CoinTouch

» see cointouch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

CoinTouch went up in January 2014, built by a British developer named Chris Beach after what he described as bad experiences with centralized exchanges. The idea was that he did not need an exchange at all, because his own extended social network already contained plenty of casual crypto traders, and the only missing piece was a way to see them. So he wrote one. You logged in with Facebook or Google, it read your friend graph with permission, and it showed you the people within two degrees of you who had posted a bid or an offer.

Prices were not set by hand. You placed an order at a spread from the market, say sell at two percent above the going rate, and CoinTouch pulled live feeds from the centralized exchanges to turn that spread into a number. When you found someone you wanted to deal with, a button opened a Facebook message and the trade itself happened between the two of you. CoinTouch held no coins and took no cut. It was a matching layer and nothing else. That is also why one person could run it on Scala, Play Framework, Neo4J and MongoDB while holding a day job that paid for the servers.

He shut it down in April 2018, one month before the General Data Protection Regulation took effect across the EU on 25 May. His stated reasoning is unusually precise for a shutdown notice: he asked people in the industry how to make the site compliant, they gave him different answers, and he concluded the law was defined ambiguously enough that no answer would be safe. The exposure was up to four percent of turnover or twenty million euros, and CoinTouch had no turnover at all.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the letter that is still up ~

Eight years on, cointouch.com still answers, and what it serves is the farewell. The title tag is empty, so automated probes keep recording the host as unreadable, but the body opens with four words and a sideways face: CoinTouch is no more. Underneath, Beach explains what the site was, how it worked, what it cost him and why he closed it, and signs off by noting the stack he built it on. It is a complete self-written obituary sitting on a live domain, paid for by someone who has had nothing to gain from it since 2018.

~ the argument he made on the way out ~

The notice makes a claim worth recording because it was unfashionable at the time and is less so now. A law written to discipline the companies that harvest personal data at scale, Beach wrote, lands hardest on the people who cannot absorb legal uncertainty, and the companies it was aimed at have the lawyers and the cash to absorb it comfortably. Whether or not you accept that as a verdict on GDPR, it is at minimum a datum: here is one free, non-commercial service that chose to stop rather than guess, a month before the deadline it was afraid of.

~ why this one stayed abstract from here ~

Crypto trading in Turkey in 2014 ran through local exchanges, with the informal side living in group chats rather than in anybody's friend list. The specific move CoinTouch was built on, reaching into a Facebook graph to find the friend of a friend who would sell you a coin, assumed a Facebook graph that mapped onto your real-world trust, and that assumption held in some countries far better than others. So the site never had anything to show me. What makes it worth a page is not the trading, it is the shutdown notice, better written than most of the ones left behind by companies that had money.

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