Coinkite, the popular wallet and hardware payment network service provider, has announced it is closing down its web wallet to focus on other projects after legal issues and DDoS attacks have impeded the use of the wallet.
Hardware products focus
After a noticeable lack in posting on their blog after incredibly frequent posting over the last three years, Coinkite has announced it is shutting down its web wallet service. Users of the service need not worry about the hardware aspect of Coinkite, as that will remain unaffected, and the team in fact hopes to expand it.
“We are winding down the web wallet part of Coinkite so that our team can focus on a number of new products that are more decentralized and embodied as hardware products. We’re still big Bitcoin fans, supporters and Hodlrs, and although Coinkite has been great adventure in the SaaS business, we want to spend more time where our heart is, hardware products, software-”not-as-a-service”, and other exciting new possibilities.”
Under DDoS since the first month
Coinkite cited the legal issues associated with being a centralized Bitcoin service, and hence the financial strain brought about by lawyers, and non-stop DDos-ing since launch for the closing down of the service.
“Being a centralized bitcoin service does attract attention from state actors and other well funded pains in the butt, and as a matter of fact, we’ve been under DDoS since the first month we launched—over three years–yay. Plus we have put real fiat dollars into our lawyers’ pockets, to defend our customers from their own governments. This is not what we love to do, which is coding and delivering awesome services.”
Programmers-turned-businessmen an issue
Part of the issue in the cryptocurrency industry is that many of those who are choosing to create businesses in this newly-fledged sector, are fundamentally programmers, and as such are ill-equipped to deal with the likes of lawyers and regulators.
The simple solution to this problem is greater co-operation between the financial industry and the cryptocurrency industry. The financial sector has been around for far, far longer than the cryptocurrency industry. It has the infrastructure, processes, and people already in place to deal with a lot of the issues facing these programmers-turned-businessmen, and if more startups are to succeed, they are going to need to implement them.