoin, Benentt (Buttercoin's CTO / co-founder) has been talking to our approach on reddit, http://bit.ly/1lu58J0
The project started off as a bit of announce-first development in response to the MtGox issues during the run-up in price last April. We had a lot of really enthusiastic people all trying to figure out what it was we were actually trying to do. Many people wanted to build a completely distributed exchange, others wanted to go other directions. That's the beauty of open projects, even if it can be a bit overwhelming.
Cedric and I already had an interview with Y Combinator scheduled to pitch a different bitcoin idea. A few of us decided to focus on building something we could use to launch a real platform and pitch that instead. We started from scratch and kept it closed to focus on that, always with the intention of opening it back up once it was at least somewhat usable.
It's taken way to long to get there. Why are we waiting for launch? Mostly because we're too busy. There's still a good amount of code specific to our deployment mixed into the stuff that's actually usable by anyone else. I'm embarrassed to admit we even have a couple of test passwords and API keys floating around in the repos. In short, we're humans of limited capacity. If I were to do it again, I'd go about things differently, but if we can put up a technically solid trading platform that helps make bitcoin (and other digital currencies) more widely adopted, then I'll have no regrets. ===
If any donor would like their bitcoins back, just send us a signed message from the address you used to donate along with a message to hello@buttercoin.com.
Also, for transparency's sake here's the wallet address we've been receiving donations at: 1McqPj92jvWfFg5F24dwyDSUptjTosH2EY
Benentt (Buttercoin's CTO / co-founder) has been talking to our approach and plan wrt the open source trade execution engine on reddit, I'll add his latest thread below as it does a nice job of adding context to the conversation.
The project started off as a bit of announce-first development in response to the MtGox issues during the run-up in price last April. We had a lot of really enthusiastic people all trying to figure out what it was we were actually trying to do. Many people wanted to build a completely distributed exchange, others wanted to go other directions. That's the beauty of open projects, even if it can be a bit overwhelming.
Cedric and I already had an interview with Y Combinator scheduled to pitch a different bitcoin idea. A few of us decided to focus on building something we could use to launch a real platform and pitch that instead. We started from scratch and kept it closed to focus on that, always with the intention of opening it back up once it was at least somewhat usable.
It's taken way to long to get there. Why are we waiting for launch? Mostly because we're too busy. There's still a good amount of code specific to our deployment mixed into the stuff that's actually usable by anyone else. I'm embarrassed to admit we even have a couple of test passwords and API keys floating around in the repos.
In short, we're humans of limited capacity. If I were to do it again, I'd go about things differently, but if we can put up a technically solid trading platform that helps make bitcoin (and other digital currencies) more widely adopted, then I'll have no regrets.
===
Hope this helps add context to where we are and why. If you have more questions, please ask, we'll do our best to answer quickly.
The matching engine described in these documents is not anywhere close to state of the art. The big exchanges can get you fills wire-to-wire sub 100 micros now with binary protocols that you can just cast into a struct without parsing. Open sourcing it wouldn't be a big deal. Heck the original ISLAND would probably give them a run for their money: http://josh.com/notes/island-ecn-10th-birthday/
Besides, exchanges are a network effect problem primarily. People will continue to trade where there's liquidity unless a new market offers something substantially better. Look how many people still used Mt Gox with its constant freezes and rumored insolvency.
Seven pages for the design of a complete exchange system, and most of them - four to be precise - for the web frontend. What could possibly go wrong?
(Don't take this comment to serious, they will probably have done a lot of work beyond that. I just want to point out that these documents say nothing at all. This is what you come up with during the first day of brainstorming.)
The security of your funds is our #1 priority. Our team goes above and beyond all banking security best practices to create the world's most secure Bitcoin trading platform.
And then they build their system using CoffeeScript, a dynamically typed language? They are kidding me?
EDIT: Another comment implies they rebuild the engine using Scala.
Assuming your design is correct and secure - and that is already really hard to do - you still have to ensure that you implementation matches your design, i.e. contains no defects, and this is harder in a dynamically typed language, because there are classes of defects that the compiler of a statically typed language will catch while they go unnoticed using a dynamically typed language. So dynamically typed languages are not less correct or secure on their own, they just do not prevent you from writing incorrect or insecure code in the same way statically typed languages do.
One example I once read about are control systems for rockets and missiles - they use different data types for x, y and z coordinates. They are all just numbers but you really want to make sure that you do not accidentally swap two variables and the missile turns left while it should ascend. And you just can not enforce such constraints in dynamically typed languages.
