Original author: Stan Higgins
Coin News
Original author: Kadhim Shubber
Original author: Tanaya Macheel
Bitcoin is often likened to the Internet, and arguably for good reason. The currency is a new, permissionless technology, championed by a small group of computer experts that say it will change the world in ways we can’t yet even imagine. That’s just how people talked about the Internet in the early nineties.
However, as with bitcoin, the hype has been accompanied by doom-mongering and naysaying.
Here are eight smart and stupid things people said about the Internet that have relevance for how we think about bitcoin today.
Let’s start with the stupid, because, hey, they are more fun.
1) Newsweek: ‘The Internet won’t change anything’
Credit: digitaltrends.com“The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
Clifford Stoll’s infamous 1995 Newsweek piece might be the most myopic article ever published. The article, which you can read yourself if you’d like a laugh, takes aim at every potential use for the Internet people had suggested and dismisses it out of hand. Sound familiar?
To his credit, Stoll later, and with good grace, admitted the article was a pile of trash, saying “of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.”
But he did add something that’s worth keeping in mind when people mindlessly repeat phrases like the dogecoiners’ slogan “straight to the moon”.
“At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.”
Perhaps, though, the most interesting part of his piece is a reference to there being no trustworthy way of sending money over the IInternet. Depending on your opinion of the banking system, you might say it took until 2008 to solve that problem.
2) ‘What is the Internet anyway? … What do you write to it, like mail?’
The video above is an unaired segment from NBC’s ‘Today Show’ in 1994 and exemplifies perfectly the bemusement and confusion people felt towards the Internet.
People didn’t know what it was, what they would use it for, or even how to use it (lots of people still don’t know how to use it, if we’re totally honest).
Bitcoin today is the same, much of the confusion stemming from a focus on mining in initial mainstream discussions of the technology. Instead of being seen as a platform for permissionless innovation, as this Vox video eloquently put it, it’s thought of as a get-rich-quick scheme.
No doubt, most people reading this will have heard some variation of “what is bitcoin anyway? … Do you just make money with your computer?”
3) ‘I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse’
Credit: tri-tel.comIn 1995, the same year Clifford Stoll offered his analysis of the future of the Internet, Robert Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet, declared in an InfoWorld column that the Internet was totally screwed.
To be fair to Metcalfe, he did offer a list of reasons, which ironically includes, in a sense, the non-existence of bitcoin:
˝As if to make up for the shortage of real money to finance Internet commerce, several companies have been trying to mint digital money. They have, however, failed to streamline financial activity – there are now more, not fewer, middlepersons. Therefore, transaction costs, at 50 cents each or more, remain way too high. Without efficient micropayments, there will be little Internet commerce, except, maybe, but probably not, some advertising.˝
Of course, in 1996, the Internet didn’t collapse and, in 1997, Metcalfe, admitting his error, blended a copy of his column and drank it.
4) ‘The Internet, with its open, distributed structure, was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. If it can do that, it can withstand corporate America’
Credit: www.sfu.caThis is less of a stupid prediction than a poignant one, from science writer Barry Shell in 1995. As net neutrality dies in the United States, it seems that the Internet can’t in fact withstand corporate America.
A similar battle for the soul of bitcoin is going on at the moment. With ‘BitLicenses’ being issued in New York, centralized mining continuing to be a threat, and mainstream bitcoin businesses popping up, the idea of bitcoin as a weapon against governments and corporations is fading.
Of course, bitcoin’s proponents have varying motivations. Some see no problem with government regulation, others are at ease with corporate power, while some are continuing to build radical tools to prevent bitcoin becoming tamed.
5) ‘If you change the way you make wealth, you inevitably change the way you make war’
The longer form of futurist Alvin Toffler’s 1993 quote during an interview with Wired basically predicts cyberwarfare, warning people to “think in terms of the very, very smart hacker sitting in Tehran”. Although perhaps today we would think in terms of whole teams of very smart hackers sitting in Beijing.
Credit: “Alvin Toffler 02″ by Vern EvansAlthough it’s not often heard, some of bitcoin’s proponents, Roger Ver for example, see bitcoin in terms of changing the way government’s make war. That is, taking control of currency away from government (specifically the US government) reduces the amount of money they have to wage war.
