Topic: crypto.pm | an upcoming cryptocurrency exchange (Read 12751 times)

Lemon, aka Ryan Kennedy, Ryan Francis Gentle, Alex Green, has been exposed.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10JYJZ8-e_0SIXsDz_b2MYJxq8fVZ37PsOK689e4Bnng/pub

Also, this service looked promising. A scam is always disappointing.

pity! be a scam only for that little amount of money. of course, 500+ BTC is large enough for some fools for which they exchange their honor.

He's a scammer, that's it.

I lost money to him, LOADS of other people lost money to him.

Lemon: Give us our money back, or suck my balls, you thieving cunt wipe.

Just found out about this (hopefully still) coming exchange. I was wondering about the choice for mongodb since it's not transactional. (It is in my understanding that the trade engine is built on top of postgresql, but I don't know what kind of data on an exchange doesn't have to be saved transactional)

Lemon: I'm curious about why you don't show any progress after such a long period?

the site is still same as two months ago. you are wasting time or investors' money? you should give a clear answer.

For public clarification, this accusation is independent of Cryptography LTD and other employees. It is personal.

Please see this scam accusation https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/lemon-defaulted-loan-237537 .

soooo....
whats the story morning glory ?

Yep!

Still Alive?

There was an update pushed 3 weeks ago, and I did not want to push another change whilst I was going on vacation. I'm back tomorrow.

Tomorrow!

When will you be back?

the site is just as the same as it was one month ago.

I'm currently on vacation, hence not updating the thread :-). Having the joy right now of our email servers having just done down, resulting in my alert system flooding me.

Any news on crypto.pm? Seems like this topic has died off.

It's probably wise to remove those email address or at least make them a bit harder to be farmed?
#SpamPhobia

[email protected] is my personal email address, [email protected] is my work address. [email protected] is read by both myself and the managing director. The former two are now forwarding to my phone!

Oh, and for what it's worth: I find Lemon's explanation for why he couldn't make it to meet up in Bath perfectly plausible.

OK, I won't drag the thread off-topic with this any more, except to help satisfy Lemon's detractors by saying that:

• Lemon has my shipping address
• I can only accept the device shipped (not in person)
• being given a tracking number with reasonable notice would greatly help to ensure I'm available to receive the package
• I'm obviously happy to reimburse him for shipping costs upon receipt of a device broadly matching the description (it's a freebie after all!)
• for the benefit of readers of this thread I promise to post briefly both here and over on the nuPlay forum as soon as something is in my hands (or, in the case that things go wrong at nuPlay, as soon as it transpires that I won't ever be receiving one)

Now you've got me slightly confused.  For the record, is [email protected] read by you, the MD, or both?  (To make things clear for readers: I e-mailed Lemon 'To' [email protected] as published on his OTC GPG key and 'CC' [email protected] which he gave out publicly on IRC as the contact e-mail for begging for nuPlay prototypes as freebies.)

That would be a5m0, as well as yourself. So, two actually.


This is indeed correct. I moved on Saturday (to a lovely place in Bath) and am still not done with the unpacking. I have far too many courier deliveries tomorrow (as well as a BT engineer and somebody to replace a window); beyond that, a family member showed up today (with their son in tow) and I ended up having to play tour guide. For the record, I don't know Bath very well. Checking IRC completely slipped my mind, and only the ( [email protected] ) address goes to my new phone (I've only just upgraded). When I got home, I checked my email - saw one from you sent at around 1130'ish, and immediately responded. I can only apologize for not checking sooner, but with the move, the visit - and the lovely weather, it completely evaded my mind to be honest.

I'd still like to meet at some point, I can either come to you - or vice versa. As per above, you have my schedule for the next week... it's a it hectic.

Again, I do apologize for not responding sooner!

It might help to say which OTC moderator.


For the record, we did not meet today (Monday).  Lemon indicated on Sunday night that he wasn't sure he could make it, but that he would let me know as early as possible on Monday.  alaricsp and I were planning to meet anyway as we had an outstanding GPG keysigning geek-date, and Bath is lovely in the sunshine, especially with ice cream I hadn't heard from Lemon by 11:30 Monday and he wasn't on IRC so I e-mailed him letting him know how to contact me to find us in Bath.

I next heard from Lemon at 20:30 Monday by e-mail, by which point alaricsp and I had both left Bath; he explained why he couldn't meet during Monday day and offered other times when he'd likely next be available to meet (right then --- Monday evening --- or towards the end of the week).  I won't be taking him up on those offers.

