As Mt. Gox erupts, SecondMarket, best known as a place to unload Facebook stock pre-IPO, emerges from the molten lava with plans for the first ever U.S.-based Bitcoin exchange. It will mimic "the early days of The IntercontinentalExchange," with founding members from "Wall Street banks and well-funded Bitcoin startups (but not, interesting, VC firms)."
San Francisco magazine says all the heat surrounding Bitcoin has attracted the kind of unsavory schemers you might have once found on the trading room floor. But they're not just trying to manipulate the Bitcoin market. Their plan of attack relies on the frantic hype surrounding new varieties of "altcoins," like say Dogecoin:
At a panel on virtual currencies held by the New York Department of Financial Services yesterday, Bitcoin investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss warned banking supervisors that too many rules would "cripple" the volatile crytocurrency. It seems the twins only like an overzealous legal system when it adds to their bank account.
Earlier this month Andreessen Horowitz hired the secessionist, Balaji Srinivasan. The academic and entrepreneur infamous for suggesting that techies build their own society "outside the U.S." scratches off the secessionist label with one hand, even as he writes dreamy odes to "a cloud country of our own" for Wired. Now, Srinivasan is aiming his science fictional phasers at death.
Before he was one of the most powerful VCs in the world, Peter Thiel created PayPal, which deals in real dollars and boomed accordingly. If you think this might make him wary of unregulated internet funny money, you're wrong: $2,000,000 wrong.
