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zanetackett
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I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 3:01 pm

Hey Everyone,

I'm Zane Tackett, the Director of Community and Product Development at Bitfinex, ask me anything!

At Bitfinex we've been making a bunch of updates to the site over the past few months and we're really happy with the progress we've made. Here are some of the things that we've done that we're really proud about:

Segregated Customer Wallets: Through our integration with BitGo, each user has their own multi-sig HD wallet, there is no longer a single pool of all the customers bitcoin. This allows each user to independently verify their funds on the blockchain in near-real-time.

WebSockets: We recently released beta.bitfinex.com which runs on WebSockets, this makes the entire page update in real-time directly from the trading engine, greatly reducing lag and providing the freshest view of the order book and your position.

Security updates: We've made a slew of security updates to our security center, this includes: PGP encrypted emails, advanced API key permissions allowing users granular access control from API keys, Clef two-factor-authentication, and various other small changes.

You can see all of the changes we've been making on our change log: bitfinex.com/changelog

I'll be happy to answer all of your questions!

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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 3:26 pm

Hello Zane

I was re-reading Antifragile by iconoclast thinker Nassim Taleb recently. He writes
"Never ask anyone for their opinion [...] Just ask them what they have -or don't have- in their portfolio"
I have come to think it's a very relevant question and you can better weight people's opinions having an idea of how many Bitcoins they hold (or do not hold.) So Instead of asking their opinion on bitcoin, I'm now asking every participants the same question:

- Do you mind to tell us which percentage of your personal net worth and/or liquid assets you hold in Bitcoins ?

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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 3:53 pm

Hi Zane, thanks for doing this AMA.

My question is, has Bitfinex started using Liquid and can you tell me what the results have been so far if you have started using it? If you haven't started yet, is there an expected launch date, and will the results be shared publicly?

Thanks!

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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 4:04 pm

Thank you for joining us.

And Wow, that's very cool about Bitgo, the multi-signature wallets you have, and the fact that customers can now see that their assets are actually there.

I also really appreciate the option to do pgp emails.

I was wondering, when did you initially start getting interested in bitcoin? What part of bitcoin initially attracted you?

What are your thoughts on the whole bitcoin scaling debate?

Will Bitfinex follow most of the rest of the industry and and switch to BIP 101 this December? Why or why not?

How does your customers breakdown in terms of nationality or continent? What places do you see the most interest in bitcoin?

How do you see bitcoin and the bitcoin space develop in the next year? What about in the next three years?
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zanetackett
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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 4:43 pm

- Do you mind to tell us which percentage of your personal net worth and/or liquid assets you hold in Bitcoins ?
I don't have exact numbers, but almost all of my net worth is in bitcoin. I do however use various products to hedge, or lock in a usd price while still holding the bitcoin (bitbays arbitrage fund for those that are wondering). I receive 100% of my salary in bitcoin and have for nearly 2 years now.
My question is, has Bitfinex started using Liquid and can you tell me what the results have been so far if you have started using it? If you haven't started yet, is there an expected launch date, and will the results be shared publicly?
We're still working with the Blockstream team on implementing liquid, we don't have an expected launch date yet but we're making progress and have high hopes for liquid. We're looking forward to completing the integration and offering our traders access to some of the most exciting technology in bitcoin.
I was wondering, when did you initially start getting interested in bitcoin? What part of bitcoin initially attracted you?
I found out about bitcoin the day the $260 bubble popped and have been enthralled ever since. I guess the first part that attracted me to bitcoin was the novelty of it, something that allows me to send money from anywhere to anywhere, at anytime, to anyone, instantly, and for free. As someone who's lived abroad for a decent portion of my life and loves to travel, the ability to do frictionless cross-border payments really excited me and got me looking more into the technology. I also share a lot of the political views that are associated with bitcoin, so I liked it from the political aspect as well.
What are your thoughts on the whole bitcoin scaling debate?
I think it's very very silly. I don't understand how people cannot have a civil debate and every discussion just turns into a childish squabble. The community on /r/bitcoin is quite toxic in this regard i think, posts get downvoted regardless of their merit simply because someone doesn't fall in line with one belief or the other. I also think the accusations thrown at Blockstream are beyond ridiculous. These people were working on bitcoin long before blockstream and have maintained their views from before blockstream was around but people are saying they're intentionally trying to break bitcoin so that they can profit from it. I think that's ludicrous. Furthermore, a year ago when blockstream had their funding round every one was super excited for what they were going to do in the future, and there was so much hype around sidechains, now there seems to be a huge backlash around that exact product which garnered so much excitement not even a year ago. I think both sides have valid points and need to work together to find an amicable solution. Because of that I'm not a big fan of the way hearn has basically said "if i don't get it my way I don't want to work on bitcoin anymore and i'm not going to maintain lighthouse or anything like that". I think they need to find a middle ground. But that bunch of people (core devs, mike hearn, gavin, blockstream) are all way smarter than I am and I trust them with bitcoin's future and believe a good solution will be reached.