On my phone so will only post briefly for the moment. I will take what you have said under consideration and decide what to do next. Please understand though, neither I; nor many businesses - would seek to do this in a public forum. My educational and training history is something I consider to be irrelevant. In terms of past (and active) projects and employers? That is something I'd be happy to post on the site. Business relationships though? I would not expect any business to say we are doing business with x and y whilst things are on going.  Once we have assured long term partnerships? Sure.

I am very disenfranchised with the legal system in the UK, this is something I have tried to make clear.

We were intending to build trust over time due to our lengthy launch time frame. The escrow service itself is designed for small amounts and is something put together to build trust. It is where we decided to start.

Most new businesses fail, if anything - bitcoin has a higher success rate based on those figures.


This is not in regards to KYC or AML. General enquiries, liability checks, etc is what it is referring to. Apologies for any confusion.

For avoidance of doubt, questions posed and opinions expressed here and in my past and any future posts on this thread are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of any other person or group of people.  I certainly do not claim to represent any of the ops on any of the Bitcoin IRC channels on Freenode except myself.


Personally, I do not find the answers given thus far to form a satisfactory answer to the questions posed.

If you choose not to provide further elaboration here, so be it, but I will not be using e-mail for this enquiry; I respectfully decline your invitation to take the questions to a medium in which the content, and the absence of a reply by either party, couldn't be independently verified by others.  Since you've invited me on IRC to "post a summary of the conversations" anyway if one were to be held by e-mail, I don't understand your reluctance to address it here.  It'd only take one post to answer the questions to a level that would satisfy anyone interested, presently or in future.  You could even edit the one you already made to save on post-noise.

Observation: There's a good reason people often qualify what they say with "I Am Not a Lawyer" on the Internet, and it's not hard to see why someone would be reluctant to be seen as one even if they were paralegals or did any other legal work.  You don't seem to share that reluctance, in my opinion.  People who are qualified are usually, understandably, quite proud and open about the fact that they are qualified, and how they came to be qualified.  I'm neither inferring nor implying that you're therefore not qualified; merely observing that your reaction to this line of enquiry seems uncharacteristic of those qualified people I've known.

To stray a little from the specifics of the question, so that it's clear why I ask at all, and why I ask here: reputation in the Bitcoin world has historically been earned and justified in the open[1].  Some who might work with you, invest in you or entrust money to your escrow service or completed exchange might require more reputation than you have yet earned in the ~18 days you've been here (as of this posting).  Therefore it might be to your (business's) benefit to provide more evidence of what reputation you've earned prior to your Bitcoin involvement, or under what other names you've participated in the Bitcoin community previously if you have.  As I'm sure you'll point out, those who might work with you/entrust money to you are free to take you or leave you, but you might encourage more to take you by making at least some of your previous successful accomplishments, qualifications, business relationships, and your identity, more open.  You're doubtless aware that you're entering a market in which ~45% of entrants have so far failed[2], and therefore of how important this stuff is to your potential customers.


It's true that this thread is posted under "Project Development", but you seem happy to "derail" it yourself to reply to other non-development questions, including:

• to say you're "working with a legal firm" on KYC/AML compliance (yet confusingly you also say that "Having a lawyer on the team has allowed us to avoid those pesky legal fees")
• what currencies and deposits you're going to be working with, and with what banks
• where your servers are located
• your fees/business model for generating profit/financial projections
• your sources of funding
• choice of domain names/branding
• interactions with regulatory bodies
• shares remaining for potential investors

[1] I'm not claiming to have any substantial reputation in the community myself in the mere ~69 days I've been interested in Bitcoin, but then I'm also not asking anyone in that community to trust me with their money, save for isolated individual counterparties in the minimal number of OTC and escrowed BitBargain trades I've participated in.

[2] I've not checked whether that paper includes Bitfloor, Bitcoin-24 and Bitcoin Central, none of which are currently executing trades, so the 45% figure may be out of date already.

A number of those questions remain unaddressed in your reply, but as you've pointed out they're largely a matter for your potential investors, depositors and escrow users to investigate as part of their own due diligence so I won't push you on them.  There's one exception; specifically, I'd be interested to see an answer to:


I'd like to break it down a little.  It's all really part of the same question, but I'd like to be sure specific parts are asked:

• Are you currently a UK solicitor?
• If not, were you in the past, and at what time?
• Either way, what exact qualification do you hold, from what institution in what country?
• More generally: have you stated that you are a lawyer (as in, used the word "lawyer" to describe yourself, as opposed to "solicitor")?
• If so, what qualification do you hold that you believe merits the title "laywer"?
• If not, why?