They also took a lot of donations in BTC which they never returned after pivoting their project to a private closed source solution. Shame on them for sure.
I understand your point of view, but isn't that sort of the spirit of open source software? To take it and build something with it. I mean, they didn't close the repo, it's still up there, they just made the decision to not contribute back as they decided to build a business around it. Others can too.
Free software typically doesn't force you to share changes either, as long as you don't distribute the binaries. Patching GPL code and using it in a web application without ever releasing the source is perfectly fine.
The Affero GPL was designed to force the release of source even in that case. That's the only license I know which has that property though.
Free software != GPL. One could argue that the Affero GPL represents a continuation of the ideals which gave birth to the GPL, now that more and more applications have moved to being network services (something less common in 80's).
I've actually talked with Kevin before, they do seem to care about open-source & security & scalability. I mean, from what we talked about, I got the sense they do. But for them, I think things are moving fast, and it's hard to please everyone, all the time, especially when you need to prioritize the business. It seems they care about open-source as a reassurance to security. And I think they do want to give back to the community.
Can the market support so many US exchanges? (do any have working USD ?)
buttercoin (no selling yet? ACH? wire? CC?)
coinbase (technically not an exchange but USD works)
campbx (bank halted ACH/wire transfers on January 31, 2014)
kraken (located in SF, USD back soon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7321703 )
coinsetter (in beta, bank approved USD)
cryptsy (located in FL, USD soon, registered Money Services Business/BSA/FinCEN)
coinlab (never opened exchange)
coinmx (may not actually be in US, overseas CC charges, be careful)
I think it's a bit of a stretch to include coinlab, they don't seem to ever have actually launched a US exchange.
Also, Kraken looks to be US based but don't yet allow US customers to trade USD pairs, only crypto/crypto so far.
Would also really like to see exchanges offer proper websocket/streaming API access, so far the only two who have shut down (Bitfloor, MtGox). Trying to write a proper trading algo against unreliable "REST" APIs is generally an exercise in frustration.
We literally just suspended USD pairs last week as we are upgrading our connectivity to a much larger bank that can offer us the quality of USD settlement our users deserve. We'll be live again with USD very soon. In the mean time, we still have other conventional currencies... notably EUR.
Who is 'we'? (The parent comment equally mentions CoinLab, Kraken, MtGox, and Bitfloor. As the topmost topic, Buttercoin is a possible antecedent as well.)
Until there's one that doesn't suck, there should be more competition keeping the exchanges innovating and improving their services to be more competitive.
They're all "USD soon" but none of them actually have it. The real race is to getting that available. Til then none of them will really take off, since you can't really trade between USD and bitcoin if you can't deposit or withdraw the USD.
Risk, banks don't want to deal with it since a tsunami of fraudulent wires will be heading their way because scammers can turn their botnet obtained bank logins to untraceable bitcoins. That and all sorts of black PR on cryptocurrencies they don't want extra work for their compliance officers. Offshore banks don't seem to mind but it will cost hefty transfer fees
I wouldn't expect CampBX to survive a lot longer. Without a banking partner they're fighting a very steep battle. Their volume has always been tiny tiny tiny even in the best of times.
I'll be surprised if Cryptsy ever makes it to USD.
Also, while they have a very wide range of alts to gamble with (and let's face it, the smaller alts are pure gambles), the experience of using the site does not inspire faith in their technological abilities. I would not be at all shocked to learn they have significant security holes.
I too have to cast serious doubts about Cryptsy's tech abilities. I navigated their website before they were publicly known (their website was already operational) and found some disturbing errors - nothing big, but I did not dig deep.
This is incorrect - I suppose we should make this clearer on our site.
For the record: Kraken is owned and operated by Payward. Payward's parent company is a US company. The Payward entity in the UK is one of many overseas entities that we have across half a dozen jurisdictions already, and that number is growing... particularly here in Asia.
We are in the death throws of partnering with a much larger bank to facilitate USD settlement connectivity at the quality our users deserve. We completed our relationship with our last parter about a week ago. It sounds like you just joined during the short intermission... hang in there.
I joined six weeks ago and am still only pre-verified for tiers 2 and 3. I doubt that the reason fastest963 can't trade USD is because of the reason you just gave. Kraken needs to be more forthcoming with which states it's properly registered in to deal with USD, because I know it's not registered in California or Kansas.
