http://www.coindesk.com/btc-e-deposit-withdrawal-fees-customer-satisfaction-bid/
BTC-e Cuts Withdrawal Fees in Customer Satisfaction Bid
BTC-e, the notoriously private bitcoin exchange rumoured to be based out of Bulgaria, has revealed that it has reduced fees across three of its third-party withdrawal services.
The news was revealed via a string of Twitter posts beginning on 27th February and continuing into 28th February that called for USD and EUR withdrawal fees to be reduced to as low as 1%.
The move brings withdrawal fees closer to the site’s USD deposit fees, which were slashed to 0% on OKPAY and Perfect Money earlier in February. BTC-e imposes an additional standard fee of 0.2 to 0.5% fee on every transaction.
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/02/27/bitcoin-exchange-btc-e-a-mt-gox-alternative-is-an-internet-black-hole/
Bitcoin exchange BTC-e, a Mt. Gox alternative, is an Internet black hole
February 27, 2014, 8:38 AM
The two largest bitcoin exchanges currently available to investors, Bitstamp and BTC-e, both stand to gain market share in the wake of Mt. Gox’s sudden meltdown. But some are questioning the safety in using the largely anonymous exchange BTC-e.
Not much is known about BTC-e besides its size and some scant information on its website. It’s the second-biggest bitcoin exchange by 30-day volume, according to bitcoincharts.com. There’s evidence that BTC-e is already benefiting from the Mt. Gox halt; a Tuesday update on BTC-e’s support website noted that the support system would be moved to a new platform “in order to cope with the increased number of client requests.”
But who runs it, and from where?
The terms of use on the exchange’s website say it is governed by the laws applicable in Cyprus but the website’s description on Google says the exchange is based in Bulgaria. The support system’s latest updates are presented in Russian and English. The founders of the BTC-e bitcoin exchange have taken pains to remain anonymous, giving only the names Aleksey and Alexander in a December interview with CoinDesk.
Users are unable to send a message to the site’s administrator. When one tries, as this reporter did, a window pops up with this response: “Please use tickets to contact us about any questions & problems.” There is no email address easily available on the website.
BTC-e did not respond to requests for comment sent through the support system and a Twitter account purporting to be from the exchange. Interestingly, the handle@btcecom, on Wednesday only followed one Twitter account — that of Charlie Shrem, the New York-based bitcoin entrepreneur arrested in late January on charges of alleged links to the bitcoin-only drug market Silk Road. The account now follows no one.
Zachary Collier, who works as an application developer in Pueblo, Colo., questioned BTC-e’s legitimacy in a post on Reddit that has nearly 300 comments.
Collier, 25, told MarketWatch he started using the exchange more than a year ago because it was one of the first to support litecoin, a derivative of bitcoin. “I took the risk so I could [convert] some of my cryptocurrencies into litecoin,” he said in a phone interview, adding that he doesn’t keep his funds on the exchange. Read: To secure your bitcoins, print them out
“If we don’t know their identities, we can’t really know anything else about the exchange,” he said in a phone interview. One of his biggest concerns is BTC-e’s unknown location. “Some people think it’s in Bulgaria. There’s a good chance it’s in Russia,” he said. A location in Russia could be problematic because authorities there have come out against bitcoin, he added.
Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners who has invested in the Chinese bitcoin exchange BTCChina, predicted a more dire outcome for those switching to BTC-e in a tweet. He testified at the virtual currency hearings in New York earlier this year.
http://invezz.com/analysis/forex/147-btc-e-anonymity-reigns-at-worlds-second-largest-bitcoin-exchange
BTC-e – Anonymity reigns at world’s second-largest bitcoin exchange
Collapse of MtGox.com puts bitcoin accountability issue squarely in focus
The facts – such as they are
Its founders and owners are supposedly called Aleksey and Alexander, which could be pseudonymous, and they may or may not be young and/or Russian.
Its domain name is administered by the branch of an Australian domain-hosting company in Johnsonville, on the outskirts of New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington. Its support desk runs on a program supplied by an Indian company with an office in England and the content is in Russian and English. No physical contact details and/or phone numbers are provided on the website.
