Notes · ongoing entries

Bitcoin Exchange History and Operations

Short pieces on the mechanics of running a bitcoin exchange in its first years: how one was funded, how it was vetted, how it priced bitcoin against ten different currencies, and what happened to the people holding balances when it failed.

BitMarket.eu's brief operating history, from its 2011 launch to the 2012 loss and partial resumption, provides the chronology for these notes. Its multi-currency market structure supplies the operational context for the questions they examine, from custody and banking access to pricing and payment rails. Each entry isolates one narrower issue and can be read independently, in any order.

Between roughly 2011 and 2014 a bitcoin exchange was a small operation solving problems that had no precedent. There was no custody standard, no proof-of-reserves practice, no regulator with a settled view, and frequently no bank. Banking access, custody practice, price fragmentation between venues and a reputation built on forum threads rather than audits are the problems these entries keep returning to. A great deal of what the sector now treats as obvious was worked out in public during those years, usually after something had already gone wrong and someone had lost money. Each note takes one of those problems and follows it as far as the evidence goes, which is sometimes not very far.

Sources are named in every piece. Press releases, regulatory filings, contemporaneous trade reporting and the exchange's own published announcements are cited by link where they exist. Where a figure or a date could not be checked against a primary source, it has been left out rather than estimated, and where the record simply does not explain something, the entry says so instead of filling the gap.

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