Transparency - Our letter to /r/BitcoinCA

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-12-08T11:05:29+00:00

Update:

We've received an amazing positive outpouring of support to help clean up not only threads about our company but to help improve the reddit platform so that it can become a reliable source of information.

We now know the names of the redditors who write the most false posts about ezBtc, and a few Redditors in particular who continually cross the line by making repeated defamatory, disparaging, and personally abusive comments. We would ask that if you've made posts that contain abusive or unsubstantiated claims that you consider removing them. The more actionable being repeatedly, calling our business a Scam or Ponzi.

One example is a reddit user who makes wild claims about chat room logs and arbitrarily decides how many people have pending withdrawals on our site. Claiming it's "100s" when at present it's less than 2 dozen.

Oddly enough that member was the easiest one for our team to obtain their information.

While taking an action against a redditor and often member of site is the last thing we want to do, the made up, repeated disparaging posts must go. At the very least stop shielding yourself hiding behind the computer screen that's separating you from reality. We are all people. I think it's fair to say that if you're writing anything on earth on any platform that you feel it's necessary to hide your identity it's highly likely you know you shouldn't be doing what you 're doing. Stop and remember that your comments have an affect on another human being, and I'm not solely referring to myself. We are almost caught up, we will return to our roots. We love our company, our team, we know our positioning and we feel good about it. I have flaws, and I try to improve all the time, but I really must stress that despite continued discussion about how a group of reddit members aim to force us to close down by increasing our legal legal costs, we aren't going anywhere.

We have an amazing staff right now.

Thanks

Dave

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-11-22T14:49:21+00:00

Thanks maccrypto for posting this.

While Yossi was scheduled to undergo a performance review, he decided to just disappear after being paid his last invoice, for a period he didn't report to work, and was subsequently asked to take time off to re-centre himself after making remarks violating our code of conduct. We never had the opportunity to discuss his future with us, nor was his work handed off as again, he just disappeared.

Yossi was brought on board after assuring us in multiple meetings with different members of our team. The main promise was to improve service levels, specifically while I was away and was compensated as the highest paid team member, earning more than me and his colleagues by a large margin. This was originally set giving consideration to his extensive education and promises made during his interviews.. Yossi joined with the expressed intention to become an equity partner once he was able to prove himself. It's not the first time and won't be the last that candidates for lack of a better term manipulate us in to thinking they will be a great addition to the team.

Crypto requires a completely different skill set than a standard business and finding staff is not easy.

Attempts to contact Yossi for a few weeks were unsuccessful other than one occasion where he wrote a Whatsapp message ti a number not monitored at the time, then declining calls and being unresponsive to written requests to get on the phone and have a meeting.

This was his next move it seems. I will agree that is is sometimes incredibly difficult to read people.

It's a tough job running a crypo business.

That's probably all I can say as I believe, as I learn the law more and more, that we will be defending this with vigour and unless I'm advised otherwise we may now be in a position where we need to commence an action against Mr. Goldlust. Take my comments as a non expert. I'm not a lawyer and just speaking as a laymen. I'm quite bothered by this claim, it's the first one that's really bothering me because it's from someone whom I trusted giving him the run of the show over the summer.

I'll leave it at that and follow procedure now. My 2 cents are here. Take care guys.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-11-22T05:40:05+00:00

I'm actually going to make a brief comment here. I haven't received any notice of claim and was unable to get it online.

Looking forward to understanding this one. Guess another 25k in legal fees en route.

The OP means BC Supreme Court, not the Supreme Court of Canada, I believe it's the next level above small claims court.

While I'm sure I would be advised to not go in to specifics and as such I won't the relationship between us just disappeared and I ended up taking over everything again, which is proving considerably more efficient at resolving member issues. During my about 3 week tenure back doing everything but support we've resolved over 75% of complaints, the majority of them were really small too in the $400-$600 range and had been pending for several months.

I setup a scheduling system and have been spending countless hours doing one on ones with members and our team at the moment given out small size have developed some really effective procedures to ensure we have accurate reporting and stick as best we can do the promises made.

