For the last few weeks I have been doing some in-depth checks into CoinReturn and its founders. Here is a brief summary of my findings and observations for the benefit of the community:
Negative Points- Introductory blurb states that the company is registered in Cyprus, however this is not the case. I asked the the CoinReturn team about this and they said that while this was the original idea, they changed their minds on this after seeking legal opinion.
- We have yet to see the delayed stream of trade history as mentioned in the company introduction
Positive Points- The Coinreturn team are fairly communicative and continue to be up-front and open about the operations of the company
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shareholder in CoinReturn.
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Just curious about the level of checks you were able to make.
The domain owner's name is anonymized in WHOIS search. So how did you know if the ID you saw belongs to the owner ?.
The investment return looks good. I just wish the owners will open up with all the secrecy , so one is sure who is managing the funds.
We're going to try to cover alot of replies here... We're glad to see SamboNZ put out his report, we saw him as a neutral third party who has history of acting as a sort of SEC for cryptostocks so we we're willing to comply as best we could (trade history, background info). We admit we (Tom and Jeff) had pretty strong opposing opinions about the benefits/risks of disclosing a photo of sensitive information (in this case Tom's DL), so in the end I (Tom) agreed to disclose a pic of my ID to SamboNZ.
Our hesitance regarding this disclosure about the specifics of our location isn't a mystery but we're going to go more in depth here... To backup a bit, when we started we thought if we could host our website and register our various accounts through IPs based in Cyprus then we could, from a legal standpoint, be based in Cyprus. Foolishly, we didn't based this on anything an attorney had told us but rather on our own assumptions. Months later, after talking with a mutual friend who is an attorney familiar with this area of the law they informed us that routing our IPs through Cyprus is not only pointless, but worse for us in the end since we would be misrepresenting ourselves.
To come clean, we are in the United States. We haven't wanted to reveal this since in the U.S., regulatory agencies like the SEC don't approve of Bitcoin investment vehicles like ours and those in the U.S. who have been open about their identity have been fined and had operations stopped. For instance, look at
two cases here from an SEC press release. Note the one involving SatoshiDice mentions:
".. SatoshiDICE...ultimately returned these offering proceeds to investors in a buy-back transaction in July 2013. A significant rise in the exchange rate of U.S. dollars to bitcoins actually increased the amount paid back to investors to approximately $3.8 million for 45,500 bitcoins." So even with investors receiving a full return and profits the SEC still extracted $50,000 from the operator. Those who have been on CS a while may remember
Multipool, whose project owner tried to do the right thing and disclose his info only to have the SEC shut down operations.
Clearly SEC involvement in any Bitcoin based investment fund is basically a death sentence and if we ever face action from the SEC we don't know how easily or fairly we will be able to get investors funds back in an equitable and fair manner, not to mention potential fines and court charges toward us.
We did, however, reveal our actual names and information about ourselves, just not our location. We have a good idea of what info is out there already about us and the SEC would have to use alot of resources and hours (and the SEC's $1.3bil budget is stretched thin as is) to figure out which Tom Mica's and Jeff Lombard's are actually running this fund, which controls <$100k (small change compared to other bitcoin investment operations). So basically from the start, we've had to balance disclosing as much as we can about ourselves but to a point that regulatory agencies can't exactly figure out who/where we are. It would be nice to be able to be totally open, but this twisted regulatory system actually punishes those who try to be open and honest.
We hope nobody here feels misled since we tried to address these issues in this thread in the first few pages, however we apologize for things we weren't open about, like our location. We've been unsure whether to address this or not but we figure more people are going to ask about the whole Cyprus/location thing and we really just want to get it out in the open. As always we welcome your questions and will do our best to answer them. However, in this instance we aren't too eager to give out any information that would make it easier for regulators (the SEC mentions these forums in the linked pressed release)
Next topic:Today's dividend is about to be paid out. We'll admit it's pretty mediocre, however we're somewhat in the middle of some trades, or rather waiting for some orders to get filled. We've had almost entirely sells today and the buys we have had just occurred recently.
Fans of technical analysis and charts can see that today , or have heard there is a bit of talk of, an incoming drop. Look at the 1d, 12h,.., 2h settings on bitcoinwisdom and you can see what has the potential to be a dip coming soon. Now of course this could change and we could be made to look like jackasses right after posting this, theres alot of bullish news (ebay/paypal buzz, expedia, etc) which might help but we are still expecting a drop, even if its only to 600.... Currently its on a small $15 uptrend at the time of this post and is getting close to triggering our break-even at different points (640-650) but we're still bearish right now. We had some fill when we went below 620 but that will be on next dividend. Bottom line: if the bear trend gains steam next dividend should be pretty nice.
If anybody is confused by charts or by what were describing don't be shy about asking and we'll gladly post some screenshots and break things down.
Phew...that took a while to type!
Sorry for the long post.
-Tom