In another special coverage of the cryptocurrency movement in Indonesia, Oscar Darmawan shares his insights on bitcoin and how far Bitcoin.co.id has developed since we last covered it. You can read our exclusive interview with Oscar for Bitcoin Indonesia in two parts here and here. The rise of bitcoin in Indonesia is steady. Let’s see what Oscar has to say:
Well, I have always believed in a lean business model so it did not take long for us to start our business. We first started our Bitcoin exchange based on a business model that was fairly similar with what would have been applied by a money changer. But in order to support a bigger and more liquid transaction, we decided to reform our business from a Bitcoin Brokerage to a Bitcoin Spot Exchange.
I have been involved with a lot of e-money transactions and businesses in the past few years. I was once a seasoned forex trader. I also had my hands on e-gold and liberty reserve which both got frozen by FBI. All my bad experiences with centralized e-money businesses made me realize that a true form of safe and global e-money would not be created if it keeps depending on a centralized system and its business nature. I also have been actively working full time in the IT area and cyber security industry for the last six years. Due to my background in finance and IT security, I have known Bitcoin since the early days and I instantly fell in love with it, especially with the Blockchain technology behind it.
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If I must say, the best thing about my venture is how we can still be running profitable even though bitcoin volume transaction goes down globally last year. Unlike most of the startups which can only survive because of investor funds, we have been profitable since day one. We keep our business model as lean as possible while still maintaining our growth rate exponentially. We even paid dividends to our investors last month for company performance in 2015.
We have unfair advantages due to our background as seasoned entrepreneurs in Information Technology. We have been running our IT infrastructures and security businesses for six years, thus more experience on the field. We also have been very lucky to have Indonesia as our main market. Indonesia is a country with a lot of potential; we have more than 250 million people as our target with 80% of them is unbanked people. Therefore this market is the perfect market for Bitcoin to grow.
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To be continued…
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