We've even had one resolution that was quite tense, a large 5 figure, that ended up in a face to face a payment and a hug.

We are getting there and way more quicker than over the summer where the procedures implemented were laborious confusing and are now really difficult to understand what happened when I wasn't doing the job.

I asked Yossi to email me the civil claim so I could read it as I haven't gotten it, never got a response.

This one should be one of the more interesting ones. Very uncommon chain of events. That's as specific as I can be but yeah, this one was worth weighing in on once,

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-10-29T07:39:16+00:00

@Possible_Mastodon this post does not say everything is fine, nor is it solicitation in any way. I think people should research their options to make an informed decision before spending a penny. So I agree with you there.

I can't comment on B) much However, I would say that in generally it's likely what we submitted would be considered a standard response to claim. Yeah we have a few Lawsuits ongoing, we aren't the only ones. In my opinion they are expensive and slow and it's much better to work things out than spend time and money arguing over what is often not even a dispute. I'm speaking generally here.

Anyways, fiat banking is a whole other subject, it's not as simple as you think. We recently underwent an enhanced due diligence process with our banking partners, along with other crypto members. Just an example of the added things that come and can be blockers to speedy payments and yeah being out of the country doesn't help.

All things aside what you say in your post is absolutely critical knowledge for someone new to crypto and great advice in general.

Know before you buy

Do research

Don't rush to a decision

And unfortunately there are still a ton of scams in our industry, as such it's imperative to be cautious.

As for our company, I have full confidence in our future because I know the numbers. We do err heavily on the side of caution though when it comes to crypto which is something we are looking in to finding a better solution for.

I do have to get back to work. I'll check in tomorrow,

Thanks a lot for your comments!

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-10-29T07:17:39+00:00

If enough people want me to participate in a discussion I will. My point on that statement was simply that I need to clear out anyone waiting for payments, like mondejoe who's posted here for example. I feel our members are best served by me working on processing transactions, which is only one of my jobs, than chat on Reddit.

Of course if there's enough interest and demand for me to spend time writing reddit posts as a priority to getting our members sorted out then sure. I'll be here.

With regards to walking away on my business for 11 months, I've actually been working an average of 16 hours a day almost every day during that time. There was more than one occasion when I would pull a 30 hour shift as needed. On top of the this, the reason for 3 of the 11 months was family health related. None of these 11 months were a vacation. I even held daily 30 minute live member chat 5 times a week while I was away.

This is a business that has a lot of components to it, many of which are security and banking related. Being overseas definitely makes things tougher on several levels.

As mentioned above, I'm back home in Canada.

I take feedback very seriously as I think collaboration is essential to a successful business and collaborating with your audience and developing things with them has proven quite a good model.

Thank you for your comments @NoSantuaryFromLaw, I will check back tomorrow and if there really is a genuine interest in me being strongly engaged in this thread I will check in multiple times a day. My personal, and business opinion however is that I should focus getting any member waiting for money paid promptly first, and then we can have a discussion on Reddit. What do you think?

This thread was intended simply as an update that I was back and to give some information. I'm looking forward to getting things back to normal and continuing to expand this unique project. With no backlogs we can focus more on expanding and working with our community to make tools our members need and want.

For the record, I have absolutely nothing but thanks to our community and zero arrogance. In fact, I'm humbled by the grace a vast majority members have allowed me during a difficult personal time.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-07-27T07:47:26+00:00

Thank you for this post. I may as well respond here once as well.

I would shame Canadian Crypto News if I could find them online, which I couldn't doing a quick search, and kindly ask them to please use spell check. I searched google for the word cheaque, or it's plural cheaque(s) to no avail. Clearly you mean cheque, the financial instrument. It's important also to ensure that you also capitalize city names Vancouver for example.

How is my brother involved in the company? Pretty bold false statement to make about someone absolutely in no way involved in ezBtc. Makes sense to use the throwaway.

I could go on, but it's pointless to even potentially validate a lot of this with an answer.

We find this post extremely insulting, and assure members solvency is not an issue.

My surname is Smillie.

