Try Bitcoin

by bernatfp • 13 years ago

73 42 13 years ago

Baliw• 13 years ago

Very nicely done! This is a great project to help raise the awareness of Bitcoin. I'll definitely be passing this around.

daurnimator• 13 years ago

Can you add other charities? e.g. EFF?

fchollet• 13 years ago

I second this, I would love to see EFF in the list.

hngiszmo5• 13 years ago

As there is no payment done in that step anyway, they should rather make clear it's just a demo.

httpteapot• 13 years ago

I got a `Uncaught ReferenceError: twttr is not defined`

elisee• 13 years ago

This is slick, well done!

I got a 500 Internal Server Error when I clicked to sign up for Coinbase though (http://trybtc.com/ajax/coinbaseregister). My account still got created and I managed to get it back by requesting a password reset from Coinbase.

mjrials3• 13 years ago

Hey, thanks! We're working to fix this issue right now.

tych0• 13 years ago

This is beautiful. Thanks for creating it :-)

TamDenholm• 13 years ago

I think the hardest part of "trying bitcoin" is quite simply converting any native currency into bitcoin. The last time i looked into it from a GBP perspective, it was a major pain in the butt.

If i could buy bitcoin with my CC online like i can pay for anything else with my CC online, then there'd be a lower barrier of entry.

RossM• 13 years ago

Had the same experience (also UK). At some point, there was a service to exchange to BTC via Barclays Pingit [0] - it wasn't working when I tried a while ago but seems open now.

[0] https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-pingit

jedunnigan2• 13 years ago

The difficulty with that is the reversibility of CC payments. A user could buy coins using their CC, then go to the CC provider claim they were scammed and get not only the coins they bought but also their original payment. This is why you should not buy BTC with services like PayPal.

There are a number of services that will be opening their doors in the coming months that will lower the barriers to fiat <--> btc conversion.

JoshTriplett2• 13 years ago

This is why you should not buy BTC with services like PayPal.

Sell, not buy. There's no obvious risk to buying BTC with PayPal, if anyone is foolish enough to sell them that way.

runeks2• 13 years ago

The general problem with buying bitcoins with credit cards is the fungibility of the good you're buying. In other words, bitcoins are so fungible that buying them with credit cards becomes a problem.

When buying anything else with bitcoin, it's generally hard to resell the item, and make your money back. With the amount of credit card fraud, buying bitcoins with a stolen credit card would mean sites offering this service would have too many chargebacks, and they would have to charge a 5% fee on top of the 3% VISA already takes. Few people are going to want to pay an 8% markup on money. Money has a very definite price, they're not like other goods. You can see that you're paying a hefty markup, and people don't like that.

Bitstamp allows you to buy bitcoins by wiring money to them: https://www.bitstamp.net/help/how-to-buy/

It might be me, but I really don't see why wiring money is so hard. I just log into my online banking site and set it up, takes a couple of minutes.

hanley• 13 years ago

The term "wiring money" still has a connotation of being complicated, probably from all the movies and TV shows that mention wiring money in exchange for hostages, etc. I wish people would just refer to it as a bank transfer.

foxylad• 13 years ago

Off topic... wiring DOES seem hard. I'm from NZ, where it's very common to do an EFT payment to another bank account. We do this for paying bills, giving money to friends, and even paying for online purchases.

I recently set up a US bank account at Wells Fargo. Today I needed to pay someone (in the US) from it, and after fruitlessly searching for a way to transfer money to another account was told by customer support that the only solution was to do a wire transfer. At a cost of $35 and having to visit a branch to set this up.

They did have something called SurePay that involved sending someone an email or SMS message, but my beneficiary is a corporate so this isn't really an option. SurePay also seems to be limited to very small amounts.

Given this is free and simple to do in every other country I've banked in (NZ, Aus, UK and Canada), I'm still suspicious that I'm missing a something on the internet banking website. Any suggestions?

MaxGabriel• 13 years ago

This was an amazing experience, great work! I especially like the Ocelot :)

One issue is that the sign up and claim link to register with Coinbase seems to be be stuck, or else is taking over a minute. (Edit: still got the email from Coinbase)

How have reactions been from people who aren't already familiar with Bitcoin?

mjrials3• 13 years ago

We're still working to fix the strange Coinbase register bug... it's related to the fact that the site currently doesn't force HTTPS (when it should). If you load using HTTPS it works fine.

