Raphael Nicolle is the founder of Bitfinex. Before that he had an interesting path.

By day a helpdesk technician, during his free time Raphael became active under the account ‘ unclescrooge’ on BitcoinTalk. From this account he makes some interesting posts, including occasional climate change denialism, saying he would invest in illegal businesses, and at least one joke about underage prostitution to make bitcoin. …

At one point I tried to learn about a token called Kimchi. That token no longer has any volume or value to speak of.

I decided to summarize some facts about the failed crypto entrepreneur Jacob Kostecki. Today, the class action lawsuit against him has entered default judgement.

I wrote about a deeply exploitive scam called The Billion Coins. Unfortunately, that coin is still active and is still taking advantage of people. They have tried to rebrand to make themselves look more official, but are still the same group of scum.

I once wrote about a worthless token called slidebits. Now the creator himself removed the blockchain from his app. …

NOTE: THIS MAY BE UPDATED OR CHANGED AS I DEVELOP A BETTER PICTURE OF OWNERSHIP OF THESE COMPANIES, UPDATES WILL BE LABELED AS SUCH.

Havelock Investments was an early platform in the cryptocurrency space that allowed for a variety of companies to fundraise.

HAVELOCK INVESTMENTS MINING FUND — Havelock Investments Mining Fund was Havelock’s fund investing in Bitcoin mining.

KORB AND CO. INVESTMENTS MINING FUND — This is another fund that was meant for purchasing Bitcoin mining rigs. You can find the most recent copy of their website here.

SATOSHI DICE — Satoshi Dice was a game started by Eric Voorhees ( archive). Satoshi Dice was a gambling service where you could send a Bitcoin transaction to a specified address and could potentially receive significantly more in response. Eric Voorhees was charged with offering unregistered securities for these sales of ownership in SatoshiDICE and FeedZeBirds. …

Bitfinex is one of the historically largest Bitcoin exchanges and Tether is by far the largest stablecoin. Each potentially has significant influence over the industry on their own, and their interconnectedness makes this more of a concern. However, since both were founded years ago and many of the events have happened and been in revealed in bits and spurts it can be difficult to understand their place in the cryptocurrency environment. This will hopefully serve as a basic introductory document that will then prompt further research.

Bitfinex was founded by Raphael Nicolle, a helpdesk technician( best I can do for an archive is a screenshot), in 2012. It quickly grew in popularity in part due to its ability to serve as a meta-exchange where you could trade on Bitfinex, Mt. Gox, or Bitstamp from the same interface, and later their lending features. However, even from the founding there were issues that plagued Bitfinex. Not the least of which being that the source code for Bitfinex was stolen from Bitcoinica ( archive), an earlier hacked and failed exchange created by a 17 year old. Furthermore, the nature of the meta-exchange meant that they also frequently had large amounts of funds on other exchanges including Mt. Gox. As late as April 21st of 2013 you can see in the leaked email below that they had half of their funds on Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox was famously hacked for three years and had approximately 650,000 Bitcoin stolen, culminating in ending withdrawals on February 24, 2014 ( archive). It is unknown if Bitfinex had funds on Mt. …

UPDATE: This was refiled presumably as part of the formal movement from the Supreme Court back to trial and the actual decision came down in July. Thank you to Rob Stevens for reminding me of this fact.

Document

There was finally a new development in the long delayed Digfinex/iFinex/Bitfinex/Tether NYAG case. The New York State Supreme Court heard the appeal from Bitfinex and unanimously decided to send them back to trial, dismissed their motion to dismiss, and reaffirmed that they need to supply the ordered documents.

I will review the document below.

For those who do not know, I use to run a nutrition and health website called Scientific Nutrition. While running this site, I came across intermittent fasting and in reviewing the literature, I thought it was a potentially useful behavioral trick for weight loss. However, I also found a variety of people making entirely nonsensical claims about intermittent fasting. They believed it cured cancer, diabetes, and overall was the solution to greater health. I wrote a book called The Optimized Guide to Intermittent Fasting that was meant to look at a healthy framework for using intermittent fasting for weight loss, combined with scientifically rooted myth busting surrounding claims others had made. …

Crypto Capital is the money processor famous in both the QuadrigaCX case and the Bitfinex and Tether cases. Bitfinex famously handed them approximately $1 billion without even a contract. This is a list of companies who have worked with them for my own reference as I do research:

AirBEx — No longer open

MIMEX — No longer open

1BTCXE — No longer open (appears to have been owned by Crypto Capital)

Coinapult — No longer open

1EX.Trade — ‘There has been no trading activity in the last 24 hours’

MonetaGo — Appears to be still be open

BitMEX — https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/10/01/bitmex-exchange-charged-with-failing-to-prevent-money-laundering/

Chip Chap — No longer…

One of the best things about Twitter is all the different people that you get to meet and communicate with. For example, the founder of Tether (infamously sued for child sexual abuse and arrested in a house full of child pornography) would semi-regularly talk to several of us Tether skeptics in threads. In one he even told us that we knew more about Tether than he did (despite founding it):

Around this same time I received a direct message out of the blue from the one and only Brock Pierce who offered to help me short Tether, the ‘dollar-backed’ stablecoin that he had created. This was a very unexpected message, as I had never messaged with Brock before, and I had never before seen someone offer to help someone else short an asset they created. …