
Own your own Bitcoin Exchange - snitko
http://bex.io
======
clarkm
What is the appeal of this when the rates are so high? The fees on most
exchanges are in the .4%-.6% range for low volume. If I tried to run an
exchange and had to pay a 3rd party 1% of all transactions, I'd be running at
a loss.

Furthermore, you can pretty much already do this by buying/selling on
localbitcoins.com[1]. They provide an online wallet, escrow service, and also
charge a 1%, but they don't charge a monthly fee.

[1] <https://localbitcoins.com/cash_exchange_howto>

~~~
wmf
I almost don't want to mention this, but it could be a "selling shovels"
business model. Since they keep their $199 whether your exchange succeeds or
fails, it looks like they are offloading all risk onto their resellers.

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seandhi
By hosting the platform, are they trying to avoid licensing/regulation? After
all, they are not providing money transfer services, but are providing a
platform for others to do it.

I looked into legally building an exchange in Texas, but I would have to get
licensed as a money transmission company or a currency exchange company. The
fees were outrageous! $2,500 application fee, $300,000+ security deposit and
requires the applicant to have over $500K net worth.

~~~
grovulent
This...

The service seems to imply a business model where there are lots of little
operators would open an exchange if they weren't so capital constrained such
that they can't roll their own.

But how many with 500k to play around with are going to then want to pay 1
percent? Even if there are a bunch of people just waiting to sign up - then
the competition is going to see their margins evaporate - with no air to
breathe over and above that 1%. What else are they going to compete on besides
price?

Either that or I just don't understand this business model at all. Best of
luck to them though.

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jontaylor
Maybe they won't target US customers.

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nwh
Even though it is licensed to allow it, not giving credit to the creator of
the hero image on this site is a little unkind.

<http://redd.it/1c4er5>

~~~
qqg3
At the bottom, in the footer, they give credit...

"Background image is a fantastic work by cubrbeat, licensed under CC-BY-SA"

~~~
nwh
That wasn't there when I made the comment.

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w-ll
There's an opensource exchange being built, albeit with a terrible name (IMO)

<https://github.com/buttercoin/buttercoin>

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caissy
I don't understand why they want to build a high-performance exchange engine,
in Node.js. Even I wouldn't choose my language of choice, but would rather
look at either Java, C/C++, hell even Go or Erlang!

~~~
codewright
They're pretty clueless.

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wmf
I don't understand the point of having a bunch of little exchanges running on
the same backend. Why not just have one?

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bluetooth
Although this might not be the right way to do it, I think the goal of the
project is to exemplify bitcoin's "distributedness" and minimize the reliance
on a single exchange (ie MtGox).

~~~
wmf
Several exchanges running on the same backend aren't that distributed; there
are many scenarios where they would all go down at the same time.

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plainOldText
"... our technology is secured by state of the art techniques such as OS-less
deployment, eliminating a large variety of exploits."

OS-less deployment? Are they using Erlang on Xen?

I'm just guessing since I know Yurii is an Elixir (a flavour of Erlang) core
developer.

~~~
tkahn6
Could be HaLVM

<http://corp.galois.com/halvm>

~~~
carterschonwald
Halvm doesn't (yet!) support recent ghc versions. For high concurrency
workloads the ghc rts recently got some nice improvements merged in that will
make the mega scale concurrency performance story even more awesome once ghc
7.8 gets released sometime this fall

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lolcraft
If you can do so much, why not build a bitcoin exchange directly? It's not
like currency exchanges are that much a commodity for you to sell. Mmm...
aren't you a bit like making excuses for not trying? ;)

No seriously, if you made a bitcoin exchange site _with the same copy_ ,
that's the one I would use. Well. If I wanted to buy Bitcoin again. You know,
a _superhardened_ style, paranoid exchange. Maybe with its paranoid wallet
too, dunno'. So do it.

~~~
hackerboos
>If you can do so much, why not build a bitcoin exchange directly?

Because the margins are awful unless you are doing huge volume.

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maaku
Do I still need to get licensed as an authorized money-transmitter? Unless
you're getting me around that monumental obstacle, you're solving the wrong
problem.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
Where does it say that bitcoins are money?

~~~
wmf
[http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/pdf/FIN-2013-G0...](http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/pdf/FIN-2013-G001.pdf)

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morgante
This seems incredibly unnecessary, especially since I might actually use
_their_ exchange if they ran one. (More design chops than most of the
abhorrent exchanges.)

Though an alert() is a rather inelegant confirmation...

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eterpstra
Not sure I quite understand... Is this so the kids on the corner can sell
bitcoins for cash instead of lemonaide?

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geuis
I'm afraid this kind of scenario is doomed to failure too. The issue with
individual exchanges has been a lack of standardized security and hardware
configuration. Many exchanges get broken into and bitcoins get stolen.

The issue with something like bex.io is that now we have many different
exchanges, but all running on the same provider. Suppose that bex.io is able
to put the best security around their systems. It still will possibly only
take one vulnerability to get inside hundreds or thousands of exchanges.

Further, instead of DDoSing one or two exchanges like mtgox and btc-e but
leaving the rest of the ecosystem free for trading, it only takes one massive
DDoS against bex.io in order to take down hundreds or thousands of exchanges
in one go.

Bad, bad, bad.

What's needed is both security and distribution. Someone else mentioned a
node.js exchange product that's popped up in the last day or so,
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5545271>. Its called Buttercoin,
<https://github.com/buttercoin/buttercoin>.

The language its written in isn't as important as the fact that its open
source. If we get an environment of several open-source exchange engines that
can be hardened by their respective communities, we get security. (Yes,
individual instances are susceptible to bad server configs...).

By having relatively easy to setup OSS exchange systems, we get distribution.

People have complained that mtgox is a problem because its the largest extant
exchange. At least its a single point of failure that only affects btc and
money on its systems. Something like bex.io is going to lead to catastrophic
losses across any number of customers as soon as they start becoming a target
for nefarious people.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
DOSS attacks can be overcome with a solid infrastructure like Cloudflare
(expensive but possible) and also with the help of modern browser capabilities
such as webRTC and offline cache.

~~~
geuis
Services like cloudflare do nothing for API's, which is the core part of any
exchange system. Browser technologies have nothing to do with building out
secure, distributed trading systems.

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joaorj
"We do the tech. You do the rest."

... So, my job is to press the button that says go?

After i pay the 200/800$ off course.

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drakaal
High exchange fees. Little info about what it is built on. Suspect timing (and
likely too short of a build time) Likely to have regulation issues in the near
future especially if lots of people do it.

All adds up to not how I would do it.

~~~
gfosco
I've read over it twice and I'm convinced it's a joke, like MailAppApp.
<http://visualidiot.com/articles/mailappapp>

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justzisguyuknow
I'm getting tired of this website design style already.

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itistoday2
"Easy is not easy enough." Uh huh. Talk sexy to me baby. So now I've gotta buy
a bitcoin exchange too?

