vinyl_steelworks

We don't have a relationship with Mark. The last time we saw and spoke with him was at the settlement in 2008, and before that was back at Harvard. We do have a relationship with Dustin Moskovitz, we saw him at Burning Man three years ago, and we've kept in touch with him. We've grabbed coffee with him in SF and also got a tour of the Asana offices (his start-up). We're pretty friendly with a lot of people around Mark, but we don't have a relationship as of this moment with him.

Hindsight's always 20/20, but it seemed like a lot of the things that happened were unnecessary. There was a way for everyone to be happy and kind of win, and it didn't have to be a zero sum situation. Hopefully we can all learn from that as we move forward and become better people and learn to find the path of least resistance.

It's certainly quite an amazing company. I don't think any of us had any idea of how big it could actually be. I think the scariest thing is that it's probably not done growing anytime soon. We're really proud of the part we played, which we think was certainly material to getting it going and I think Mark has certainly done an incredible job shepherding it and leading the company to what it is today. I think that I'm really impressed with what it is and what it most definitely will be.

If you're so committed to Bitcoin, why hasn't your exchange implemented the latest Bitcoin technology yet? Things like implementing Segwit and transaction batching would not only benefit both your exchange and your customers but also the network as a whole.

Our Bitcoin hot wallet was made before Segwit was but a twinkle in Pieter Wuille's eye. It would be very tricky to retrofit Segwit into there. So we built a new hot wallet, from the ground up, with support for Segwit, transaction batching, Bech32 addresses, and all sorts of other goodies. We used that new system for Zcash, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, which is why we're already using both native and P2SH wrapped Segwit for Litecoin. We're working on migrating Bitcoin to the new system, and it should be done in Q1.

So we built from ground one with a security first mentality, our first 3 hires were security experts. Our chief security officer was the head of security for AirBNB, something like a 15 or 20B company so it's quite large. He also worked on Google Wallet and at Microsoft with the highly touted security group. We've used the best practices, multi-signature technology, hardware security modules, geographically distributed vault systems we've spent about a year and a half building state of the art both to prevent from external hacks and internal malfeasance and any type of errors. You know this has been the most important thing for us to think about. We take security really seriously and we recognize that security has been pretty much the downfall of Bitcoin companies before and we've tried to learn from that and build the best product possible.

So I don't usually buy my lunch with bitcoin because I'm worried that I'll be overpaying down the road so right now I'm holding my bitcoin.

Unfortunately the ETF regulatory process is a close process and we're not allowed to discuss the latest and greatest with it. We are working incredibly hard to make this happen as quickly as possible, and rest assured that nobody wants this to come to market quicker than myself and u/winky_pop.