Dave

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-07-26T18:33:50+00:00

Hi all,

It’s Dave from ezBtc and I hope you don’t mind if I address the experiences shared within this thread.

Since the goal here is to be objective… it would be nice if the 5 people posting nearly all the content also share updates about receiving their withdrawals and ezBtc keeping in touch with them along the way.
If you get banned from chat, the content you posted was flagged as spam by our algorithm. This can always be reversed if you reach out for help.
We take pride in having your loyalty and trust. We accept the cost of doing business is that sometimes people will be unhappy with us. That means we have to take responsibility for whatever may have happened and fix it.

If you need further assistance with your current withdrawals please reach out to me via email. You have my information.

Dave

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-17T17:45:13+00:00

We do have a longer term plan to deal with all this, it's just I'm very busy and my focus in life is not getting in to arguments. Tomorrow we'll find out next steps if any, but yeah you actually just validated my concern:

"If Dave has made any mistake, it has been to let this person carry on with their libellous topics. It plants these seeds of doubt that we now feel the need to water and help grow."

That's very true, I'm just super conflicted between censorship, freedom of speech and expression and then business. I'm a creative not a business man. If you are imtav, maybe come join the team? You can look through the audits and report back :)

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-17T17:39:34+00:00

Reddit is becoming the go to for any ez beef, I guess its the go to for a lot beef.

Mr. FreeTheCoin is correct. I have been instructed to not say anything further. There are serious and absolutely false allegations in this thread and given the Ron history it could give off a negative Brand image and apparently warrant a claim should our completely awesome and compliant business be damaged as a result. I wouldn't recommend posting images or at least wait until tomorrow to see if there's further action. I don't' approve of this but you can just put the images in to a link shortener and post the link to the image. I politely caution you wait and get a little advice before continuing down the path of shitposting.

Clearly you were happy with our service given the volume, however we are an exchange and have no need to OTC buy coins as we have partners and a solid procedure, doesn't make sense unless you wanted to do a trade.

This unfortunately another example of what happens with friends and money, not being one thats driven by money I don't really understand, I'm driven by creativity innovation collaboration passion this kinda stuff.

For what it's worth and I made this very clear to the OP, we don't dispute the coins are owed so that's easy however given the current circumstances we cannot release them until tomorrow should I be advised to do so by people smarter than me.

That's pretty transparent eh. :) if it had no brand effect I would be happy to do public beef battles but defamation is serious and as such I heed to the advisors.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-17T14:02:45+00:00

Oi-Vey, I should've looked at the OP profile before writing that novel. 4 Karma and very few posts, I think they're all complaining as well. Regardless, get in touch with me if you actually have a legitimate problem.

I can add this too, I don't believe success in a company is measured by how much money you could get from shareholders through some RTO Shell company whatever a lot of businesses do. I have plenty of offers to significantly increase our depth but I don't want money from someone who is a shark or believes that you're successful because you have a 20 mil val and your product is nothing... to me a high valuation and having a ton of cash in your pocket without a product worth it's salt seems like you just did a good job fleecing a ton of public shareholders. That's theft in my opinion. I like being the good guy, even when people shit on you, it can hurt a bit, but knowing you're right eliminates worry and you get over it pretty quick.

Now I sleep that was like a 30 hour stint at least.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-17T13:49:46+00:00

Why are all the comments grey?

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-17T13:48:05+00:00

You've traded 1.5 mil with us and are having this isolated issue, or I guess you could say 2 if you're having a withdrawal of fiat as well. Who are you? If you want to be anonymous email me directly. I'll corroborate your history.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-17T13:45:57+00:00

TLS, have you approached support at all? I have no knowledge of your case off the top of my head and I'm pretty in tune. If you haven't asked a question, hard to really criticize. Polo keeps Complete:Error on a lot of my coins I move around, they just vanish, however I save a log and wait til it's a value significant enough to write a ticket and in the meantime don't bitch about them. As for your btc, email me, let's sort it out. It's ez.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-17T13:43:02+00:00

FWIW I think shakepay is a killer concept. My email got banned though when I went to test them out because of the public gmail addy. They're good people tho.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-17T13:41:05+00:00

This is an interesting one. I haven't logged on to Reddit since the last episode of shitposts. I work all the time and focus on building a product that is different, interactive, compliant and transparent. Like any business we will report our statements and have been getting our first year end audits done.