Welcome to the distinctly opaque world of BTC-e – with the seemingly terminal demise of MtGox now reputedly the world’s second-largest bitcoin exchange.
Then there’s the ‘Bulgaria connection’
The above insights have been harvested from a range of open sources on the World Wide Web. It’s not much to go on and, bizarrely, what we haven’t been able to find is more than a scintilla of evidence for the oft-repeated description (we ourselves are guilty) of BTC-e as ‘Bulgaria-based’.
But then, the other surviving major – Bitstamp – is equally routinely described as ‘Slovenia-based’, raising the spectre of south-east European domination of world bitcoin trading. Bitstamp indeed has a Slovenian founder and CEO – one Nejc Kodrič, whose photo on his linkedin.com page could have been taken for his high-school yearbook, he looks that young – but on the exchange’s website, in the only entry in the ‘About Us’ section, Bitstamp is placed in the picturesque village of Aldermaston in Berkshire, UK.
Back to BTC-e, and the purported Bulgaria connection, here’s an illustrative extract from a story running today at buzzfeed.com, about American Barry Silbert’s plans to establish a regulated US-based bitcoin exchange.
The two main Bitcoin exchanges aside from the crisis-ridden Mt. Gox — Bitstamp and BTC-e — are based in Slovenia and Bulgaria respectively.
Well, as mentioned earlier, we can’t find anything which puts BTC-e in Bulgaria in any shape or form.
Regardless of who created that Facebook page, don’t bother going there if it’s substantive – or indeed any – information about BTC-e that you’re looking for. There isn’t any.
Trying to nail down where BTC-e might be found by using the website’s ip address, publicly available at whois, didn’t help. The site uses the Cloud Flare CDN service and in consequence returns a different IP depending on where you query from. If you request that site from Europe, as we did, it returns the content of the site from Cloud Flare servers in Europe. Ditto if you’re in the United States – you get a US ip address. In fact the BTC-e.com site could be located anywhere in the world. That’s the Cloud for you.
Aleksey and Alexander speak to the media - apparently
How do we even know that BTC-e’s proprietors are Aleksey and Alexander? Only because – and to the extent that – some e-money media say so. On 11 December last, coindesk.com ran an item about ‘recent banking issues’ experienced by BTC-e customers and indicated that they – coindesk.com – actually got voice-to-voice with Aleksey and Alexander, though “they wouldn’t share their surnames”.
But coindesk.com felt able to write:
At least one of the banks involved in the process is located in the Czech Republic; the BTC-e site references Bulgaria in its SEO descriptions; the founders, Russian programmers Aleksey and Alexander, honed their skills at the Skolkovo tech park; and the BTC-e managing company is based in Cyprus.
That’s true by the way about BTC-e search engine results. If you google the name, you get under the website url the statement that it’s ‘a cryptocurrency exchange based in Bulgaria where users can trade Bitcoins’ and other things. You just don’t find that statement on the website itself.
For the ignorant on point, the ‘Skolkovo tech park’ mentioned by coindesk.com is more formally known as the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, a Russian government initiative being progressively developed just outside of Moscow, with the broad objective of lifting the Russian Federation’s game across all technology sectors. It does sound like the sort of place where Aleksey and Alexander might have indeed ‘honed their skills’.
Does it matter?
Should we – or anyone – care who is behind BTC-e or where it operates from? Knowing that MtGox.com had an office in Tokyo and a real face – that of the now much-hounded Mark Karpeles – hasn’t stopped that particular bitcoin exchange from shutting its doors, in all probability terminally and with significant loss to its clientele. And given that it is an absolute tenet of the bitcoin faith that no government controls it, the concomitant surely is that anyone shafted by the MtGox debacle or any other bitcoin-related shenanigan is entirely on his or her own.
It seems though that BTC-e itself cares. For just yesterday, a statement appeared in the News section of its website concerning the MtGox shutdown. After making predictably reassuring noises about the BTC-e operation, the statement says this:
Interestingly, there’s a similar MtGox-induced statement at Bitstamp.net, also in News and also from yesterday:
Bitstamp is now performing quarterly financial audits and will post our financial reports on our website.
