Hot on the heels of a major hack at Bitcoinica, Zhou Tong, the founder of Bitcoin’s most successful Bitcoin project to date, has just announced that he will no longer involve himself in any Bitcoin-related projects:
“I, Zhou Tong… will discontinue all involvement in Bitcoin-related projects after the Bitcoinica incident has been fully resolved until further notice. I failed at one thing… that is generating value for the society. Bitcoinica did create a place for people to trade more efficiently and provide liquidity to the market. However, speculation is a zero-sum game (or negative-sum, strictly saying). I know there can be many justifications for Bitcoinica’s value, but all of them are against my intuition and values.”
In his announcement, he also revealed that Bitcoinica was actually sold in November of 2011, with the official handover happening in January of this year.
Not surprisingly, he will be moving on to pursue other projects:
“I have started working on another project (not Bitcoin-related) that is going to make a little difference on the Internet. So far I have achieved great progress and I’m pretty confident about this new venture.”
Zhou Tong, a 17 year-old developer from Singapore, took the Bitcoin community by storm by creating the first advanced trading platform for Bitcoin. Several security incidents eventually pushed the site to the brink, the most recent being a $90,000 USD theft on May 11th. The site currently remains offline.