“If you change the way you make wealth, you inevitably change the way you make war,” was said in 1993, but it wouldn’t sound out of place in a discussion about bitcoin today.
6) ‘Any future information network will help unhappy people secede, at least mentally, from institutions they do not like, much as the interstate highway system allowed the affluent to flee the cities for the suburbs and exurbs’
Credit: messiah.eduFew quotes describe more eloquently the glorious escapism the Internet provides than historian Edward Tenner’s comments in 1994. If you don’t like the circumstances that immediately confront you, the Internet provides a connection to other worlds, ideas and communities.
Bitcoin, as originally envisioned, was escapism of a different sort: escapism from a banking system that had just catastrophically crashed. ‘Be your own bank’, was the clarion call to those unhappy with the current financial system.
Libertarian backers of bitcoin, unhappy with government-controlled money, see it as means of creating a new discussion about the nature of money. For them the idea of digital money, created according to algorithmic rules, forces people to ‘secede mentally’ from the rigid orthodoxy that money must come from government.
7) ‘We have to resist media imperialism – the tendency to colonize, to define new technologies in terms of the old … Redefine, don’t repackage’
Over $250m-worth of venture-capital funding has been thrown at various bitcoin businesses, all of which, if one were to be critical, look entirely the same as the payment and finance companies that came before.
At the extreme end, Circle is upfront about its disguising the bitcoin part of its business as completely as possible from its users.
In 1995, Barry Diller, who is Chairman of Expedia, which recently began accepting bitcoin payments for hotel bookings, warned against using the past as a model for the future when thinking about, and creating products with, new, revolutionary technologies.
“We will fall short if we impose our own familiar business models on the coming convergence. Telephones were not just telegraphs with voice. Computers weren’t just calculators with keyboards. And in the future, no one will call your product ‘magazines with sound and moving pictures.’”
And perhaps bitcoin isn’t just ‘digital cash’.
Internettechnology
Credit: digitaltrends.com“The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
Clifford Stoll’s infamous 1995 Newsweek piece might be the most myopic article ever published. The article, which you can read yourself if you’d like a laugh, takes aim at every potential use for the Internet people had suggested and dismisses it out of hand. Sound familiar?
To his credit, Stoll later, and with good grace, admitted the article was a pile of trash, saying “of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.”
But he did add something that’s worth keeping in mind when people mindlessly repeat phrases like the dogecoiners’ slogan “straight to the moon”.
“At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.”
Perhaps, though, the most interesting part of his piece is a reference to there being no trustworthy way of sending money over the IInternet. Depending on your opinion of the banking system, you might say it took until 2008 to solve that problem.
2) ‘What is the Internet anyway? … What do you write to it, like mail?’
The video above is an unaired segment from NBC’s ‘Today Show’ in 1994 and exemplifies perfectly the bemusement and confusion people felt towards the Internet.
People didn’t know what it was, what they would use it for, or even how to use it (lots of people still don’t know how to use it, if we’re totally honest).
Bitcoin today is the same, much of the confusion stemming from a focus on mining in initial mainstream discussions of the technology. Instead of being seen as a platform for permissionless innovation, as this Vox video eloquently put it, it’s thought of as a get-rich-quick scheme.
No doubt, most people reading this will have heard some variation of “what is bitcoin anyway? … Do you just make money with your computer?”
3) ‘I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse’
Credit: tri-tel.comIn 1995, the same year Clifford Stoll offered his analysis of the future of the Internet, Robert Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet, declared in an InfoWorld column that the Internet was totally screwed.
To be fair to Metcalfe, he did offer a list of reasons, which ironically includes, in a sense, the non-existence of bitcoin:
˝As if to make up for the shortage of real money to finance Internet commerce, several companies have been trying to mint digital money. They have, however, failed to streamline financial activity – there are now more, not fewer, middlepersons. Therefore, transaction costs, at 50 cents each or more, remain way too high. Without efficient micropayments, there will be little Internet commerce, except, maybe, but probably not, some advertising.˝
Of course, in 1996, the Internet didn’t collapse and, in 1997, Metcalfe, admitting his error, blended a copy of his column and drank it.
4) ‘The Internet, with its open, distributed structure, was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. If it can do that, it can withstand corporate America’
Credit: www.sfu.caThis is less of a stupid prediction than a poignant one, from science writer Barry Shell in 1995. As net neutrality dies in the United States, it seems that the Internet can’t in fact withstand corporate America.