I will emphasize that this is not my area and I am not commenting in an official capacity but IIRC it's less about 'registered in', and more about 'has state-specific financial licenses for' versus 'has a business presence in' versus individual state law. Somewhat like the mess that is US the domestic tax nexus. Anyway, I believe there are legal reasons why, owing to the above, we are not allowed to divulge state-on-state policy. We have a really good legal team. Yes, this sounds nuts and is entirely counterintuitive, but that's the US legal system for you.
From the casual attention I pay to this, I thought Coinbase was one of the, if not the, largest US exchange at this point. I'm surprised no one has even mentioned it here. Am I missing something?
Coinbase is not an exchange; they're a broker, when you buy there you're buying from Coinbase, not from someone else's sell order like you would at an exchange. Exchanges match buyers to sellers.
From Brian Armstrong, Coinbase Agent, via the coinbase support site, 11 Nov 2012:
"We integrate with a variety of exchanges and also hold our own reserves. When you sell your bitcoins for USD we usually sell them to other Coinbase users at some point down the line (this is where our reserves come from), but we may cash them out if needed. In general, our goal is to abstract away some of the complexity so it's a simpler process for our users. What we have now is a good start but not finished by any means. Hope it helps!"
Cryptsy is up there but you are right CoinMKT is US based and has USD working with a US bank. They also have a very clean website. They just need better marketing because I never heard of them.
Atomic-Trade is also in US and apparears to have a US bank relationship. Another one I never heard of them so they need to hire some marketing people.
Ok guys explain this:
I've signed up for early access and was placed 6817, my friend sitting next to me signed up right after and was 6827, my gf signed up 30 secs later and is 6837. See a pattern? If they have to lie about their number of sign ups I wonder how trustworthy the rest of the service will be.
I know it's just a detail but why would you do something like this? Fake it until you make it?
Well, the former Reddit founder is on the team. And I seem to recall reading something about how that did that with early Reddit posts too (marking the voting counts much higher to make it seem like they have more users than they did).
They just didn't quite do it good enough. Would have made it more believable if they did a random 5 to 10 addition on each signup. Probably had to rush out the landing page to capitalize on the opportune MtGox disaster.
Hi tinbad, thanks for signing up for early access. We appreciate that your friend and girlfriend also joined. Let us know if you have ideas for how we might verify our numbers as being authentic while also protecting user privacy / security, we'll be happy to oblige.
So they say "The security of your funds is our #1 priority. Our team goes above and beyond all banking security best practices to create the world's most secure Bitcoin trading platform" but no other details are provided?
Is there any reason to believe any part of that statement without further details?
Not until I see a security audit will I believe any exchange is secure. I believed Mt. Gox had "resolved" the basic issue of password hashing back when they were compromised until I found out they were using a home-grown "run sha512 1000x" solution.
That, plus I know as a programmer I like to think I'm disciplined enough to be a secure programmer until my software is audited or pentested. Then I realize how naive I really am.
Like I said, I'm not trusting any exchanges until I start seeing rigorous security measures (more than "security is our #1 priority" bullshit) in the form of audits, pentesting, and etc...
That said I also know very few people that actually use their personal BTC wallets and encrypt it with GPG + a two factor challenge (to avoid the possibility of key loggers).
If it is in fact the world's most secure bitcoin trading platform does it make bitcoin safe relative to other end user services such as traditional banks or credit cards?
The difference I see is that using Visa and MasterCard do not require me to believe they are the smartest people in the room. All I have to believe is that when someone else uses my account they will try to detect it, correct it and keep me whole - which they have done several times.
The system works because it does not need to prevent all fraud. Maybe ButterCoin has solved that problem but YC and Google's investments are not evidence one way or the other.
Who's their compliance officer and what are their qualifications? Without that kind of disclosure, they have forced me to conclude that they are full of shit. Without basic information and contact info about their compliance structure, they have no business making this kind of claim. It's just press release nonsense.
Why don't these guys list their bios on the website in a prominent location? I find it difficult to trust any exchange that doesn't do this personally.
I don't think they're trying to hide anything, maybe just haven't gotten around to creating an About page. Both founders used to work for Microsoft: https://angel.co/buttercoin
Hi starfishjenga, Cedric Dahl here, co-founder and CEO of Buttercoin. We have bios which will be available in Buttercoin's About section, if you'd like to learn more about us in the meantime, here is additional info: Bennett and I both used to work at Microsoft, we left to start an analytics company, founded a hacker house (NerdTribe.com), and later made a documentary film, People in Motion: http://youtu.be/QH09YCtpKaw, before stating our current project, Buttercoin.com
I saw the tagline "Safe, Easy, Fast" and what sprang to mind was "Pick Two". Maybe it's all the Bitcoin failures that make my cynical but I've never really seen these executed well. I guess time will tell.