Please know that these are my personal opinions and not necessarily those of Bitfinex.
Will Bitfinex follow most of the rest of the industry and and switch to BIP 101 this December? Why or why not?
I think saying that most of the industry is switching to BIP 101 isn't exactly accurate. There's a large portion of the industry that isn't going to switch to BIP 101 and I think there is still uncertainty from some big players (charlie lee saying coinbase won't back bip 101 while Brian Armstrong said he will). But a lot of the Chinese side don't seem to want BIP 101 and they definitely have a say in the matter. That being said if the majority of the industry does go with BIP 101, I believe we will as well.


How do you see bitcoin and the bitcoin space develop in the next year? What about in the next three years?
Things in this industry grow so fast I never know what to expect. I think we'll see some amazing advancements and I can't wait to see where we are in that time. I think that in three years there will be a lot more infrastructure built around bitcoin which will make it much more frictionless and easy to use, which im really looking forward to as a big bitcoin user myself.
Last edited by zanetackett on Fri Dec 04, 2015 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 5:35 pm

Zane,

If you could wave a magic wand and instantly change one thing about bitcoin (or a related topic), what would that be, and why?

I'm intentionally being very open-ended with this question, but only asking that you single out something specific.

Appreciate your response!

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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 5:38 pm

Hi Zane,

I hate other exchanges, but only poloniex, gatecoin and Kraken let me trade Ether! When will Bitfinex support Ethereum??

-It's a top 5 coin by market cap.
-It's what most news stories are actually talking about when they say "blockchain without bitcoin".
-Microsoft is launching it on Azure.
-R3 with Deloitte, CIBC, Goldman Sachs, et. al is looking at Ethereum smart contracts to be the foundation of their interbank network.
-can already exceed 127 transactions per second and can support sidechains (SPV inside contracts google BtcRelay)
-Slock.it has it integrated into hardware (similar to how IBM had it running a washing machine).
-We can put it on Raspberry Pi Zero and get essentially the same functionality as the 21inc Bitcoin computer (and after PoS it can "mine" on it thru staking).

And this is just what it can do NOW... in about 12 months it'll switch to CASPER PoS and with planned scalability improvements (sharding) is expected to exceed 100,000 tps capacity!! (Better than peak Visa capacity!!)

And it's only about $1 USD most days because the liquidity is garbage on those exchanges listed above!!

Thx!

zanetackett
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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 7:38 pm

If you could wave a magic wand and instantly change one thing about bitcoin (or a related topic), what would that be, and why?
This probably doesn't sound too good, but if I could change one thing it would be the price. I would like the price to be higher for one reason, higher market cap. At this price we kind of have a chicken and egg problem with bitcoin. It's too small for a lot of use cases, but it needs people to use it for those use cases to grow out of it's small size and thus limited role. For example, if a major company wanted to pay their suppliers in bitcoin for something in the tens of millions of dollars range it would be near impossible to do without causing so much slippage that it's no longer viable. If the market cap were larger it would open up a lot more possibilities for bitcoin. My opinion is quite similar to that of Wences Cesares and what he's said in relation to this.

This is a really hard question though, cause there are lots of things i'd want to change: regulation, bank relationships, merchant adoption (i wish i could spend my bitcoin everywhere) and a whole bunch of other things.

zanetackett
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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Dec 04, 2015 7:41 pm

Hi Zane,

I hate other exchanges, but only poloniex, gatecoin and Kraken let me trade Ether! When will Bitfinex support Ethereum??

-It's a top 5 coin by market cap.
-It's what most news stories are actually talking about when they say "blockchain without bitcoin".
-Microsoft is launching it on Azure.
-R3 with Deloitte, CIBC, Goldman Sachs, et. al is looking at Ethereum smart contracts to be the foundation of their interbank network.
-can already exceed 127 transactions per second and can support sidechains (SPV inside contracts google BtcRelay)
-Slock.it has it integrated into hardware (similar to how IBM had it running a washing machine).
-We can put it on Raspberry Pi Zero and get essentially the same functionality as the 21inc Bitcoin computer (and after PoS it can "mine" on it thru staking).

And this is just what it can do NOW... in about 12 months it'll switch to CASPER PoS and with planned scalability improvements (sharding) is expected to exceed 100,000 tps capacity!! (Better than peak Visa capacity!!)

And it's only about $1 USD most days because the liquidity is garbage on those exchanges listed above!!

Thx!
Right now we don't have any plans to add any other altcoins. Me personally (not bitfinex per se), i'm kind of a bitcoin elitist, i do believe all of the alts have their roles to play but i'd like to see how far we can take bitcoin and would personally prefer to focus on that.

I'm well aware of ethereums promise, i've been following it for a while and have talked with Vitalik and others from the Ethereum team on numerous occasions. I know that it is receiving a lot of interest from banks, and has a lot of capabilities. But for the time being we don't have any plans to add eth to the exchange. Sorry.

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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Tue Apr 26, 2016 12:27 am

Who are the owners of Bitfinex? How many owners are there?

CryptoCrypto
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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Wed Feb 28, 2018 11:41 am

Cool, thank you for this AMA

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Re: I'm Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, AMA

Fri Mar 09, 2018 6:42 pm

Cool man. I wish you all the best. How you got the idea?

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