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This September is our two year anniversary operating Bitcoin.com — the world’s most interactive web portal dedicated to educating the world about the technological innovation we all love — Bitcoin.
The website Bitcoin.com is a big project, and we’ve been steadily improving every corner of the site over the last two years. The domain has a long history and has passed through many hands over the course of the past eight years. In fact, Bitcoin.com was registered in January of 2008, a year before the protocol was released by Satoshi Nakamoto back in January of 2009. After the domain was created, one of the earliest bitcoin exchanges, Tradehill, took over the website six years ago but the ownership didn’t last long. The trading platform fell apart, and the domain was then transferred over to Roger Ver in April of 2014.
Ver explains that he purchased Bitcoin.com for an undisclosed sum. Originally Blockchain.info was going to use the website as the main landing page Ver says, but the idea never came to fruition. Following this Ver negotiated a deal with the Chinese exchange, Okcoin, to lease the website as he had several other offers from interested parties. Ver says that Okcoin provided the best offer for the lease agreement and the two parties worked out an arrangement. Okcoin didn’t put much work into the website’s design and in May of 2015 Ver revealed to the public that the exchange owed him funds for overdue payments. Ver explains that “Okcoin breached the agreement in every manner possible.”
“I now have a $570K USD, plus damages judgment against them,” explains Ver telling the story about his dispute with Okcoin.
When they took the website offline, and stopped paying the money that they owed, I decided to manage the website myself, and the current version of Bitcoin.com that we all know and love was born. – Roger Ver.
In the summer of 2015 Ver hired Mate Tokay, a successful entrepreneur as the Chief Operating Officer for Bitcoin.com. Tokay got very interested in bitcoin in 2012 and began mining using custom-built miners back in 2013. Following this, Tokay founded the popular cryptocurrency news website the Bitcoinist and sold the domain shortly after joining Bitcoin.com. Since then Tokay has been successfully managing the day to day operations for every aspect of the bitcoin-focused web portal.
“Bitcoin.com is a world-class website that covers every aspect of this growing ecosystem,” Tokay explains. “My ultimate goal is to make cryptocurrencies as popular as possible, and I knew working with Roger that the domain would go a long way.”
Three years later our web portal covers all types of bitcoin-related products, services, and educational venues. We have the hottest headlines in our news section, a bitcoin Wiki, a whole suite of wallets for every OS, charts, a world-class casino, podcasts, and so much more. The truth is Bitcoin.com is just getting started.
In addition to adding Tokay to the team, Ver hired Emil Oldenburg, as the company’s Chief Technical Officer. Oldenburg began working for ISP businesses early in his career working on networks and data centers. Following this Oldenburg worked as a security specialist at Nasdaq OMX, but got really passionate about bitcoin shortly after. Following his new passion for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, Oldenburg created the Swedish bitcoin exchange Safello in 2013. In the summer of 2015, Oldenburg began building Bitcoin.com from the ground up.
“I remember starting building Bitcoin.com in the spring; we started with just a simple static website,” Oldenburg details. “Then we migrated to WordPress, set up the news site, built a simple tools page, then got more and more servers. It feels like ages ago now.”
In September of 2015 Ver hired the writer, Jamie Redman, a bitcoin journalist and graphic artist to help start a bitcoin-based news section. Redman got into bitcoin in 2011 and had worked as a graphic artist/writer since 2002. In early 2015 Redman began writing for multiple cryptocurrency and bitcoin-based news outlets. Ver reached out to Redman because they shared the same libertarian-based ideologies and hired him as the first writer for Bitcoin.com. Alongside adding Redman, the news section also started with former Bitcoinist editors, Scott Fargo and Evan Faggert, and a few other freelance journalists. Since then, Redman has worked exclusively for Bitcoin.com as the news team’s lead writer and has written over 1200 articles on the website. Some of Redman’s articles have gathered well over three hundred thousand views and have exposed scams like the Ponzi operation Onecoin.
“Working for news.Bitcoin.com has been super fun, and our site has grown very popular over the past few years,” Redman details. “Our news team strives for greatness every day to be the number one source for bitcoin-related news.”
Over the past eight months our new Editor in Chief, Nanok Bie, has pushed Bitcoin.com’s news section to the next level. Further my colleagues Kevin Helms, Sterlin Lujan, and Samuel Haig provide us with top-notch reporting on the everyday events taking place in the growing bitcoin ecosystem.
Now Bitcoin.com has a lot of people on the payroll with a broad variety of sections covering every aspect of the bitcoin space. These days we have a mining pool, a voting section, a place where people can purchase bitcoin, cloud mining, an open and uncensored forum, and so much more. Over the past two years, our website has gathered millions of visitors every month, and we hope to bring that number to the billions someday.
We’d also like to thank our Chief Financial Officer – Natalia Ra, General Counsel – Daniel Kelman, Head of Design – Jeffrey Vier, Business Development – Jake Smith, Product Manager – Mike Malley, Graphic Designer – Luis Barreto, Web Designer – Makoto Takizawa, Translator / Author – Huang (Lightning) ShiLiang, Podcaster – Brian Wilson, Sales Manager – Mike White, Affiliate Marketing Manager – Tzvi Shishler, Global Support – Stephen Bitkilo, Bitcoin Games affiliate manager – Kaine Bell-Cross, Community Manager – Jason Sheman, Bitcoin Games Affiliate Manager – Mandy Goldberg, and Business Development – Tim Potter.
And our excellent development team who brings us all the magic from behind the scenes with Senior Developer – Clark Moody, Developers – Shaun Chong, Arsen Gasparyan, Joakim Johansson, Triet Cao, Joey King, Sam Cheng Hung, David Shares, and Hans Engren.
The entire Bitcoin.com team is super passionate about decentralized technology and the innovative bitcoin protocol. We look forward to bitcoin’s future and want our visitors and readers to know Bitcoin.com will be there every step of the way. Check out our new company blog today to hear from our passionate team members.
How big do you think Bitcoin will become as a currency, a network and a protocol? In what ways do you expect Bitcoin.com to follow and reflect that development and what else you do expect from us? Let us know in the comment section below!
Images courtesy of Bitcoin.com
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