It's partly private. To say it is not part of government is also inaccurate. It is independent of several branches in many respects, but relies in the government in others, by design. For example, the chair and vice chair are appointed and confirmed. Congress has oversight of the system but does not appropriate funds to the system.
My understanding is that legally, it's not part of the government. That makes it private, with any voluntary government relationships being just that. This doesn't make what you are saying untrue, but what you are saying isn't exactly clear either.
(Thought experiment: Obviously, if one did wield influence on a central bank after winning the rights to run it from a nation, one would try to keep public perceptions as wishy-washy as possible in order to keep pockets safely lined and one's fiscal hegemony in place.)
This isn't correct. The Federal Reserve System is composed of the various Federal Reserve Banks (FRBs) and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (BOG). The FRBs are hybrid entities considered to be federal instrumentalities for some purposes but not for others. The BOG is a federal agency. The Chairman of the BOG (Janet Yellen at present) is a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate.
Sorry, a colloquialism I use with some friends and was kind of wondering how it works without knowing. "BS" is maybe a bit strong in this instance but you get the idea?
Seriously! Why is everyone going with iOS 7 style instead of having a web page with some information on it. I am about to start writing my first CSS page, but before I do I want to know:
Is it still possible to use hyperlinks on a fancy CSS page?
As far as I can tell all they do is look cool and scroll. I miss being able to click and get more info
This. Doesn't even work on Safari on my iPad: it only shows a blank page.
I seriously think this Web 3.0 fashion has gone way out of hand, like in the early days of the web with amimated GIFs, auto-play, and other awfully unusable gimmicks. Every web designer should open this website every day, and ponder:
P.D.: On a bitter, petty unrelated note: this footnote strikes me as trying too hard to be cute: "Buttercoin is lovingly crafted in Palo Alto, California". I don't think a Bitcoin exchange should be equated to, I don't know, some organic high-end coffee brew, or the latest Jony Ive creation... It just leaves a weird taste in my mouth.
In one of other comments is linked a document about front-end support. They are not focused on cross-browser compatibility at the moment. Basically the latest modern browsers are the only ones supported.
You got a public API? I'd love to add this exchange to Cryptowatch[1] right away ;)
The landing page is pretty bare, but this looks like it's made by professionals. I'm excited to see another player enter the field and looking forward to getting access and learning more.
Buttercoin dropped the original JavaScript repository and rewrote the entire thing in Scala/Java. They are not releasing the new software, but planning on white-labeling their new product (very similar to bex.io).
I honestly think the most trusthworthy exchange so far has been dogecoin. I haven't really heard anyone scamming anybody. Is dogecoin going to last for another 2-3 years? Anyone know?
The form should limit the number of digits allowed in the "I want to spend" field. Right now, it says I'll receive more bitcoins than the total possible mined coins cap (21 million). http://i.imgur.com/pCUTqOz.png
Obviously it's a mock form, but shouldn't it at least be accurate?
Thanks jermaink, having the ticker in the browser tab came from user testing. Please let us know if you have additional ideas on how we can make things more convenient / nicer.
As mentioned, Coinbase is not an exchange and honestly leaves much to be desired (limited instant buys, for example).
I think the better reason is that allowing any single Bitcoin trading company to get too big is unhealthy (see MtGox). Having competing companies is very much in the interest of the btc community.
No you're right. Coinbase does payment processing and hosted wallets. Users can buy or sell bitcoins to Coinbase, but it's not an exchange in the sense that any two users can trade USD/BTC with each other.
Mtgox crash about 1 year ago, when their trade engine could not keep up with the large number of transactions. Later we found out that Mtgox could not handle more than something like 50 transactions / second. Buttercoin was a developer's response to Mtgox's crash. To build a better mouse trap that could handle 100x more trade volume than Mtgox.
https://buttercoin.hackpad.com/FAQ-QTRSMzlkLD6
It was originally supposed to be open source, to improve the underlying machinery for all bitcoin exchanges. There were some really bright and ambitious people involved in the beginning too. Somewhere a couple months in, the core developers took VC money, and decided to launch their own exchange instead. I haven't kept up with the project enough to know if they are holding to the initial open source exchange source code promises, but I'm not surprised at all that they want to cash in on becoming a big centralized exchange.
It'd probably be hard to be VC funded, while also giving away their competitive advantage (highly scalable trade engine source code) for free.
https://buttercoin.hackpad.com/FAQ-QTRSMzlkLD6
http://www.reddit.com/r/buttercoin