A similar battle for the soul of bitcoin is going on at the moment. With ‘BitLicenses’ being issued in New York, centralized mining continuing to be a threat, and mainstream bitcoin businesses popping up, the idea of bitcoin as a weapon against governments and corporations is fading.
Of course, bitcoin’s proponents have varying motivations. Some see no problem with government regulation, others are at ease with corporate power, while some are continuing to build radical tools to prevent bitcoin becoming tamed.
5) ‘If you change the way you make wealth, you inevitably change the way you make war’
The longer form of futurist Alvin Toffler’s 1993 quote during an interview with Wired basically predicts cyberwarfare, warning people to “think in terms of the very, very smart hacker sitting in Tehran”. Although perhaps today we would think in terms of whole teams of very smart hackers sitting in Beijing.
Credit: “Alvin Toffler 02″ by Vern EvansAlthough it’s not often heard, some of bitcoin’s proponents, Roger Ver for example, see bitcoin in terms of changing the way government’s make war. That is, taking control of currency away from government (specifically the US government) reduces the amount of money they have to wage war.
“If you change the way you make wealth, you inevitably change the way you make war,” was said in 1993, but it wouldn’t sound out of place in a discussion about bitcoin today.
6) ‘Any future information network will help unhappy people secede, at least mentally, from institutions they do not like, much as the interstate highway system allowed the affluent to flee the cities for the suburbs and exurbs’
Credit: messiah.eduFew quotes describe more eloquently the glorious escapism the Internet provides than historian Edward Tenner’s comments in 1994. If you don’t like the circumstances that immediately confront you, the Internet provides a connection to other worlds, ideas and communities.
Bitcoin, as originally envisioned, was escapism of a different sort: escapism from a banking system that had just catastrophically crashed. ‘Be your own bank’, was the clarion call to those unhappy with the current financial system.
Libertarian backers of bitcoin, unhappy with government-controlled money, see it as means of creating a new discussion about the nature of money. For them the idea of digital money, created according to algorithmic rules, forces people to ‘secede mentally’ from the rigid orthodoxy that money must come from government.
7) ‘We have to resist media imperialism – the tendency to colonize, to define new technologies in terms of the old … Redefine, don’t repackage’
Over $250m-worth of venture-capital funding has been thrown at various bitcoin businesses, all of which, if one were to be critical, look entirely the same as the payment and finance companies that came before.
At the extreme end, Circle is upfront about its disguising the bitcoin part of its business as completely as possible from its users.
In 1995, Barry Diller, who is Chairman of Expedia, which recently began accepting bitcoin payments for hotel bookings, warned against using the past as a model for the future when thinking about, and creating products with, new, revolutionary technologies.
“We will fall short if we impose our own familiar business models on the coming convergence. Telephones were not just telegraphs with voice. Computers weren’t just calculators with keyboards. And in the future, no one will call your product ‘magazines with sound and moving pictures.’”
And perhaps bitcoin isn’t just ‘digital cash’.
Internettechnology
Original author: Kadhim Shubber
Original author: Nermin Hajdarbegovic
Charles Allen is the CEO of Bitcoin Shop, a publicly traded US bitcoin company that leverages Amazon’s affiliate program to sell a wide selection of e-commerce products for bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin.
Bitcoin Shop is now seeking to expand its industry goals, recently making strategic investments in key partners, including California-based bitcoin buying service expresscoin and digital currency processor GoCoin, with the goal of using e-commerce to build a universal bitcoin company.
Allen recently spoke about his company’s ambitions at The North American Bitcoin Conference, held last weekend at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. CoinDesk sat down with Allen to learn more about his company, the pressures of being public and why he believes Bitcoin Shop is the most misunderstood company in the space.
CoinDesk: You’ve said that Bitcoin Shop is one of the more misunderstood companies in the bitcoin industry, and that you’re not simply an e-commerce play. Can you introduce us to your vision for Bitcoin Shop and its goals?
Charles Allen: Yeah, that’s not what we’re building. Just to give you an idea where we started, the company was founded by two engineers from NASA in June last year. We launched our initial website in September and basically realized that there are bitcoins, but nowhere to spend them. That’s not a business, that’s a short-term solution to a problem. No one accepts bitcoins, now there’s someone to do it. That’s not sustainable. I joined in January and have shifted the direction of the company.