I'm making no assertions or claims about you here, and I'm certainly not asserting or claiming that you're not a lawyer or not a solicitor; I'm just asking questions.  In the UK, for the protection of consumers, "solicitor" is a protected title.  Anyone using that term first needs to be granted a Practising Certificate; to make that claim or use that title in the UK without such a certificate is a criminal offence in its own right.  Such certificates are a matter of public record for the protection of consumers.  There is one exception: from the page linked above: "the only genuine ones not on there are those who have requested their removal from the database".  Please be clear about whether this applies to you, and if so we can cross that bridge next.

In the UK at least, this is not a question on which people are allowed to be cagey or unclear.  I'm not implying any right on my part to obtain an answer to this on an Internet forum; just saying that the entire UK can be partitioned into two non-overlapping sets: those who legally have to say they're not a solicitor when asked, and those who legally have to say they are when asked, for whom it's easily verified with public records.

On another note, I'm about to push the latest version to the testing platform - which includes advanced sell orders and a more in-depth transactional history!

We've sent out quite a few invites to date, and if you've requested one (but have yet to receive) - you should get an email within the next day or so :-).

To clarify in case there is some confusion. I am not the managing director or business owner (as can be found listed on public records). I am the platform architect, and I guess - the face of the community (for now).

I do not have the authority to disclose any potentially sensitive information (and have provided the direct address of the MD to the above poster). In regards to a completely different business that I am involved with (and have an ownership stake in), there's honestly not a chance in hell that I can disclose customer information.

I can potentially request from a few of the customers I know closely that they confirm, but please email in order to chase that up. They are entirely separate businesses.

Edit: A device is being shipped to an OTC moderator.

Edit 2: I'm also meeting one of the OTC moderators for lunch on Monday, and will be happy to further discuss this with him.

You are welcome to contact nuPlay in regards to nuPlay hardware. Cryptography LTD is not linked to it in any way, shape or form.

You are also welcome to contact the managing director of Cryptography LTD (who is not me) via [email protected] for evidence, identification or clarification on any point.

Edit: To clarify on the first point, releasing customer information is something that cannot be done indiscretionately. To clarify on the final point, the disclosure of ongoing business talks is not something I can imagine any business disclosing in full. The managing director can decide whether or not what they wish to disclose.

Please list your previous companies.  Please provide details of one customer, veritably a separate person, who has received NuPlay hardware and is prepared to say so.  Please provide pictures of the unit.  Please provide some evidence of your experience in financial software.  Please state your exact qualification in law, the certifying body, and where we can find a certificate. Please provide evidence that "we" is anyone but just you, sitting alone in your flat in your underwear. Please provide any evidence whatsoever of the "high level talks" or high level contacts you've claimed to have in UK banking, businesses and regulatory organisations.

Address has been rotated three times due to investor request. At this stage, no shares are remaining - nor will they be, if the 80 currently on hold are completed.

From your investment page:
However, 1DidPinfrZqKHqbfCz4yjy32NYey7jMaxo shows only two 10 BTC incoming transactions.

The development and testing platform is in Ireland.

Where are the servers located?

The fee is fair, 0,18 is less than the 0,2% BTC-e is taking. I'm not talk about gox because it's a robbery...

This is currently being looked in to :-).

Hope other virtual currencies, such as litecoin, or Liberty Reserve, are also supported.

Since you can hardly support RMB, besides HK$, LR is an alternative to support Chinese buyers, since they're using LR to buy gold.

It actually is! We've been talking actively with HSBC in regards to this, it's a market that we can't ignore.

is HongKong dollar on the schedule?

Good luck mate. I look forward to more of this stuff. At last GBP will be added finaly..yess.. Have you thought about a way of using a Virtual reality interface down the line? and how big are your predictions on transactions in the near future?
Also, how much advertising do you think you will have to do and where?
cheers
 

We're using bootstrap simply for prototyping, nothing more :-).

whoops my apologies. i remembered the 6, but i thought gox was 0.06%

very well then, my mistake. good luck to you i hope those fees will work out nicely for you and for the customers. i will keep an eye on your progress and potentially join if you get the liquidity



no troll pal, legit mistake. good for them for taking a stand against these high fee exchanges. my mistake is that i thought that they wanted to take advantage even further

dont get mad because i insulted bootstrap. who cares about rapid prototyping. there are plenty of other frameworks available as well such as Zurb Foundation which looks 100x better than bootstrap

and you conveniently ignored the part about every bitcoin startup looking exactly the same. if i wasn't aware of bootstrap, which most avg internet users are not, i would assume that every one of these websites are build by the same college kid in his basement. trying to make it look like individual companies when really its just one big stable made from the same person. thats what all these bootstrap websites look like. hell, i'm sure bootstrap can be customized to make it look different as well, but people dont even bother doing that, so the criticism is deserved

Who the hell cares more about looks then functionality? Bootstrap allows for rapid prototyping!

