Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain. And they want you to deposit money with them. Yeah, right.

View on HN

Updated the footer.. 604 Arizona Ave, Santa Monica CA 90403. And here's my linked in page:

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/josh-jones/3/91a/44a

I think this is genius. One of the best products I've seen recently, if not THE best. Definitely, the best Bitcoin-related idea. I guess companies like Circle, Coinbase, Chain, 21 co, etc. are cool in their own right. But I don't see how any of them will help Bitcoin breakout and become more accepted. I think relatable products like yours are gonna be more beneficial to the protocol.

I, Josh Jones, 100% agree with everything in this comment.

> Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain. And they want you to deposit money with them. Yeah, right.

https://bitcoinbuilder.com/ full name of the founder is at the bottom of the page, Josh Jones (founder of Dreamhost).

You can look up the company "BITCOIN BUILDER, INC." here: http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/

Wow! An apartment half a block from the beach in Santa Monica! Wonder how this Bitcoin business makes enough money for that?

You must not be familiar with Dreamhost

Didn't he also buy up a lot of Gox's bitcoins at a steep discount once withdrawals became impossible? Essentially betting they'd eventually be worth something rather than nothing. I wonder if that's settled out, and if so how he did...

It's not settled out yet, and he's also wondering how he did...

Owning a website does not mean it funds 100% of your life or makes any money at all for that matter.

> Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain.

This will be more and more common and isn't a bad thing. None of those provide any real safeguards and frankly, private domain registration is pretty common. I wouldn't dump > a half weeks paycheck in there, but measuring risk and reputation will no longer be a simple BBB or Dun and Bradstreet lookup.

"None of those provide any real safeguards". Don't you feel like this is an overstatement? Like if Microsoft commits a fraud I can sue Microsoft. Like yes it's possible that in the future these safeguards wont' be available, but having real legal entities with known individuals you can have a trust based relationship in society is of tremendous value. Knowing that your counter-party in a transaction has repetitional risk is definitely beneficial.

... and frankly, at least in a country with a stable legal system, it's a slight bit of comfort to know that if all else fails (hopefully it never reaches that point of course), the police can go and arrest somebody that caused us harm, and/or seize their assets.

I agree. I'm curious, however, to know what the D&B replacement will be for these types of operations in the future.

I believe CoinsSource provided a trust index for altcoin developers at one point [0], and it looks like Bitrated has a web-of-trust-based system for bitcoin-denominated transactions [1].

[0] https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/cryptocurrency-trust-index-d...

[1] https://www.bitrated.com/

Block chain and gpg keys. Confirmed transactions and feedback most likely.

I wouldn't use D&B as a metric of if a business is good or bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com