It’s scarcely credible to us here at iNVEZZ.com that any investor would entrust either fiat money or bitcoins to an exchange about which not one iota of information is volunteered on the exchange website, so thumbing its nose at any suggestion of accountability should things go pear-shaped.
Seemingly Aleksey and Alexander, or whoever they are, did come out from under their particular rock to talk to coindesk.com but that is hardly a substitute for transparency – perhaps ‘glasnost’ is the more apt term here – in the operation of a major financial exchange.
Maybe ‘they’ know
It’s occurred to us that there is perhaps some underground current of knowledge surrounding BTC-e.com that we’re not privy to but that is shared by a cognoscenti within that exchange’s clientele. Certainly perusal of a sample hour of chatter early today on the BTC-e chat forum hosted by dcaz.net gave no indication that the exchange’s anonymity – or integrity come to that - is a live issue.
Which is fine for them, if such an in-crowd exists. But it’s not for the poor schmucks who may hereafter be induced to go trading on BTC-e, should it then follow MtGox into oblivion.
Aliosha, Sasha – it’s time to front up or sell out to someone who will.
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/02/04/volgograd-prosecutors-site-reports-yesterdays-btc-e-ban-story-hack/
Volgograd Prosecutor’s Site Reports Yesterday’s BTC-e Ban Story was a Hack
The Russian “ban” of BTC-e was a hoax.
The Volgograd Prosecutor’s official website has seemingly issued a retraction of the report it ran yesterday, in which it was claimed that citizens would be blocked from accessing BTC-e.
A machine translation of this latest news on the VolgoProc.ru site reads as follows:
04.02.2014
Note to editorsOn the prosecutor’s Volgograd Region is hacking. As a result, it was posted on the website the news that a criminal’s online resources are untrue. Prior to resolve technical issues, please check the authenticity of the news in the press service of the Prosecutor of the Volgograd region on the phone 4/21/31.
The initial report on the site has now been taken down.
It’s possible that hackers were responsible for either the original story or this retraction. Either way, there is little cause for alarm as we reported yesterday.
We will update this story as it develops.
Update: Russian reader and chat room resident, eliotcougar, who helped with context for the original story, suggests a possible explanation. Apparently, in Russia controversial ideas are sometimes floated online or in the media as a means to gauge public sentiment. Should opinion prove negative, they are then retracted as “hacks” or otherwise explained away.
Calm Down Internet, BTC-e is Not About to Be Shutdown
Picture via www.freestock.ca.
Update: BTC-e has increased fees on withdrawals to fiat.
Update #2: Looks like we were right for the wrong reasons. The original source for the story is reporting that their website was hacked.
A report out of Russia has some of the Bitcoin community worried because it mentions BTC-e and how it could be facilitating money laundering for terrorists. Let’s get right to the facts:
- The report is talking about blocking the BTC-e website in Russia. The website would be blocked under a new Russian law that allows the government to block certain websites associated with terrorism or extremism without a court order.
- The accusations are coming from one local legislator in one Russian city. The complaint needs to reach the Prosecutor General’s Office before any action can take place.
- BTC-e is located in Bulgaria, which means this is more about blocking a Bitcoin website in Russia than actually investigating BTC-e.
There are Still Problems for Bitcoin in Russia
While there are easy ways to get around a nationwide ban of BTC-e in Russia, the reality is that the regulatory picture around Bitcoin is still not very clear in this country. A country that is willing to ban websites without a review from any court is definitely the kind of country that would also try to ban Bitcoin. The Russian government recently sent out a warning about how businesses and the Russian people should try to avoid Bitcoin because of the risks involved with the digital currency. It may only be a matter of time before Russian regulators stop making recommendations and start shutting down Bitcoin businesses.
Banning Bitcoin Won’t Work
As I’ve written in the past, the reality is that a ban on Bitcoin will be about as useful as banning the BTC-e website. The Russian people will simply use Tor and VPNs to get around the strict regulations placed on the Internet or Bitcoin. The fight against Bitcoin is a battle that cannot be won by any government, but that definitely won’t stop them from trying.
Note: Thanks to eliotcougar from our chatroom for helping out with some info for this story.
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