You proceed with making it blatantly obvious how big of a troll you are:

Gox: 0.6
Bitstamp: 0.4

Link me a legit exchange that beats an average transaction fee of 0.18.

Given mtgox starts at 0.6% (https://mtgox.com/fee-schedule), not entirely sure of the reason for your statement.

yet another bitcoin website based on the ugly ass bootstrap framework

every fkn bitcoin website looks exactly the same

and wtf 0.18% fee is more than 3x the other exchanges

We don't believe in failure, therefore we don't hope, we know ;-)!

ah well all good then. A bit odd that you do intend but do not hope tho =P

Our financial projections are quite solid on this front. We do indeed intend (not hope) to turn a profit.

well right you have to charge something to prevent spamming. But do you hope to turn a profit at 0.18%?

If you look, we charge a flat 0.18% fee on trades. Are you referring to our escrow service? If so, it's a cross-marketing tool.

add a fee. wise people dont trust people who try to give them something for free.

or at least you need to tell us very bluntly what you stand to gain.

Will do, though I'm sure I did

Just to let you know that we're looking in to the feasibility of this.

Drop an email to [email protected] .

Can I get an invite there please lemon

So, testing is going very well at the moment - and user feedback has been critical to the ongoing development of this platform. Talks with the FCA are going well, and we've narrowed down our choice of bank down to two after a number of high level talks.

Invites for the simulated test platform are still available.

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We've now completed our migration from our testing platform (which was on crappy Heroku) to our development platform. We've also deployed version 0.35 to the masses.

We're still handing out invites to those interested!

Suggestion: NZD along with a local bank to send/receive funds to/from

Invites are now being sent out in batches!

Edit: Linked dashboard screenshot ( http://crypto.pm/gfx/crypto-dashboard.png ) has now been updated.

We've built prototypes in more than one language, but you might be interested to know that BigDecimal/BigInteger was ported to Node. I'm not confident about floating point in the least, but I am confident in "immutable, arbitrary-precision, signed decimal numbers".

https://github.com/iriscouch/bigdecimal.js

Interesting to see that you're courageous enough to use Node.js despite lack of integer (or decimal) types in JavaScript. Have you cooked your own decimal library or are you just confident that floating point works well enough even in the monetary domain?

.pm is hardly country neutral....since .pm is a country...but hey....

Being from the uk myself, I dont care on the name, just gimme a uk exchange

It's not necessarily better to use a .com; and as we're targeting a global market - we wanted a country neutral domain. Out of all the suggestions given to us by our brand agency, we ended up with crypto.pm - I like it personally!

It's a distributed worker environment, but the test environment is working with one of everything on the exchange side. In terms of testing, clients across the network simulating a full browser experience using the websocket API (which is what the site uses).

May I ask about the testing environment? Was that from a single client over network, or a single local client? Also, single client actually can't make a trade, as two clients are needed. What is the connection protocol, API?

I am interested in the performance testing, and am going to conduct a performance testing of ICBIT exchange, however I would like to do it as close to real situation as possible.

I have decided I would like to help with the project, as you are UK based and seem serious about this venture then I feel I could add to the venture. I can do branding, web design, 3D, Illustration and pretty much any design related content. If you can do the technical stuff I am confident I could create a professional looking exchange, my coding at the moment is limited to HTML & CSS. I have been working on this project lately (http://www.marketutopia.co.uk/).

How come the .pm domain name by the way? Is it not better to use a .com and register the .co.uk too?

That many trades per second is based on a single worker node currently, and they should (theoretically) scale up as traffic increases - increasing the total number of trades per second that the engine can handle. The postgresql database is clustered to hell and back and can handle damn near whatever we throw at it.

If you're interested in what the testing dashboard looks like, here's a link to a screenshot.

http://crypto.pm/gfx/crypto-dashboard.png

Now you have my attention. 60,000 trades per second is much better than the current trading platforms.

