Topic: [ANN] TorBroker - Fund your account in Bitcoin, trade >1000 real stocks and ETFs - page 6. (Read 58427 times)

Note there is currently a minimum of $10. For small orders the commission is therefore larger than 1%. For large orders it is 1%.

He means this is so obviously a scam you'd have to be about as dumb&deluded as Kludge to miss it.

Alternatively, Personal responsiblity and the Ponzi scam; So you think you're going to start a Bitcoin business, right?

What makes me suspicious is the 1% fee. I would believe in the service more if it had 5% fee.

Edit: not that I would still put any money to this.

We are fully aware of such offshore companies. However, according to our research, being a registered broker in any of the jurisdictions we have looked into requires you to perform time-consuming and intrusive KYC.

Also, if it is publicly known which companies are handling TorBroker accounts, our employed brokerages could be facing political pressure to close our accounts. We would also be attracting the attention of the authorities in the local jurisdiction where these companies are operating. With our current model, there is no political entity that the major securities regulators can pressure.

Care to elaborate?

I'm interested, but can you respond have you considered that^^, and why you are not implenting this that^^ way?

In other thoughts, I'm pretty sure that this is going to be one of the main reasons when the feds start their attack on bitcoin.

Just one question: are you all fucking crazy?

This is really good for insider trading. Gordon Gekko is pleased.

If these guy's have 1,000BTC to put up for insurance then they can also buy their own offshore fully legal brokerage/securities trading financial services company and do this on clearnet. Nothing illegal about anonymous directors running a brokerage service in Belize, Panama, Seychelles, or even New Zealand if you have a local employee there. As long as you are licensed in that country you can operate. Hell you could operate a legal brokerage out of Liberia.

also... that site also looks awfully similar to bitcoin24, and since one of them 'coded financial trading engines' cat is clearly out of the bag.

Kind of disappointed this service announcement has been relegated to the "Gambling" section. 

This actually seems like a pretty good execution of an interesting/dangerous idea.  Good luck to ya!

Are you asking if you should pay taxes on your gains on TorBroker? That's a case between you and the tax authorities in your area that you choose to inform about your gains. It will vary depending on location and we can't advise on it.

Or are you asking if TorBroker is paying taxes on gains from customer positions in our accounts? Our accounts are in jurisdictions with no capital gains taxes, so we can pass on the full profit to our customers.

What about taxes on short-term capital gains?

Thanks, Roger.

However, we disagree on the following:
 





Our lawyer has been in contact with the financial regulators in our local jurisdiction. He was given the information that at the moment there are no actual laws that explicitly forbid individual or company traders from passing on gains/losses to a third party that has no legal ownership of the traded securities. Furthermore, there is no regulation regarding deposits in unregulated currencies (bananas, seashells, bitcoins). However, they stated they would look negatively on such a service, but they wouldn’t be able to legally take action against it as is.

This means that they would have to change the legal framework before they could actually impede upon TorBroker’s activities. And even if they did change the regulation, the consequence would most likely be a fine to TorBroker and not a confiscation of customer funds. In the event of a change of legislation, TorBroker would alert customers.

We know that it will take time to build our reputation, but rest assured that we welcome any question regarding our service and are determined to prove to the community that we are in it for the long run.

Thank you for sharing this!

While I like and support this venture my intuition and common sense will not allow me to deposit any money, especially considering the amount of people / companies on these forums that turned out to be scammy, despite having their identities known by the community and being in possession of impeccable reputation. Nonetheless, I wish you good luck.

I don't know TorBroker or any of the people behind it,  but about a month and a half
ago they contacted me,  and at least one other well known member of the
Bitcoin community and asked us to publicly hold 1,000 BTC as a security
bond that would be used to refund customers if TorBroker ever disappeared
with their customers money.

While I fully support TorBroker's efforts to bring additional economic
freedom to traditional financial markets,  legally it didn't seem safe
for me to be the front man for this.

The fact that they were looking for someone to hold this bond seems to
be a strong indication that they are in this for the long term,  and do not
intend to disappear with everyone's money.
If the regulators are able to uncover the true identities of the
TorBroker accounts,  I am sure that they (the regulators) will steal everyone's money though.

I wish TorBroker the best of luck,  and financial tyrants the worst.

Very interesting, I can certainly see an advantage.

My curiosity is simply in how the taxes would work since when you normally sell a stock for cash you pay large capital gains taxes, as much as 40% for short term. If you are selling for bitcoins though you wouldn't have to necessarily.

The legal risk for the people operating this is massive though. At a 1% commission right now it is a -EV game, in the future this could be quite promising.

I've been predicting this kind of thing would happen for a long long time (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-price-increases-are-just-getting-started-7985)

Good luck to you!

Holding large amounts of savings for long periods of time is one way to use our service but far from the only one. It is entirely possible to deposit today, enter a position for 1 day, and then cash out gains. With our upcoming support for leveraged trading this will be even more attractive.

In fact, from the general security principle of decentralization, we want to encourage customers to hold their own funds if they are not actively trading.

Also note that it is currently not possible to hold Bitcoin balances at TorBroker - all balances and positions are denominated in USD. If we wanted to build up a large amount of customer holdings to run away with, we would probably have allowed customers to keep balances in BTC, because our target segment is generally long BTC.

However, we think the most important argument for our trustworthiness is the transparency of our business model. With a 1% commission on all trades (with a current minimum of $10), it is simply much more profitable for us to run a long term sustainable business than to deceive our customers.


Even though the activity of TorBroker is in a grey zone because ownership of securities are never legally transferred from us to customers and thus not a subject for law enforcement to scrutinize, this is a very important issue to raise and something that we have thought extensively about and which we will address in the following way:

All activity in the regulated markets is registered and potentially subject to examination by suspecting regulatory parties. In order to prevent third parties from linking the trading activity at TorBroker to activity in the real markets, TorBroker will randomly split all orders up and execute these through different legal entities on different brokers. Significant activity also allows us to subtract opposite customer positions from each other, obfuscating even further the origin of our activity in the regulated markets.

In this way the trading activity of TorBroker will “show up” in the real market as an unintelligible and untraceable mosaic of transactions by various smaller entities. TorBroker has a huge vested interest in evading the potential wrath of regulators and we will carefully seek to minimize the systemic risks of our service.