1. BY RON FINBERG Synthetic Bitcoins and a Journalistic Point of View

2. Who am I? Former Wall Street Equity Trader Writer for Forex Magnates Launched Digital Currency Magnates

3. Synthetic Bitcoins CFDs Options Futures Binary Options

4. What is a CFD? CFD = Contract For Difference Created in the UK to avoid taxes associated with sales of shares CFD tracks the price of another security CFDs exists for stocks, commodities, indexes

5. Example Crude Oil Futures trade at $100 CFD of Oil trades at $100 If the price of Crude Oil rises to $101 the CFD also rises to $101 Traders can buy the CFD or Future of Crude Oil and have the same profit/losses

6. Bitcoin CFD

7. $$$exy

8. How to Create a Bitcoin CFD Find an exchange that offers an API (MtGox was the favorite by developers – whoops!!) Or use technology provider like Leverate or Gold-i Integrate the API feed to create a synthetic CFD contract Offer to clients

9. Brokers with Bitcoin CFDs Plus500 (first broker) AvaTrade Markets.com eToro (a bit different CFD)

10. Potential Problems!! Hard to hedge risk (who wants to be short in a rising market) Do you want to deposit money at MtGox? Latency and disconnections (DDoS) Traders taking advantage to arbitrage slow latent feeds

11. Solutions Bitcoin exchanges are becoming more transparent – easier to trust depositing large sums FXOpen provides direct hedging of bitcoins But… Latency still a problem

12. Trends (Trading) We haven’t seen a lot of interest from forex customers to trade bitcoins But offering bitcoins is helpful to attract new customers (see Plus500)

13. Trends (General) People still don’t know why they need bitcoins Too complicated P2P Technology is taking off Community/Crowdsourcing is immensely powerful

14. Why bitcoins? “If my credit card works, why do I need bitcoins or digital currencies?” Opportunity: Companies need to make advantages clear. Whoever does this wins!!

15. Mining, eWallets, Cryptography (Huh) Bitcoin still seems very techy – this scares off many new users Opportunity – keep things simple Think 20 years ago when everyone used AOL because it was the easiest way to get to the internet. Coinbase doing this well

16. P2P Money is becoming digital –P2P technology benefits of transactions without the middle man appeals to general public Opportunity – creating products that are P2P. Doesn’t have to be bitcoin. Think P2P credit cards, Mastercoin, etc

17. Much Community So Moon!!

18. Community Rules!! Dogecoin started as a joke But….Palmer’s friends and others wanted to see it happen

19. Dogecoin Launched in December, Dogecoin went viral and an entire community became interested in it The community sent The Jamaican Bobsled team to the Olympics

20. What We Learned Community Power Dogecoin may have sounded like a dumb idea, but the interest proved that there was demand for a ‘funner’ digital currency that doesn’t appear to ‘techie’ Sharing ideas with the community is an optimal way to gauge interest quickly