That is a fitting image for the price of bitcoin: floating in space, pegged to nothing... 

ItBit Reveals Bankchain Project Won't Use Bitcoin

ItBit was licensed recently by Ben Lawsky to operate as a Trust, which, IIRC, gives it some advantages over ordinary exchanges in NY State  -- even if they get the NY BitLicense.

A Lawyer, a Jew, and a Texan walk into a bar.
The bartender confronts them, angry:
'What is this -- that stupid joke again?  Out!'
The Lawyer replies, "No, wait -- this is a new one!'

That was probably before they realized the legal implications of doing that. 

Suspicions were raised in another thread that a certain mining equipment manufacturer used BitPay to convert 1 M $ worth of bitcoin to dollars (without BitPay's knowledge, hopefully) by simulating a purchase of 1 M $ of equipment by a "customer" who was in fact the manufacturer itself.  (Bitcoins that, allegedly, had been mined by the manufacturer on equipment that it should have delivered to other prepaying customers months before...)

I explained:


See, I even put a "sorry" there. 

They are not a bitcoin exchange (like Coinbase is), and (AFAIK) still take care not to be used as one, precisely so that they do not need to register as MSB/MTB.  A payment processor is narowly defined in law: it can only accept payments from consumers on behalf of other merchants, in exchange for goods and services delivered by those merchants to those consumers.  They do sell the bitcoins, over the counter or on exchanges (not to the consumers) and take bitcoins from the consumers (but do not give them dollars in exchange).  Their clients are the merchants, not the consumers.

By the way, here is some analysis of the traffic through BitPay's wallet that I did last December.  The source data shows (among other things) their periodic deposits on Bitstamp and other exchanges.

Yes.


I did read their TOS and a discussion of this issue some months ago.  Is there something new that I should read?

Note "may".  

And I still wonder whether they are subject to the NY BitLicense.  IIRC, they had those exclusions in their TOS precisely to avoid the need for money business/trasmitter licenses and to operate in the whole US without separate state licenses.

Sorry, I meant "buy and sell from individual customers".

I recall their TOS saying explicitly that you could not use them to turn your bitcoins to cash.  Basically they came into play when you clicked "pay with bitcoin" at some merchant; they converted the merchant's price to bitcoin, took your bitcoins, sold them, and sent the dollars to the merchant's bank account. 

Have they changed recently?  Or are you confusing them with Coinbase?

BitPay is just a payment processor (e.g. it would not sell or buy bitcoins, or hold accounts in name of clients).  As such, it may have different licensing requirements. 

What about itBit?  Has anyone tried to use it? 

What will Gemini have that itBit doesn't have?

But if they instead distribute the BTC through Kraken, some of the victims may choose to sell anyway, expecting a fall in the price -- and thus causing it. (I don't see how the price could rise, in either case, as a result.)

Thanks!

Welcome back Tinkerbell, I missed ya...

Now. can i have that gif of a pink pony on a trampoline?

The bankruptcy liquidation process seems to be chugging along at its slow pace.  (Well, a bit slower maybe: since the deadline for filing claims was postponed by 1 month or so, the next deadlines may be shifted too...)

Victims will get their moer or less fair share of the money and of the 220'000 bitcoins.  However, that ruling, as I understood from that comment, actually means the opposite.  It said that the bitcoins in MtGOX are fungible like money in a bank, not individualized like clothes in a dry-cleaning store.  Therefore the depositors' claims against MtGOX are for a certain monetary value, not for a certain amount of bitcoin; and the trustee can pay everybody in JPY if he chooses to.


If the payouts are to be made entirely in JPY (my guess), I believe that the coins will be auctioned, and whatever amount he gets from the auction will be distributed to the clients.  He will get is fees paid from the spoils, but the spoils are not his property, so he cannot play trader with them.  Indeed, he should prefer to auction the coins, precisely to avoid being sued for losses due to incompetent trading.

Unless the disappearance of the 600'000 BTC was an operation of the Yakuza...

According to [this reddit comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fztzt/tokyo_court_bitcoin_not_subject_to_ownership/cttk8f8), the ruling was probably mangled by going through two reporters who did not quite understand it, with a Japanese-to-English translation to boot. 

That guy's explanation seems to make sense: what the judge probably ruled is that bitcoins are fungible, so that plaintiff cannot claim ownership of certain particular 458 bitcoins that are in the MtGOX estate, or even of 485 generic bitcoins.  The plaintiff can only lay a claim to the value of those bitcoins, according to some etablished price.  Therefoer the trustee could continue the normal process of gathering all assets and all claims, converting all to JPY, and dividing the former proportionally to the latter

In high school I learned about two oxides of carbon, CO (the locally bad one) and CO₂ (the globally bad one).  A third one, C₃O₂, was briefly mentioned in high school and in college.  Only recently I learned that there are in fact infinitely many carbon oxides or oxocarbons, some of them just as stable as the common ones, many of them with beautiful symmetric molecules -- and some of them known since the 19th century.  Many more relatively simple ones surely remain to be discovered.  There are also many oxocarbon anions consisting only of carbon and oxygen -- besides carbonate CO₃^2- and oxalate C₂O₄^2-, the only ones I knew until a few years ago.   There is even one (mellitate) that forms a natural gemstone, honeystone, perhaps the only gemstone that has organic carbon (organic both in the sense of having a non-trivial carbon-carbon skeleton, and also in the sense of being derived from chemicals of biological origin in peat bogs).  I haven't found any minimally stable oxocarbon cations, however; perhaps they could be construed using oxygen atoms in the +1 state, that are trivalent, if they could be buried inside an oxocarbon cage.  (This trivalent O⁺ moiety does occur in carbon monoxide, which is better described as ⁻C≡O⁺.)

Well, yes, they agreed to 8MB, in a document signed and sealed with red star stamps and all.  However, they added afterwards that they do not like the idea of switching to XT, and hope that the Core devs and Gavin&Co will reach an agreement.