Erik Voorhees

Erik Tristan Voorhees is an American / Panamanian startup founder. He is co-founder of the bitcoin company Coinapult, worked as Director of Marketing at BitInstant, and was founder and partial owner of the bitcoin gambling website Satoshi Dice (subsequently sold in July 2013 to an undisclosed buyer).
He was fined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an unregistered stock offering related to SatoshiDice.
He is also the creator and CEO of the instant bitcoin and altcoin exchange ShapeShift.io, having founded and operated it under the alias Beorn Gonthier, until revealing his true involvement with the company, as part of a seed funding announcement, in March 2015.
 

Background

Originally from Colorado, Voorhees later moved to Dubai, New York City and New Hampshire, becoming a participant in the Free State Project. Voorhees now lives in Panama City, Panama. According to a US court order in a SEC case, Voorhees is a US citizen as of June 3, 2014. He attended Vail Mountain School, and graduated in 2007 from the University of Puget Sound.

Voorhees believes the current monetary system has serious systemic problems with counter-party risk, that the Federal Reserve System is "fraudulent" and advocates "the separation of money and state." He keeps his assets and finances in bitcoin, and is an outspoken opponent of taxation though he does file with the IRS as an American citizen.

Career

Voorhees is the founder and former CEO of Coinapult, a company that transfers bitcoin via SMS and email. He previously founded Satoshi Dice, Voorhees' company SatoshiDice has been criticized for its high level of gambling traffic, which vastly increased the amount of data stored in the bitcoin "block chain". On March 8, 2013, he was interviewed on noted financial commentator Peter Schiff's podcast by Tom Woods about bitcoin as an alternative currency. On January 30, 2015 he was interviewed on the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast and discussed his bitcoin career.

As of August 2012, as Director of Marketing Voorhees and BitInstant planned to launch a bitcoin-funded debit card, which would allow bitcoin-funded purchases to be transacted over standard bank networks.

In July 2013, Voorhees sold Satoshi Dice to an anonymous investor for 126,315 bitcoins, valued at $11.5M ($83M as of Jun 7 2014), and described as the "first big Bitcoin acquisition".