Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain. And they want you to deposit money with them. Yeah, right.
I think this is genius. One of the best products I've seen recently, if not THE best. Definitely, the best Bitcoin-related idea. I guess companies like Circle, Coinbase, Chain, 21 co, etc. are cool in their own right. But I don't see how any of them will help Bitcoin breakout and become more accepted. I think relatable products like yours are gonna be more beneficial to the protocol.
> Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain. And they want you to deposit money with them. Yeah, right.
https://bitcoinbuilder.com/ full name of the founder is at the bottom of the page, Josh Jones (founder of Dreamhost).
Didn't he also buy up a lot of Gox's bitcoins at a steep discount once withdrawals became impossible? Essentially betting they'd eventually be worth something rather than nothing. I wonder if that's settled out, and if so how he did...
> Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain.
This will be more and more common and isn't a bad thing. None of those provide any real safeguards and frankly, private domain registration is pretty common. I wouldn't dump > a half weeks paycheck in there, but measuring risk and reputation will no longer be a simple BBB or Dun and Bradstreet lookup.
"None of those provide any real safeguards". Don't you feel like this is an overstatement? Like if Microsoft commits a fraud I can sue Microsoft. Like yes it's possible that in the future these safeguards wont' be available, but having real legal entities with known individuals you can have a trust based relationship in society is of tremendous value. Knowing that your counter-party in a transaction has repetitional risk is definitely beneficial.
... and frankly, at least in a country with a stable legal system, it's a slight bit of comfort to know that if all else fails (hopefully it never reaches that point of course), the police can go and arrest somebody that caused us harm, and/or seize their assets.
I agree. I'm curious, however, to know what the D&B replacement will be for these types of operations in the future.
I believe CoinsSource provided a trust index for altcoin developers at one point [0], and it looks like Bitrated has a web-of-trust-based system for bitcoin-denominated transactions [1].
Bitcoin Builder started out as a way to trade against MtGox's internal ledger when they halted withdraws. Users could effectively bet on MtGox's future by using privately held bitcoins to trade with users wanting to sell their "Gox coins" at a fraction of the market price. Anyone that sold their Gox coins for less than 100% market value made out far better than those that didn't. It was a wild idea that basically created a functional market for the greedy and the desperate. I'm sure millions flowed though the site during its short lived existence.
Awesome, and works very smoothly. I really hope that uber won't ban it. Or even better, I really hope that uber would implement a system where you would be able to convert bitcoins directly to uber credit :)
Uber uses Braintree for payment processing[1]. Braintree already has integration with Coinbase[2]. I assume that bitcoin transfers being push (instead of pull like credit cards) is the reason they haven't activated it.
Uber already has "uber credit" system, for example promotions where you get $10 in your uber account. They could very trivially just add option, where you could add uber credit to your account with bitcoin (or any other push-only payment method, for example cash via coupons).
- the first time there was a confusing instance of chargeback/dispute resolution.. it's easier to say "this is a TOS violation" than to "figure it out"
- if the total amount coming from this account makes different taxes/regulations apply that aren't beneficial to uber
That's not true. If you're, say, a car dealership and Walter White comes in with $50,000 cash looking to buy a car, you are required to file a Currency Transaction Report with the federal government.
I wonder what happens if you try to charge them for a ride which costs more than you have in your account. They require a $25 balance, but you can certainly go on much more expensive rides.
The bitcoinbuilder option will automatically disappear, when your balance goes below certain amount. I would guess they would ban accounts which do that permanently. Anyway, there probably are lots of users who are very happy to use this system fairly, such as me.
> Your company will see trip information about rides that were charged to their Uber for Business account, including pickup location and destination, product type, time of day, and duration.
Your name and phone number don't get revealed, but yeah, like Uber says, they do give us the information above. I can promise we don't do anything with it?
I don't see a mention of how much the service costs; what fees they charge. Perhaps that becomes transparent after creating account, but it's probably important information to have immediately available.
