1) Buttercoin does not appear to be a registered money transmitter. They've known about this requirement for months, they've had the financial capabilities to do this for months...and yet they haven't bothered so far. See http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstatesel....
2) They started off as open source, took a bunch of free code, and then ended the open source aspects of the project.
3) They took a substantial amount of BTC donations (even more substantial now with the higher F/X rate) and never returned those donations when the project pivoted from an open source software project to a V/C funded business.
One of these red flags is bad enough, but 3 together is a big, red, flashing "STAY AWAY".
They clearly don't have the professionalism or the wherewithal to handle the basic foundational aspects of their professed industry. I recommend staying away from them before they become the next MtGox.
So is AirBnb with one of the coowners listed on top 100 FBI cyberscammers list.
Im sorry but having a rubberstamp of PG is not the same as having blessing of Elon Musk, for example. PG seems to be drifting into the dark side. What worked for Airbnb (scamming people on craiglist to solicit airbnb) worked as charm on SocialCam when the idea was to scam as many of your Facebook friends as possible.
> I think people will be wondering if this resembles the founders' ideas when they were funded by [PG], and if this represents the kind of company you wish to be funding.
Its a matter of how much "hustling" you like. Someone that hacks a traffic lights and show you how cool they drive and remotely change their lights to green, or someone that hacked a traffic lights and show you how cool sixty cars, twenty dead drivers pileup looks like....
Can you link to the top 100 FBI cyberscammers list? I did a bit of googling and was unable to find it. Also which owner of AirBnB is on the list? By owner do you mean a founder or one of their investors?
#2 is why the Affero GPL was invented. When you contribute to open source, be aware of what you are agreeing to, with respect to folks who might want to take and not share alike.
Hi gamblor956, your concerns are all valid. I'll do my best to address them inturn.
1. We'll be disclosing our approach to applicable licenses at launch within our FAQ. Keep in mind, each country has different requirements. We're rolling out globally and will use a different approach in each country we launch in.
2. Regarding the open source parts of Buttercoin, Benentt (Buttercoin's CTO / co-founder) has been talking to our approach on reddit, http://bit.ly/1lu58J0
The project started off as a bit of announce-first development in response to the MtGox issues during the run-up in price last April. We had a lot of really enthusiastic people all trying to figure out what it was we were actually trying to do. Many people wanted to build a completely distributed exchange, others wanted to go other directions. That's the beauty of open projects, even if it can be a bit overwhelming.
Cedric and I already had an interview with Y Combinator scheduled to pitch a different bitcoin idea. A few of us decided to focus on building something we could use to launch a real platform and pitch that instead. We started from scratch and kept it closed to focus on that, always with the intention of opening it back up once it was at least somewhat usable.
It's taken way to long to get there. Why are we waiting for launch? Mostly because we're too busy. There's still a good amount of code specific to our deployment mixed into the stuff that's actually usable by anyone else. I'm embarrassed to admit we even have a couple of test passwords and API keys floating around in the repos. In short, we're humans of limited capacity. If I were to do it again, I'd go about things differently, but if we can put up a technically solid trading platform that helps make bitcoin (and other digital currencies) more widely adopted, then I'll have no regrets. ===
If any donor would like their bitcoins back, just send us a signed message from the address you used to donate along with a message to hello@buttercoin.com.
Also, for transparency's sake here's the wallet address we've been receiving donations at: 1McqPj92jvWfFg5F24dwyDSUptjTosH2EY
1) Buttercoin does not appear to be a registered money transmitter. They've known about this requirement for months, they've had the financial capabilities to do this for months...and yet they haven't bothered so far. See http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstatesel....
2) They started off as open source, took a bunch of free code, and then ended the open source aspects of the project.
3) They took a substantial amount of BTC donations (even more substantial now with the higher F/X rate) and never returned those donations when the project pivoted from an open source software project to a V/C funded business.
One of these red flags is bad enough, but 3 together is a big, red, flashing "STAY AWAY".
They clearly don't have the professionalism or the wherewithal to handle the basic foundational aspects of their professed industry. I recommend staying away from them before they become the next MtGox.