#tradehill

Bitcoin’s Price Plunge: Bloomberg West (02/07)

Bitcoin Reels as Mt. Gox Exchange Halts Withdrawals

Tradehill open to holding more auctions as it grapples with regulation

21 October 2013 | By Danny Bradbury | Coindesk.com

Bitcoin exchange Tradehill says that it may continue with its auction business after a successful first sale of Avalon ASIC miners. The firm operated an auction for ASIC mining company Avalon, in the midst of struggles to resolve its regulatory issues.

This month, the San Francisco-based company conducted a two-week auction to sell Avalon’s 60 Ghash/sec units. Tradehill founder and CEO Jered Kenna has left the door open for future business with other auction clients. “We can’t say when the next one will be, but with the success of this one, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do it again,” he said.

Tradehill took the auction business from Avalon after it was forced to halt trading in bitcoin due to issues with its bank, the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union, at the end of August.

“We’re not operating as an exchange right now due to operational and regulatory reasons, yet it’s extremely easy to provide services that are all-bitcoin,” said Kenna. “I’ve been friends for quite a while with Yifo [Guo], the owner of Avalon, and we told him that we could auction off his ASIC miners without too many changes to the code.”

Bitcoin London 2013: Panel session - The rising stars of the Bitcoin start-up ecosystem (by STARTFORUMTALKS)

The second largest exchange for buying and selling bitcoins, TradeHill, has shut down its trading operation and is returning funds on deposit from its clients.

The announcement from the exchange's CEO, Jared Kenna, blames 'increasing regulation' and losses exceeding $100K USD when transfers to the exchange were reversed by a payment processor (presumable the July 2011 incident in which TradeHill claimed Dwolla withdrew funds).  A post on BetaBeat regarding today's closure also references the exchange's trouble processing transactions after an issue in January affecting their account at Citibank.

Though Kenna describes the intention to pursue licensing and raise funds, the TradeHill staff are now working on Bitcoin.com with a release planned before the end of the month.  There was no mention of what service this site will offer.

The second largest Bitcoin exchange, TradeHill, has published what they believe is evidence showing that information in Dwolla's transaction reporting cannot be relied on as far as determining whether or not funds for a payment have been secured.

The transaction logs published indicate transactions that have reverted from "credited" status to "pending_credit".  Dwolla refers to Dwolla Payments as being like cash but the exchange complains that when the status of a payment reverts and the funds are no longer secure, the exchange cannot treat payments from Dwolla as being like cash.

For the moment, TradeHill will not accept funds from Dwolla customers.  Withdrawals from the exchange are still being processed.

A previous post of ours addresses this situation further including the discovery by TradeHill that Dwolla Terms & Conditions agreement now explicitly allows for chargebacks.

TradeHill, Bitcoin's second largest trading exchange, is hiring for a wide variety of positions.

Open areas include:

Dev Ops/Deployment/Systems (deal with servers in dozens of data centers)

Computer Security (build a bank that has better security than existing banks)

Programmers – Python, Javascript, C, … (if you wrote your own lisp-dialect, that’s a plus)

UI/UX Designers (help us build next-gen mobile, web, and merchant interfaces)

Positions are open in their San Francisco; Washington DC; and Chile locations.

TradeHill's Announcement

TradeHill opened its BTC/EUR market exchange and can now accept EUR funds deposited with SEPA transfers.

In today's announcement the exchange stated that there is no fee charged for SEPA deposits and that EUR withdrawals as SEPA transfers are free as well.

This addition brings the number of markets operated by TradeHill to six.  The others are BTC/USD, BTC/AUD, BTC/CLP, BTC/INR, and BTC/LR (for the Liberty Reserve USD digital currency as well).

Other BTC/EUR markets are operated by Intersango and Bitcoin7 in addition to the over-the-counter half-escrow BTC/EUR market through BitMarket.eu.

TradeHill's entry into the EUR space will likely be welcomed by many following problems at Bitcoin's largest exchange, Mt. Gox.  Mt. Gox has announced further complications that have delayed their ability to accept EUR deposits.  The exchange has been unable to accept EUR deposits since July 11th when its bank discontinued service to the exchange.  These delays could extend until July 26th.

Mt. Gox operates a BTC/USD market and EUR funds deposted are converted to USD  upon receipt at the exchange.  Though the exchange does not report fund flows from deposits and withdrawals it is believed that the exchange sees more deposits in EUR than it does of USD.

Mt. Gox continues following an ambitious path.  Today they announced the acquisition of MtGoxLive.com, including its popular realtime market depth chart and its recently launched mobile app.  The MtGoxLive Trader mobile app can be used not only for making bitcoin transactions but for sending and redeeming the exchange's redeemable codes (vouchers).  Mt. Gox vouchers can be used to send funds from one Mt. Gox account to another, and are available in any USD or BTC denomination.  MtGoxLive Trader is available for Android.

Also expected from Mt. Gox is the ability to add Hong Kong Dollar (HKD) funds and possibly Chinese currency (renminbi) funds with deposits of Chinese Yuan (CNY) as well, according to statements made by the exchange's operator in the #mtgox IRC channel.  

In August the exchange also expects to offer trading for its home currency, the Japanese Yen (JPY).  This will be the exchange's first market to exist alongside its BTC/USD market.  For the time being, it will also be the only BTC/JPY market though a new exchange, Ruxum, has described plans to offer JPY deposits to their exchange.

Growth in the number of currencies supported and in the number of exchanges and markets where trades occur is occurring rapidly.  For instance, our Bitcoin Exchanges Popping Up Like Daisies post from yesterday has already become out of date.  Yet seeing Bitcoin being embraced globally means these additions are likely to become even more frequent.