$869 000 USD

SEPTEMBER 2013

AUSTRALIA

COINLENDERS

DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS

"Bitcoin lending. Get BTC loans with sane repayments. Or earn fee rebates on your deposited coins!" "CoinLenders is a website that offers (and keeps track of) bitcoin loans, and also offers credit ratings / ID verifications. We also plan on additional features over time."

 

"Get loans! Get your credit rating which you choose who to share to, apply for BTC loans.. You choose your interest rate and schedule!" "First of all, improve your credit rating so you're more likely to get a loan. Also list your reputation - we don't lend money to strangers. After that, visit the loans page."

 

"Earn fee rebates! Get fee rebates for having a balance or buying CDs. The current max AFR is 27.25%. Don't face a loss with lending yourself where defaults affect you!" "Fee rebates are paid daily as long as you have at least 1 BTC in balance. Deposits are prorated, as in if you deposit coins a hour before fee rebates is paid you won't get the full daily fee rebate. For more info, see the fee rebate page."

 

"CD stands for Certificate of Deposit. They are fixed return, fixed term bonds essentially. You lock in a fee rebate rate for an amount, in exchange for the deposit being fixed term. For more info, see the Wikipedia article." "You lock in this fee rebate rate instead of it being variable and subject to change at any time. For example, if you buy a 20% APR CD and the variable account fee rebate rate is changed to 18% after a few days, that CD will no longer be offered (replaced with a lower paying one) while you (who have locked in) gets 20% APR. More choice to suit you."

 

"Coinlenders.com is as legit as it gets in Bitcoin investments. It's run by Tradefortress, one of the most trusted (and hated for some reason) people in the industry. It is not a ponzi, he lends the coins out at a higher interest rate than he pays... and the bulk of the loans are secured with assets such as shares in Bitcoin companies."

 

"I have personally done over a thousand Bitcoins worth of Bitcoins with him this year."

 

"I can't offer anyone advice as to whether or not using such a system is legal in their jurisdiction, and I have never used the site coinlenders.com itself. I am only speaking as to the credibility of the person behind it."

 

"Important Notice: CoinLenders is not a bank or financial institution. This is not an investment, and CoinLenders does not solicit investments from anyone. CoinLenders is a fictional website operating for web development, entertainment and educational purposes only." "This is a demo instance of the CoinLenders Bitcoin Bank Script. While this demo is fully functional, nothing is real, and nothing is an investment."

 

"The hot wallet bitcoind is hosted on another server, and only has a small amount of bitcoins that will be topped up when we give new loans. We reguarly backup our MySQL databases. As with any bitcoin service, don't treat it as a government insured bank, use offline / paper wallets to store the bulk of your coins."

 

"CL used Inputs as it's wallet." "TradeFortress did not have any bitcoins stored in a cold wallet either for CoinLenders.com or Inputs.io."

 

"He might decide to go away with your money and you'd have an harder time getting it back, but if the government comes knocking at his door it won't care and confiscate anything anyway." "Thanks for your feedback, armchair lawyers."

 

"We're talking about the same guy who all of a sudden "oh hi Coinlenders is now closed down, this is a full working demo now, have fun". Honestly I would expect anything."

 

"Due to growing regulatory attention on Bitcoin, CoinLenders regrettably has decided to close it's service. As detailed on the site, everything was fictional anyway."

 

"We're now selling the CoinLenders script and we have a fully functional demo instance available here. It has been filled with real world data, take a look!"

 

"It took me 2 years, many late nights and much diligence to accumulate 6 BTC. Starting with faucets, then moving on to pushing small volume on violitile BTC & security exchange markets. All it took was 1 month to loose it all. The first half of my lose occurred through a close Internet friend of 4 years(who actually brought bitcoin to my attention) a P2P loan that defaulted. The second half of my loss now comes from this fiasco."

 

"Inputs does not lend out money, it does not have assets, it does not have shares, etc. It's much simpler to manage than coinlenders, which is why it is being done first."

 

"I understand that people want more information but nothing has been finalized yet, and you'll receive an email when there's updates."

 

"CL still has some assets and people did not lose all of their money." "Due to major hacks, Inputs does not have enough BTC to repay everyone fully which has also affected CoinLenders. If you have had balance shown on Inputs.io, we're dividing up the coins we do have left based on a sliding scale, and have sent it to the specified address. On your Inputs account, your balance should have flipped to the negative to indicate you've received a refund. We apologize sincerely for the lost Bitcoins. It's been a very hard lesson for us, and we're sorry that we have to pass it onto our users. Please respond to the email if you have any queries."

 

"All CL users with a balance (in the form of CDs, balances, withdrawals, to Inputs that weren't credited) will receive an email update within a week."

 

"Inputs.io accounts are being refunded partial amounts inversely proportionate to the amount of BTC they had at Inputs.io, using a sliding scale. As a rough estimation (see blow), deposits of over 10btc are refunded less than 50%, deposits below 10btc are refunded greater than 50%. There has been no announcement yet regarding CoinLenders Deposits."

CoinLender was a bitcoin lending platform launched by TradeFortress, the same individual who launched Inputs.io. The service appearrs to lend bitcoins that users deposited out to others, although it was claimed to only be a demo for legal reasons. Funds were stored in a hot wallet under the individual control of TradeFortress. At least 6514.894239 BTC ($869k USD at the time) was invested. After the inputs.io wallet was breached due to on of TradeFortress's old email accounts being breached, very few funds were disbursed back to CoinLenders users, a reported 219.383 BTC (roughly $29k).

HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?

Funds should never be stored in a hot wallet unless needed to active withdrawals. All other funds should be stored in cold storage and protected through a multi-signature requirement. Hot wallets should be insureed through self-insurance or an industry insurance fund.

 

Check Our Framework For Safe Secure Exchange Platforms

Sources And Further Reading

 For questions or enquiries, email info@quadrigainitiative.com.

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