Andrew Lee | |
---|---|
Crown Prince of Korea (disputed) | |
Reign | October 2018 – present |
Born | Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |
Spouse | Princess Nana Lee |
House | House of Yi |
Andrew Lee (born December 1983) [1] is a Korean-American entrepreneur. He is the founder of the VPN service Private Internet Access, which started in 2010. [2] He is the heir to Yi Seok, who in turn is claimed by some to be the heir of the former Korean monarchy. [3] [4]
Andrew Lee | |
Hangul | 리앤드류 |
---|---|
Revised Romanization | Ri Aendeuryu |
McCune–Reischauer | Ri Aendŭryu |
In 2009,Lee founded London Trust Media (LTM),a private holdings company. In 2010,he founded Private Internet Access (PIA),a virtual private network service for anonymizing Internet traffic. [5] He claimed to have started PIA because of his interest in Internet Relay Chat (IRC),whose users' IP addresses could be easily revealed,but only after the Freenode purchase. [6] Lee and co-owner Steve DeProspero sold LTM (and its subsidiary PIA) to Israeli company Kape Technologies for US$95.5 million in November 2019. [7] [8] Lee co-founded Mt. Gox Live,a bitcoin price tracker that was later acquired by the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. [9]
In 2017,Christel Dahlskjaer,then the head of staff at Freenode,incorporated and transferred ownership of Freenode Limited to Lee; [10] Dahlskjaer and Lee said the company was solely for funding the network and running the Freenode #live conferences. [11] [12] According to staff,they were not informed of the contents of the deal and were told that it would not affect Freenode's day-to-day operations,as the company only managed the conference and nothing else. [12] [13] A dispute over changes Lee imposed in 2021 resulted in all of Freenode's 20 to 30 staff members resigning. [11] [12] This team went on to form a new network called Libera Chat. [11]
Andrew Lee was born in Indianapolis and raised in Carmel,a city in the Indianapolis metro area. [14] [3] He enrolled in Purdue University and transferred to the University at Buffalo,but later dropped out to start working. [3]
In October 2018,Yi Seok,a member of the House of Yi and one of the pretenders to the defunct imperial throne of Korea,declared Lee the crown prince of Korea at a ceremony in Los Angeles,attended by Bermuda premier David Burt,and city officials from Los Angeles and Jeonju. [3] [15]
In 2020,Lee and his family moved to a mansion in Hidden Valley,Ventura County,California. [14] [16]
In the afternoon of November 18,2022,J-Money,driving a Rolls-Royce Phantom registered to Andrew Lee,was shot and robbed by 2 men in Koreatown,Los Angeles. [17] [18] As of February 2023,the perpetrators have not been identified. [19] Andrew Lee,under the rapper name KingLee,appeared on J-Money's album titled "Dun It All". [20]
Koreatown,or K-Town,is an ethnic Korean enclave in Midtown Manhattan,New York City,centered on 32nd Street between Madison Avenue and the intersection with Sixth Avenue and Broadway,which is known as Greeley Square. The neighborhood in Midtown South features over 150 businesses of various types and sizes,ranging from small restaurants and beauty salons to large branches of Korean banking conglomerates. Koreatown,Manhattan,has become described as the "Korean Times Square" and has emerged as the international economic outpost for the Korean chaebol.
Rolls-Royce Holdings plc is a British multinational aerospace and defence company incorporated in February 2011. The company owns Rolls-Royce,a business established in 1904 which today designs,manufactures and distributes power systems for aviation and other industries. Rolls-Royce is the world's second-largest maker of aircraft engines and has major businesses in the marine propulsion and energy sectors.
A cryptocurrency exchange,or a digital currency exchange (DCE),is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets,such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments,wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or,as a matching platform,simply charges fees.
The Rolls-Royce Phantom IV is a British automobile produced by Rolls-Royce. Only eighteen were made between 1950 and 1956,sold only to buyers whom Rolls-Royce considered worthy of the distinction:the British royal family and heads of state. Sixteen are known to still exist in museums as well as in public and private collections.
Freenode,stylized as freenode and formerly known as Open Projects Network,is an IRC network which was previously used to discuss peer-directed projects. Their servers are accessible from the hostname chat.freenode.net,which load balances connections by using round-robin DNS.
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger,called a blockchain,without central oversight.
A cryptocurrency,crypto-currency,or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority,such as a government or bank,to uphold or maintain it. It is a decentralized system for verifying that the parties to a transaction have the money they claim to have,eliminating the need for traditional intermediaries,such as banks,when funds are being transferred between two entities.
The Bitcoin Foundation is an American organization that was formerly a nonprofit corporation. It was founded in September 2012 in an effort to restore the reputation of Bitcoin after several scandals,and to try to promote its development and uptake. The organization is modeled on the Linux Foundation and was funded mainly through grants made by for-profit companies that depend on the bitcoin technology.
Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange based in Shibuya,Tokyo,Japan. Launched in 2010,it was handling over 70% of all bitcoin (BTC) buys/sells worldwide by early 2014,when it abruptly ceased operations amid revelations of its involvement in the loss/theft of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins,then worth hundreds of millions in US dollars.
Private Internet Access (PIA) is a personal VPN service that allows users to connect to multiple locations. In 2018,former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès was named chief technology officer of PIA's parent company,London Trust Media. In November 2019,Private Internet Access was acquired by Kape Technologies.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency,a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange,Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto,who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history,it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s,some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
Mark Marie Robert Karpelès,also sometimes known by his online alias MagicalTux,is the former CEO of bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. Born in France,he moved to Japan in 2009.
Stellar,or Stellar Lumens,is an open-source,decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation,the Stellar Development Foundation,though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.
A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block,a timestamp,and transaction data. Since each block contains information about the previous block,they effectively form a chain,with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently,blockchain transactions are irreversible in that,once they are recorded,the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.
CoinDesk is a news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies. Founded by Shakil Khan,the firm also provides guides to bitcoin for those new to digital currencies.
BTC-e was a cryptocurrency trading platform primarily serving the Russian market,with servers located in the United States. The U.S. government seized their website and funds in 2017. It was founded in July 2011 by Alexander Vinnik and Aleksandr Bilyuchenko,and as of February 2015 handled around 3% of all Bitcoin exchange volume. The platform was eventually taken over by Russian Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev,and funds from BTC-e were used for the war in Donbass,under the control of the FSB.
Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange,founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$10.8 billion in mid-2022. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018,and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.
A cryptocurrency wallet is a device,physical medium,program or an online service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys,a cryptocurrency wallet more often offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract,a cryptocurrency transaction,identification,or legally signing a 'document'.
Cryptocurrency and crime describe notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies that have been used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.
Libera Chat,stylized as Libera.Chat,is an IRC network for free and open-source software projects. It was founded on 19 May 2021 by former Freenode staff members,after Freenode was taken over by Andrew Lee,founder of Private Internet Access.