Own your own Bitcoin Exchange
bex.io
bex.io
Furthermore, you can pretty much already do this by buying/selling on localbitcoins.com[1]. They provide an online wallet, escrow service, and also charge a 1%, but they don't charge a monthly fee.
I looked into legally building an exchange in Texas, but I would have to get licensed as a money transmission company or a currency exchange company. The fees were outrageous! $2,500 application fee, $300,000+ security deposit and requires the applicant to have over $500K net worth.
The service seems to imply a business model where there are lots of little operators would open an exchange if they weren't so capital constrained such that they can't roll their own.
But how many with 500k to play around with are going to then want to pay 1 percent? Even if there are a bunch of people just waiting to sign up - then the competition is going to see their margins evaporate - with no air to breathe over and above that 1%. What else are they going to compete on besides price?
Either that or I just don't understand this business model at all. Best of luck to them though.
Doesn't it cost $30 million to get licenses in all the states that required it?
That certainly seems like a broken system. I'm not sure why there isn't a federal law or an agreement between states that one license can be used across states.
I've read that laws like this exist because of lobbying done by Western Union.
Contrasting with the EU. One license in any EU state means you can provide services across the EU.
"Background image is a fantastic work by cubrbeat, licensed under CC-BY-SA"
OS-less deployment? Are they using Erlang on Xen?
I'm just guessing since I know Yurii is an Elixir (a flavour of Erlang) core developer.
Sound like the kind of line you put on your home page to make it to the top of hacker news.
No seriously, if you made a bitcoin exchange site with the same copy, that's the one I would use. Well. If I wanted to buy Bitcoin again. You know, a superhardened style, paranoid exchange. Maybe with its paranoid wallet too, dunno'. So do it.
Because the margins are awful unless you are doing huge volume.
Though an alert() is a rather inelegant confirmation...
The issue with something like bex.io is that now we have many different exchanges, but all running on the same provider. Suppose that bex.io is able to put the best security around their systems. It still will possibly only take one vulnerability to get inside hundreds or thousands of exchanges.
Further, instead of DDoSing one or two exchanges like mtgox and btc-e but leaving the rest of the ecosystem free for trading, it only takes one massive DDoS against bex.io in order to take down hundreds or thousands of exchanges in one go.
Bad, bad, bad.
What's needed is both security and distribution. Someone else mentioned a node.js exchange product that's popped up in the last day or so, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5545271. Its called Buttercoin, https://github.com/buttercoin/buttercoin.
The language its written in isn't as important as the fact that its open source. If we get an environment of several open-source exchange engines that can be hardened by their respective communities, we get security. (Yes, individual instances are susceptible to bad server configs...).
By having relatively easy to setup OSS exchange systems, we get distribution.
People have complained that mtgox is a problem because its the largest extant exchange. At least its a single point of failure that only affects btc and money on its systems. Something like bex.io is going to lead to catastrophic losses across any number of customers as soon as they start becoming a target for nefarious people.
... So, my job is to press the button that says go?
After i pay the 200/800$ off course.
All adds up to not how I would do it.