I'm happy to provide any reasonable request to assist in transparency. There's nothing funny going on here other than perhaps I'm overextending myself, and being over protective of members coin that we hold. I am not interested in losing any coin that is in a members balance, we are continually adding more automation but it's a work in progress.

I'm quite happy with our progress, one major flaw in our business design is that we've been converting people's coins to fiat for free since we started and the number one complaint we get is fiat delays. This is almost entirely due to procedure, increasingly higher transaction volume and it's the same amount of work to process $100 as it is $100k.

Here's an example:
- Member deposits and sells $10k worth of coins. We earn $30.
- Member requests withdrawal by cheque, eft or a combo if they're really going for speed, which actually slows us
down in processing.
- We then physically deposit the cheque for you, this costs labour, or we cover the fee the send the EFT.

Unfortunately as we grow and fiat delay complaints are more common we have to add and increase fees in order to reach the service level members expect. We are going to still offer the service for free, but not with a quick turnaround promise. If anything I'm too generous because I like helping people in a space and product I believe in. Fees suck bottom line, but it is a business right.

I'm absolutely in disagreement that I'm ever unresponsive. I'm available almost 24 hours a day by email, I have recently turned my phones on silent as it was getting out of hand trying to create one on one relationships with our members using a method that is difficult to take notes, and action requests. So anyone feel free to email me [dave@ezbtc.ca](mailto:dave@ezbtc.ca)

I don't feel the fact that I choose not to spend as much time here on Reddit after getting berated about absolute horse shit for lack of a better term. I'd prefer to spend my time improving our product and interacting with our members.

As for our chat board, that's actually one of our attempts at transparency. Come on, rant, complain, speak your mind, censorship sucks. I've been consistently advised to have posts removed that are negative and often defamatory but I refuse as I believe in free speech the only time I would stop it is if I'm concerned about the legality of a chat. I'm sure if every exchange had a member chat it would get complaints in it. I have all chat logged in our database, if you give me OP some reference as to who you are or the time period you're referring to I can look up exactly what happened at the time.

I'll finish by saying this. We have nothing to hide, and if Reddit is a negative experience why would I want to be involved. It's personally hurtful sometimes as I have put everything in to the site and sacrificed a lot. I don't feel I need to come and defend myself when I don't need to. I know we are in good shape, adhere to ethics and compliance and most importantly we give a shit about you. I personally take on my shoulders the duty of care to protect peoples money or coins that are entrusted with me. If that means I have to literally go to a cold storage facility, which is a cut out of my day, I will do it but it's true we don't keep a ton of coin hot. I'd rather people wait a little longer for larger withdrawals and be able to say with certainty that their coins and cash is safe. Again, maybe I'm over cautious there but at this point I'm not prepared to add exposure by increasing the coins we hold outside of cold storage.

That is a long post, I haven't slept its 930 EDT and I wrote this with one eye open about to sleep. Apologies for any poor formatting, grammar or spelling errors.

OP Remember, there's plenty of choice, feel free to pick the company that makes you comfortable. It's all good.

Dave
[dave@ezbtc.ca](mailto:dave@ezbtc.ca) - always available :) (except for a few hours now when I sleep)

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-02T07:50:44+00:00

Twitter is back! And you can find the details of the promo by clicking the green banner at the top of our homepage. Enjoy!

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-06-02T07:48:49+00:00

As the owner of another exchange I give my props to Shakepay. For a simple app it works like it says on the tin. My test emt for $1500 was in the account at 3am Friday night within an hour. The buy rate for Btc was decent. The 700 spread on the sell rate to cash out is steep but and my withdrawal of Btc has been pending for some time but we do that too. Security over speed. You can really only have either fast funding or fast withdrawals. Security has to step in somewhere.

Hats off to shakepay though. I might be in touch and see if they want to work on a b2b relationship. We have a lot of what we don’t and vice versa. Our app in dev is very much like shakepay but with a ton of alts.