Whilst we do not require any form of external funding to bring this project to fruition - we are considering a cryptostock style implementation, we'll have some more information in the near future.

We're finalizing our encryption standards, and will be releasing details on this this coming Friday. In terms of trades per second, it can currently handle a little over 60,000 per second - and we're still in the midst of doing heavy optimization work on the engine.

Sorry if I have appeared vague in terms of specifications, but as we're finishing off finalizing them - I didn't want to provide false information.

Max... Keiser?

Hey Max Keiser do open a receiving bank in Panama it would be great.

Vite

We've received quite a few emails in regards to crypto.pm - and we'll be offering invites to roughly another 40 people if they're interested in testing the trading platform. Testing is performed with simulated currencies during the early days.

We are physically based in the United Kingdom, which is the reason for our working with the Financial Conduct Authority (they are the main financial regulatory body in the UK after the FSA split on April 1st). This project is the result of a number of talks with key people in the UK banking and trading industry in regards to the hoops we would have to jump through. We've decided that the hoops won't be a problem.

Where are you guys operating from?

When I refer to KYC, I'm referring to the inclusion of anti-money laundering checks.

KYC is all well and good but what about AML?

This is definitely something we're planning on. The legal groundwork to accept currency in multiple formats with receiving banks in numerous countries (for speed and cost reasons) is an absolute nightmare, but is something we're making headway on!

Sounds interesting! Do you consider SEPA funding four us european folks?

People watching this thread might be interested to know that we are currently in talks with the FCA (successor to the FSA) with the goal of becoming authorized and are also currently working with a legal firm in order to ensure full KYC compliance in order to achieve maximum stability of the business.

If you're interested in testing this platform (test mode uses no actual currency), please drop an email to [email protected] and we'll get you an account provisioned!

Whilst we have yet to even begin drumming up interest in our upcoming platform (or even make the launch page public), I've decided to post some information about it here in order to celebrate the fact that we've finally settled on a name (of which a domain was actually available). We highly doubt that we will be launching to the general public before at least six months from today, due to the legal groundwork involved - and also due to the fact that we also have no intention of releasing a faulty product.

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[ About ]

crypto.pm is an advanced cryptocurrency exchange featuring state of the art security and performance enhancements. Our goal is to provide a trading platform that offers 100% highly performant uptime, whilst providing the highest level of resilience and security available.

We treat every single bit of information that we store as if it was our own credit card number. With hashing and encryption taken to a level that some might find overkill, we ensure that the security of your data is absolute. Beyond this, to ensure performance - we have built a highly redundant self scaling architecture that grows as traffic levels rise.

Sadly, we won't be ready to launch to the general public for quite a while. After all, we want to do this properly and ensure that we release a resilient platform that will be used for many years to come (and let's not forget all the legal paperwork that we need to deal with). In the interim, what we mostly need are ideas. Whilst donations are always appreciated, we are far more interested in what we can get out of your brain. So, if you have any suggestions for us - then please, let us know.

Now, for the interesting part. Our fee structure. To be blunt, we are not looking to make a profit with this exchange, as long as costs are covered and we can ensure that there is a healthy safety buffer - then we're happy. As a result, we have a flat fee of 0.18% across the board. There are no volume discounts, and we're pretty sure that despite that, we will have the lowest trading fees on the market.

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[ FAQ ]

Currencies
At launch, we will be supporting the following currencies.

AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, USD

Fees
0.18% (flat rate)

* additional fees charged by payment processors may be incurred.

Security
We take security very seriously. Each and every bit of information that we store (and we try to make it as minimal as possible) is treated as if it were the credit card number of a staff member. Numerous forms of encryption and hashing are used in order to ensure data security and core system access is multi-factored and highly limited.

Beyond this, we highly recommend that you withdraw any large amounts of BTC held in your account following a trade to cold storage unless you intend to use them in the near future. Support for automated transfers if no account activity has happened within days is provided for people wishing to take advantage of this feature.

Verification
People trading over a certain level of currency will be required to verify their identity. This is a regulatory requirement and if we chose to ignore it, we could not offer this service and would possibly enjoy some prison time for facilitating money laundering.

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[ Technology ]

Client Side
html
javascript
websockets

Server Side
aggressive caching
clustered architecture
geodns balancing
mongodb
node.js
postgresql
redis
websockets

Development Side
caffeine
snacks

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[ Contact ]

Have any questions? Interested in potentially joining this venture? Get in touch.

Email
[email protected]

Telephone
Available on request (to prevent mass spamming).