Bitcoin: Free Money or Fraud?

https://www.coindl.com/page/item/118

by dsterry • 14 years ago

18 13 14 years ago

dsterry7• 14 years ago

Subby here. For a demo of how the purchase process works see 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.

iopuy2• 14 years ago

I'm sorry, could you clarify who "Subby" is or what you did?

dsterry7• 14 years ago

Sorry, subby is slang for submitter. I am the developer of the linked site.

ziggerg• 14 years ago

> 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!

dsterry7• 14 years ago

> 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.

sgornick• 14 years ago

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!

dsterry7• 14 years ago

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

iopuy2• 14 years ago

Confusing I would say.

Gring2• 14 years ago

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.)

dsterry7• 14 years ago

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.

Gring2• 14 years ago

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)?

dsterry7• 14 years ago

Also, this post was originally titled "CoinDL enables Bitcoin purchases in seconds (link to eBook example)" so your post was more on-topic than it seemed. Today I learned, titles can be renamed by somebody else on Hacker News.

Bitcoin: Free Money or Fraud?

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