Another One Bites The Dust: Cryptsy Edition

The altcoin exchange known as Cryptsy finally went full Gox after more than a year of warnings. Reports then came in that the company moved out of their office without any notice to users. Yesterday divorce proceedings involving the exchange's proprietor, Paul Edward Vernon, were posted to Bitcointalk leading to speculation that the civil court has frozen all of the proprietor's assets including Cryptsy's cold wallet until divorce proceedings have finalized. Cryptsy has acted irresponsible in regards to its users, and has yet to make a public statement of any kind regarding its situation.

China Continues Forcing Stockholders To HODL

Reports are emerging that China's stock market regulators will continue to ban stock holders possessing more than 5% of a companies shares from selling (archived). The measure which appears intended to prevent actual market valuation of securities deprives the most significant investors in companies of their ability to reclaim value they put in while there is still value to save. As the global fiat system continues to decline expect more national market regulators to take extreme measures like this in order force disproportionate loss on the system's most critical private investors. Sorry for your loss.

Lead Top Performing Metal of 2015

Out of all the metals traded on open markets in 2015, lead was the top performer posting only a 5% loss closing the year at 0.80 United States Dollars per pound and 1623.27 Euros per ton. Humble lead's 5% loss was enough to outperform all of the precious metals, the rare earth metals, and the other base metals. Price information on metals with less established markets in 2015 is unavailable.

Interview with David Francois on Building a Real Bitcoin Business

Operating a Bitcoin business is difficult and, a lot of times is the first step down the road which brings pretty much 9x% to crime within six months to a year (archived). With the excess influx of Venture Capital into companies pretending as to have any involvement with Bitcoin, I sat down with David "davout" Francois CTO of Paymium, formerly known as Bitcoin-Central, to talk about the fundamentals from his personal experience in developing a Bitcoin company that can survive the ruthless climate of the world of Bitcoin. Continue reading

Karpeles Arrested on Still More Embezzlement Charges

Shingetsu News Agency is reporting on their Twitter feed that Mt Gox CEO Mark Karpelès has been rearrested in Japan on still more embezzlement charges. Japanese police are only allowed to hold a suspect in detention for a limited period of time, so re-arrest on further charges is a common tactic used to keep charged suspects detained indefinitely before trial.

Ethereum Bet Update

The bet over Ethereum's ability to make it out of 2015 alive previously covered on Qntra has climbed to more than 209 Bitcoin in total wagers. The odds have shifted with 35% of the wagers now predicting Ethereum's demise while 65% largely in early wagers stands hoping Ethereum just might have a future. Since September 25th only 1.45807 Bitcoin in new bets  have come in in favor of Ethereum. At present Ethereum is trading around 0.0016 Bitcoin per Ether token a in a substantial and sustained decline from their peak price in August. Further bad news came for Ethereum near the end of September when Buterin revealed his foundation backing Ethereum was spending at a rate that would leave it insolvent.

British 'Cultural' Capital Controls Interfere With Commerce

CNN reports that government of the United Kingdom is forbidding a buyer who paid 146,500 pounds formerly known as sterling for a watercolor painting from taking it to his home (archived) outside of Britain. According to the Kingdom's government it hopes that the ban will encourage the buyer, who purchased the piece as the highest bidder at Christie's auction house would make the decision to sell the painting on to a buyer intending to keep the watercolor in the United Kingdom. This is in spite of the fact that no such buyer for the artwork was interested in outbidding the actual purchaser in an auction. The export ban was put into place by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey. Continue reading

OKCoin Ver Dispute Escalates

The dispute between OKCoin and Roger Ver over which contract governs an agreement they made regarding the bitcoin.com domain name continues to escalate with Ver's friend and former CTO of OKCoin Changpeng Zhao publicly stating (archive) that he had a gentleman's agreement with Ver which he expected OKCoin to honour after he left the company.

In addition to siding with Ver's version of events, Zhao claims OKCoin has been engaged in an assortment of deceptive conduct regarding the operation of its exchange, specifically: Continue reading