In February, we were a lead investor in GoCoin, and we use them as a payment processor, so we now accept bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin. We also just invested in expresscoin. What we want to do is use digital currency as an onramp to digital currency adoption, and the first step in that is redoing the website. Everyone was part-time until February and we haven’t touched the website since going public.
We need to be able to take bitcoin out of the equation and that e-commerce model needs to be a standalone business.
No one’s ever done this before [...] Conceptually you could shop from all the big-box retailers you trust and we would find you the best price and they would ship it to you.
We believe if we create a solution where we connected to all these people, there’s a good reason people should shop on our site as opposed to [just] bitcoin.
Do you see Bitcoin Shop evolving to become more of a traditional e-commerce company, and less focused on bitcoin, over time?
You’re still thinking about e-commerce as the core of the business, and it is now, but we want to tie all the other service offerings in. If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to have a wallet that isn’t integrated with a payment processor or that isn’t integrated with a merchant. It’s not all tied together. You need a universal solution, then a customer can have one point of access and do all their transactions.
If you have a wallet, now you have to connect your wallet to your exchange or your payment processor. You have all these different usernames and passwords and logins, and you’re building this ecosystem of different providers that you have to manage and deal with.
We believe that we can create a unified solution through partnerships, where you can do everything in one stop, where you can shop and exchange, and you could buy products, you can get bitcoin, collecting all of the pieces, but e-commerce is the onramp.
The nice thing about e-commerce: business models are unproven at bitcoin companies. If you’re a wallet, how are you going to make money? Should a wallet be a free service that’s offered by a company?
If you start thinking about all these pieces its very difficult to transact and work in bitcoin, because no one has come out with a very elegant solution. Coinbase has done a very good job, and the fact that they have an ACH [Automated Clearing House] relationship, so they can connect to your bank account, is a great lead, but it’s not a long-term competitive advantage.
E-commerce is nice because no one is going to complain about us getting affiliate fees from the merchants we purchase from, whereas people may complain about paying for a wallet service, so a lot of the models that are being built are just untested. What is a consumer willing to pay for versus what are they not willing to pay for?
So you see Bitcoin Shop and its partner ecosystem becoming like a Coinbase, Circle-type consumer solution?
Yes, our investing in expresscoin is the step in that direction. They don’t have the ACH connection, but they’re connected to ATMs, they can wire money in, they have agents. But to be able to seamlessly offer that for our website is where I want to go.
We’ve raised just under $2m, so we’re partnering with other companies in the space that we believe we can connect with to offer a seamless solution over time. Right now the core team is putting the new website out the door and once that’s done we’re going to work to integrate expresscoin.
Our competitive advantage today is that we’re the only public company in this space.
I know you’ve said that an advantage to investing in Bitcoin Shop is the exposure investors get to companies like expresscoin and GoCoin. Do you see Bitcoin Shop becoming almost like an exchange-traded fund for investors?
I would say it’s more like a public private equity fund or like a BT6 [equity fund]. So right now, you’re right. For investors in our company, we trade anywhere from $400,000-$500,000 a day in stock. So, if you bought $10,000 worth of stock you could sell that quite easily at current volumes. When you think about for the general public, if you want to be exposed to bitcoin, you can buy bitcoin or you can buy my stock.
If you buy my stock, you get exposed to GoCoin and expresscoin, and we have an option to invest $1m in expresscoin at its current valuation. I’m not looking to be a publically traded fund; the investments I’ve made to date are strategic because I want to integrate with these companies.
For now, Bitcoin Shop is still an e-commerce company. How affected are you by new merchants that enter the bitcoin ecosystem? Is good merchant news for bitcoin bad for Bitcoin Shop?
I think it’s a positive in that the more big merchants come on, the more people want bitcoin. I think most of the merchants coming online are doing it because it’s free PR.
Dell accepts bitcoin. I’m sure they’ll talk to you or be on Bloomberg. They can be in the media to drive awareness and their customer acquisition [costs] are lower, which is great. The more adoption there is, the more its going to force regulators to make decisions.
Do you feel like Bitcoin Shop will need to rebrand in order to better communicate its goals of becoming a universal bitcoin company?