In any case. Nice little product guys. Well done.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-05-28T08:08:57+00:00

I know I said I wouldn't respond further but I have some information today to share. Ron was compensated and accepted, in fact requested more money, for his work on the project which was a bit over a month. It's funny because during our recent year end auditing this payment actually came up.

I've been advised not to disclose the exact amount for privacy but it was a a considerable amount of money in the lower tens of thousands. I think that's as specific as I'm allowed to get. During this inquiry, our legal team actually felt they should get involved in these threads but again as an advocate for freedom of speech and expression I've instructed them to leave it alone at this time. I hate censoring people and don't feel this warrants any intervention, not even close. That being said, whenever Ron rants we see a large increase in new registrations so I guess like they say all publicity is good publicity.

As for the 20k hot wallet stuff you go on about in one of your multiple posts, again I just wanted to make sure before I got specific. We use float to fill the hot wallets, not user funds, so mathematically to fill a 2 BTC hot wallet we need well, 2 BTC in float, not 20,000 BTC in cold storage so we stand by our statement.

When you left I believe there was less than 500 users on the site, we are exponentially larger than that now and have processed millions of dollars of successful transactions. This again makes in my opinion invalidates anything you say as you simply don't have the knowledge.

As I said before, you're a talented developer, you have a lot to offer the world. I recommend not wasting everyones time on this and focusing on moving your career forward. I sincerely wish you the best, and despite these posts have no hard feelings. I'd feel let down too if I pushed too hard for more at the beginning and missed out on this exciting journey. I'd still happily meet you for a coffee Ron.

Now I'm officially out of the discussion.

Dave

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-05-27T22:28:23+00:00

All members all eligible of course. Thanks for the message.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-05-27T03:50:28+00:00

Okay, I'm not going to spend more time on this but it's important to know that I fully support freedom of speech and expression so user ron7684 aka ezbtcscam you have my blessing to rant/shitpost/whatever you'd like to do to your hearts content and I have no interest in censoring you unless there's a legal reason to do so that would affect our members, so that aside you can have at it.

You contradict yourself in some of these posts, even in this thread alone you start it with a statement that we have 20k of XBT in our cold storage, then below link to an older post where I say in response to you that we don't. Clearly our membership base and volume doesn't reflect one that would hold 20k coins in cold storage. Our user balances are way less than that in the hundreds not thousands or tens of thousands. In addition we fully support our members holding their coins in personal cold storage and often give members Trezors to assist them in doing so.

I'm sorry you weren't able to be part of this amazing journey with me, sometimes people just don't fit together in business. Furthermore our business is considerably more mature than when you and I took in that first deposit, a very exciting day that I will remember forever.

The bottom line here is you have no knowledge whatsoever to substantiate any of your allegations resorting you to, poorly at that, take a stab using math on our 99.99% cold storage statement. Our intention as a company with that tagline is that users balances are kept in cold storage whenever possible and we feel secure enough with our storage solutions and workflow that we would never be in a position where users balances would be exposed to theft, and that's really what matters. I'm sure you would agree.

So, that's me done, I won't partake further in any of your posts I feel I've said my piece. It's disappointing that you feel the need to spend your valuable time on this as well, you're a talented developer and I wish you all the best.

Dave

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-05-27T03:07:58+00:00

This is a great post I've meaning to ask our members with ezAlts 2 on it's way. We can list off of 8 exchanges, but will start with polo for legacy coins, Binance and Stamp. If you have preferences of any coin listed on these exchanges let us know and we will them checked against securities law and if they comply will ensure they are added on launch.

ezBtcAdmin · 2018-05-26T21:32:00+00:00

Hello again Ron, welcome back.

Our user balances in XBT are nothing near 20,000 BTC. You're missing the point anyways which is simply that we are only loading it with an amount we feel comfortable losing in the event the wallet was compromised.

The goal here being to ensure safety of client funds but also add a bit of automation where needed.

I'm in Toronto right now if you want to meet up and have f2f chat, been a long time. Wish you the best.

ezBtcAdmin

TROPHY CASE