

Bitcoin: Free Money or Fraud? - dsterry
https://www.coindl.com/page/item/118

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sgornick
Title was a bit confusing. You aren't purchasing bitcoins, you are purchasing
goods using bitcoin. Big difference.

Great service though, I use it as both a supplier and a customer!

And found a couple new songs for my playlist!

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dsterry
Confusing? or genius. 80 chars or less means the line is often blurred.

~~~
iopuy
Confusing I would say.

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dsterry
Subby here. For a demo of how the purchase process works see
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVBxvnQEy9o&hd=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVBxvnQEy9o&hd=1)

In the first couple weeks we have added 40 suppliers and 100 downloadable
items. We take a competitive 20% of sales and pay in 48-72 hours. We're
looking for feedback on who to approach for supplier relationships, startup
mentoring, and funding.

~~~
ziggerg
> We take a competitive 20% of sales

That's actually pretty high in terms of BTC markup. There are BTC payment
solutions out there that take less. Is the proposed value-add here a kind of
content discovery service a la App Store?

> pay in 48-72 hours

Surely this can be optimized? 6 confirms is the standard of trust even for
enormous transactions, and automatic payouts after such a threshold are simple
to implement (yes, I've done it).

The time lag seems kind of artificial here and brings to mind the BS of
traditional banking/payment processing. Is there some reasoning behind it?

> We're looking for feedback on who to approach for supplier relationships,
> startup mentoring, and funding.

If you'e looking for funding, you're going to hear this a lot: "seems more
like a feature than a product". It's too early to be thinking about
investments.

Is the idea to become a general for-download BTC marketplace? If so, you're
probably doing the right thing in terms of going after the small / independent
fish first. Find some sort of niche and eat it. Start worrying about investors
when there's so much demand that you can't handle it on your own. You seem to
be managing well enough so far, though.

Congrats on the launch!

~~~
dsterry
> Is the proposed value-add here a kind of content discovery service a la App
> Store?

Yes, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for artists and authors to
sell their downloads for Bitcoin. We could make shopping cart software and
charge 1-2% but we're covering fulfillment, support and everything else about
the process to make it easy for both sides.

>> pay in 48-72 hours

> Surely this can be optimized?

The reasoning behind this is to be able to deal with any complaints, in the
app store model there is usually a short return period and in order to be able
to provide that we need a little time. The delay also may serve to deter
scammers who might want to list someone else's work, promote it heavily and
run with the money.

Thanks for the investment comment. This is ycombinator so I thought I'd throw
it out there.

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Gring
As far as I'm aware of, the blockchain only gets signed every few minutes or
so.

So how can you achieve this low latency? Do you just base your decision "x has
paid" on the still unsigned chain? That's quite risky and open for exploits,
isn't it?

Also, what do you do if there are orphan blocks in the chain?

(Comment about coindl.com, not the book the article links to.)

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dsterry
New blocks are created in a lottery process (mining) that could take seconds
to hours for someone to win. We are using unconfirmed transactions but are
willing to take some risk while developing strategies to mitigate that risk.
Orphan blocks don't concern us so long as the transactions we are honoring
make it into the greatest-height chain.

~~~
Gring
Thanks for the answer!

Why don't you focus just on the realtime aspect and create a service that
allows realtime bitcoin transactions on any website (and inside every app)
trough an API, and ask for a smaller percentage (like ~2%, like a credit card
company)?

~~~
dsterry
There are already a number of merchant processing systems for Bitcoin
including MtGox's payment api and Bit-Pay. Neither one supports instant
transactions coming via the Bitcoin network (MtGox is instant if buyer and
seller both have funds there), but the cultural aspect of helping Bitcoin
users sell their wares easily was also an attractive one for this project.

Still, it's a great suggestion and will be considered for future development.