You’ll notice we bought BTCS.com. That’s our stock ticker, so there may be a point where we’ll think about rebranding when the time is right. Right now, I think it needs to be reflective of the business model we have in place.
This interview has been edited for length.
Image via Bloomberg
bitcoin shopexpresscoinGoCoinNorth American Bitcoin Conference
CoinDesk: You’ve said that Bitcoin Shop is one of the more misunderstood companies in the bitcoin industry, and that you’re not simply an e-commerce play. Can you introduce us to your vision for Bitcoin Shop and its goals?
Charles Allen: Yeah, that’s not what we’re building. Just to give you an idea where we started, the company was founded by two engineers from NASA in June last year. We launched our initial website in September and basically realized that there are bitcoins, but nowhere to spend them. That’s not a business, that’s a short-term solution to a problem. No one accepts bitcoins, now there’s someone to do it. That’s not sustainable. I joined in January and have shifted the direction of the company.
In February, we were a lead investor in GoCoin, and we use them as a payment processor, so we now accept bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin. We also just invested in expresscoin. What we want to do is use digital currency as an onramp to digital currency adoption, and the first step in that is redoing the website. Everyone was part-time until February and we haven’t touched the website since going public.
We need to be able to take bitcoin out of the equation and that e-commerce model needs to be a standalone business.
No one’s ever done this before [...] Conceptually you could shop from all the big-box retailers you trust and we would find you the best price and they would ship it to you.
We believe if we create a solution where we connected to all these people, there’s a good reason people should shop on our site as opposed to [just] bitcoin.
Do you see Bitcoin Shop evolving to become more of a traditional e-commerce company, and less focused on bitcoin, over time?
You’re still thinking about e-commerce as the core of the business, and it is now, but we want to tie all the other service offerings in. If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to have a wallet that isn’t integrated with a payment processor or that isn’t integrated with a merchant. It’s not all tied together. You need a universal solution, then a customer can have one point of access and do all their transactions.
If you have a wallet, now you have to connect your wallet to your exchange or your payment processor. You have all these different usernames and passwords and logins, and you’re building this ecosystem of different providers that you have to manage and deal with.
We believe that we can create a unified solution through partnerships, where you can do everything in one stop, where you can shop and exchange, and you could buy products, you can get bitcoin, collecting all of the pieces, but e-commerce is the onramp.
The nice thing about e-commerce: business models are unproven at bitcoin companies. If you’re a wallet, how are you going to make money? Should a wallet be a free service that’s offered by a company?
If you start thinking about all these pieces its very difficult to transact and work in bitcoin, because no one has come out with a very elegant solution. Coinbase has done a very good job, and the fact that they have an ACH [Automated Clearing House] relationship, so they can connect to your bank account, is a great lead, but it’s not a long-term competitive advantage.
E-commerce is nice because no one is going to complain about us getting affiliate fees from the merchants we purchase from, whereas people may complain about paying for a wallet service, so a lot of the models that are being built are just untested. What is a consumer willing to pay for versus what are they not willing to pay for?
So you see Bitcoin Shop and its partner ecosystem becoming like a Coinbase, Circle-type consumer solution?
Yes, our investing in expresscoin is the step in that direction. They don’t have the ACH connection, but they’re connected to ATMs, they can wire money in, they have agents. But to be able to seamlessly offer that for our website is where I want to go.
We’ve raised just under $2m, so we’re partnering with other companies in the space that we believe we can connect with to offer a seamless solution over time. Right now the core team is putting the new website out the door and once that’s done we’re going to work to integrate expresscoin.
Our competitive advantage today is that we’re the only public company in this space.
I know you’ve said that an advantage to investing in Bitcoin Shop is the exposure investors get to companies like expresscoin and GoCoin. Do you see Bitcoin Shop becoming almost like an exchange-traded fund for investors?
I would say it’s more like a public private equity fund or like a BT6 [equity fund]. So right now, you’re right. For investors in our company, we trade anywhere from $400,000-$500,000 a day in stock. So, if you bought $10,000 worth of stock you could sell that quite easily at current volumes. When you think about for the general public, if you want to be exposed to bitcoin, you can buy bitcoin or you can buy my stock.
If you buy my stock, you get exposed to GoCoin and expresscoin, and we have an option to invest $1m in expresscoin at its current valuation. I’m not looking to be a publically traded fund; the investments I’ve made to date are strategic because I want to integrate with these companies.
For now, Bitcoin Shop is still an e-commerce company. How affected are you by new merchants that enter the bitcoin ecosystem? Is good merchant news for bitcoin bad for Bitcoin Shop?
I think it’s a positive in that the more big merchants come on, the more people want bitcoin. I think most of the merchants coming online are doing it because it’s free PR.
Dell accepts bitcoin. I’m sure they’ll talk to you or be on Bloomberg. They can be in the media to drive awareness and their customer acquisition [costs] are lower, which is great. The more adoption there is, the more its going to force regulators to make decisions.
Do you feel like Bitcoin Shop will need to rebrand in order to better communicate its goals of becoming a universal bitcoin company?
You’ll notice we bought BTCS.com. That’s our stock ticker, so there may be a point where we’ll think about rebranding when the time is right. Right now, I think it needs to be reflective of the business model we have in place.
This interview has been edited for length.
Image via Bloomberg
bitcoin shopexpresscoinGoCoinNorth American Bitcoin Conference
Original author: Pete Rizzo
Known as one of China’s ‘big three’ exchanges, Beijing-based Huobi experienced a meteoric rise to the top tier of China’s bitcoin industry last year, emerging from relative obscurity to become a market leader with more than 100 employees.
Since that early success, Huobi, like other China-based exchanges, has struggled to control its international perception.
Huobi has had to fight off rumours it was faking trading volumes in a bid to attract users. Further, the future and stability of its business were called into question by China’s central bank, which has moved broadly to discourage bitcoin businesses from working with its financial services sector in March.
It’s this uncertain image that Huobi is looking to attack as it, like major competitors OKCoin and BTC China, begins to set its sights overseas.
In accordance with these global goals, the company’s international business director Wendy Wen spoke at The North American Bitcoin Conference last weekend. There, CoinDesk sat down with Wen for an extended interview where she suggested Huobi will soon add support for USD markets in a bid to attract new users both in China and around the globe.
Wen told CoinDesk:
“You can imagine how much money Chinese consumers hold in USD [...] We’re looking at the whole picture. Our actual competitors are BTC-e, Bitstamp and Bitfinex, all of those platforms. We want to be the international standard.”
To meet this goal, Wen said Huobi is investing heavily in AML and KYC compliance and overall security. But, she added: “We have a lot of homework to do.”
Data from Bitcoinity suggests Huobi is the second-largest bitcoin exchange in China, trailing OKCoin, though that exchange’s recent volume figures have been affected by its international expansion and are not currently available.
International ambitions
Of course, Wen also offered her thoughts on what exactly it means for a bitcoin exchange to be international, especially given the fact that Huobi, like most exchanges, does serve customers outside of its home country.
To Wen, being an international exchange means growing the business and its ambitions. Throughout the discussion, she emphasized the professional abilities of her team, noting Huobi’s strong legal, accounting, marketing and compliance divisions.
Shifting the team’s focus globally will mean a reallocation of some of its team to address this issue, Wen said:
“We’re still trying to weigh how to change or what is the right way to change. We definitely want to go international, but who is to tell us the standards of being international? It’s a long and hard way to find a standard to running a proper business in the bitcoin industry.”
She added: “We’re trying really hard, but it’s complicated and hard to say if we’re there.”
Managing perception
Like OKCoin’s Changpeng Zhao, Wen is confident that Huobi’s product will meet the needs of global consumers. In particular, she notes that the exchange has the best liquidity and that it now offers novel features such as margin trading and interest accounts via its new platform BitVC.
However, Huobi faces a language barrier, one that it is still working to overcome, as evidenced by Wen’s lukewarm reception from conference-goers at TNABC.
Still, Wen is optimistic that Huobi can reach these customers through dialogue, and that its persistent approach will pay dividends, saying:
“For the international users, we changed all the interface, we learned a lot of things from other trading platforms, and we have our main customers we can talk to and give feedback. So, we are trying to get a heads up about what our foreign customers really like.”
Uncertainty in China
Given the uncertainty regarding whether China will even allow Huobi and its competitors’ operations to continue, it remains unclear whether Huobi itself will need to focus internationally out of necessity. Early this year, its announcements suggested it was one of the exchanges more willing to adapt to survive.
Wen indicated that Huobi is interested in other Asian markets, and that it could seek to set up a regulated exchange in Singapore or Japan in part to reduce this risk.
However, with formal guidance from Chinese regulators unlikely, Wen suggested that the biggest focus for her company is on the developing regulation in the US, stating:
“Everyone is looking at the US market, but we’re waiting on the regulation coming up. All the exchanges will start doing something at this point.”
She also named Europe and Australia as other markets of interest to the exchange.
Cooperative culture
While both Huobi and OKCoin have their sights set on becoming the top global exchange, Wen said that the atmosphere between the companies remains friendly, especially as the major companies are grappling with issues – whether regulation or international exchange – simultaneously.
“Most of the CEOs here sit together and talk about future of bitcoin and chinese bitcoin exchanges what we’re going to do internationally,” she said.
As for now, she wouldn’t say when Huobi would make its formal introduction to the international market, suggesting that her company wants to ensure its strategy is fully in place before any moves are made.
As Wen asserts, confidence is king in the international market, and she is keen to ensure that Huobi moves lightly as it tries to secure new users.
She concluded:
“The way we do business is honest and professional and we do what we say. It’s going to take time for users to trust our brand. Saying is always easier than doing. What we want to present is our action.”
Images via CoinDesk and The North American Bitcoin Conference
ChinaHuobiNorth American Bitcoin Conference
Original author: Pete Rizzo
Multi-exchange trading platform provider BTX Trader has officially launched Celery, a new product that aims to position the company to expand its market beyond institutional traders to everyday US consumers.
Celery will offer bitcoin and dogecoin buying, boasting what the company says is a more carefully calibrated user experience than what has been provided by other digital currency exchanges and brokerages to date.
BTX Trader CTO Divya Thakur and COO Ilya Subkhankulov expanded on this idea of user experience in an interview with CoinDesk, saying:
“We tested [Celery] with users and watched them use the product. So, we feel that our onboarding and our user experience is superior to any other solutions out there, when it comes to a first time buyer of bitcoin or dogecoin.”
Thakur explained that many of the consumers BTX Trader worked with were unaware that they could buy fractions of a bitcoin, an insight that lead the service to include preset buying options.
Consumers can elect to purchase ‘Packages’ to buy $19.99, $49.99 and $99.99 worth of bitcoin or dogecoin, or use the ‘Custom’ version of the interface, which may be more familiar to existing traders. Celery does not support credit card buying.
Further, Celery includes social features, allowing those who purchase bitcoin or dogecoin to share the message to others. To encourage customer confidence, these messages are then aggregated on the main page.
BTX Trader is a subsidiary of WPCS International, a public company that specializes in product integration, speciality construction and electrical power.
Opening a Celery account
To begin, Celery requests basic user information including the user’s first name, last name, email and country of residence.
Next, it asks that users add their mobile phone number, address and bank account information. At each stage, the company provides a short explanation of why such information is needed, another feature clearly aimed at novice buyers.
The ‘Add a phone’ option, for instance, reads:
“Please provide your mobile phone number to enable Two-Factor Authentication, a security feature that sends SMS codes to your phone to better protect your account. We will not contact you by phone unless absolutely necessary.”
Elsewhere, Celery builds in basic definitions for its services. When users seek to deposit digital currency, they are greeted with an introductory explanation of how an address works.
Support for altcoins
Thakur also told CoinDesk that Celery aims to be digital currency inclusive, a stance that it has first presented in its support for dogecoin.
He added that he believes dogecoin’s strong community was its most attractive feature:
“We think dogecoin is a great community. It’s used in sites like reddit, it’s much higher volume than bitcoin tipping and there’s really no good hosted wallet for dogecoin.”
With the move, Celery joins expresscoin to become the latest novice digital currency service to also court dogecoin buyers.
The perks of being public
Thakur and Subkhankulov also talked about their relationship with WPCS, which funded BTX Trader with a $1m investment earlier this year.
Thakur indicated that while they do seek insight from the company’s CEO Sebastian Giordano, they are free to innovate as they see fit, saying:
“The way that really works is that we were on a call with them talking about our direction. They really keep us as a domain expert when it comes to digital currency.”
To learn more about Celery, visit its newly launched website. More information on BTX Trader and its offerings for institutional traders can be viewed here.
Computer image via Shutterstock
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Original author: Pete Rizzo