Reactions from newcomers are almost all positive. They like the interactivity, graphics, and ease of use. Theres plenty of negative feedback from BTC pros when it comes to how we oversimplify technical details (these are all intentional), but I believe this is essential to onboarding people who aren't familiar with BTC.

barefoot• 13 years ago

Beautiful. The third screen appeared to be breaking on my computer though. Clicked the next (right arrow) button once and the numbered information boxes disappeared with some flickering without any further information displaying. Needed to press button again to progress to next screen. Noticed similar problems when clicking through a few times (ex: "This is your wallet's Bitcoin address" shown below with no address displayed)

I'm using Safari 6.0. If anyone can remember one of those services that captures machine information I'd be happy to use one and post that here.

drx• 13 years ago

Babou the ocelot was swiped from Archer the TV series: http://archer.wikia.com/wiki/Babou

vault_• 13 years ago

Which was swiped from the actual life of Salvador Dalí: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_dali#Politics_and_pers... ;)

reustle• 13 years ago

I just ran through the demo and everything was great. Although, I believe I just dumped 400 uBTC into a black hole (was given 500, donated 100, didn't bother saving the wallet #).

I'm sure a lot of people will do exactly the same. You might want to not give out the 500 uBTC so easily / fast, I doubt much of that will ever be used.

Another solution is to update the donate screen to be donating all 500 of it, that way it's completely used up by the end of the demo.

jhasse• 13 years ago

The wallet is temporary and wasn't really created (if I understood it correctly).

runeks2• 13 years ago

If they can send money to Red Cross from your address they have the private key anyway, so nothing is lost.

hngiszmo5• 13 years ago

There is not donation happening in that step and the receiving addresses are not from any charities neither. The charities might want to take legal action against being used in this way.

ramanujan• 13 years ago

You are insane. No charity will accept an amount of 500 uBTC. They're probably batching the donations and then sending them in bulk.

a3voices• 13 years ago

Someone needs to make a "Try Litecoin" now.

micah63• 13 years ago

I'm new to the concept of Bitcoin and the part I have the hardest time with is how do I get out? If I have Bitcoins and want to turn it back into Canadian money, how does that work? Or does it work at all? Am I locked in? Can I only buy tech items on a couple websites that support it?

andrewmunsell• 13 years ago

There are a couple exchanges that will cash out your Bitcoins to another currency-- CoinBase being one of them.

Sometimes you'll need to go through some hoops to verify your identity, and you'll likely end up getting a bank transfer (as opposed to PayPal, etc).

jadeddrag• 13 years ago

There is also the option of localbitcoins.com to sell to people anonymously (but in person). Or you can use the bitcoin-otc irc channel.

javindo• 13 years ago

Hate to be the pessimist but surely this is easily abusable? From the way you described the process of sending money from a wallet to another, there is likely some way of using a botnet or something of the sort to run through your site, create a wallet, send to a central wallet, repeat thousands of times?

xanderstrike• 13 years ago

AKA Give us your facebook login in exchange for telling you about BTC.

No thanks.

hngiszmo5• 13 years ago

Sneaky advertisement. I'm just curious and before I realize it, I gave them my facebook ID and spammed my friends. Could work. I mean I won't spam my friends but hey, facebook is evil, so why not make the facebook-experience for everybody just a little worse and nag them with something actually cool.

hngiszmo5• 13 years ago

Uhm, pardon? They "recommend" coinbase to claim the 500µBTC in my wallet but don't let me give them just any other receiving address? So for me the 2nd screen where they say they give me 500µBTC is a lie and they are scammers.

hngiszmo5• 13 years ago

WTF?? Ok, so they forced me to go to coinbase to claim my money which according to other posts here does not work. So I started over again and checked the charity addresses they show which are actually not related to any charity neither do they get any donations in the progress.

I would say this is fishyfish.

grigio• 13 years ago

the drag and drop doesn't work on touch devices..

gojomo• 13 years ago

(4) A wallet is a computer file which holds Bitcoins. Bitcoins are sent between wallets; each wallet is represented by a Bitcoin address.

The simplifications in this explanation are ultimately damaging.

A real wallet does "hold" cash, but a Bitcoin "wallet" only holds keys & relevant history information. (It would make as much or more sense to say the balance is actually "held" by the globally replicated network.)

A "Bitcoin wallet" is not just (or even mainly) a "file", but the active software which gives you the power to spend your balances. It is atypical (and against best practice) for a "Bitcoin wallet" to be represented by a (single, distinct) Bitcoin address.

Confusion over these points have cost a lot of early adopters a lot of Bitcoins, to theft or complete destruction.

(Personally I think the very term "wallet" should be discarded, because the notions of 'physical containment' and reification-in-a-single-place that creates are counterproductive. Perhaps it's too late to fix that, though.)

mjrials3• 13 years ago

Hey everyone, we're currently experiencing a security breach which has resulted in us temporarily freezing Bitcoin transactions. Because of this, claiming your wallet at the end will not work. We hope to have this fixed in the next hour. Thank you all for your patience.

improv32• 13 years ago

It's giving me weird upside down text. http://i.imgur.com/ikTne52.png Arch Linux, Chromium 29.0.1547.62 (219432)

Devlin_Donnelly• 13 years ago

I recieved this error when trying to sign up for coinbase and transfer my uBTC there:

You don't have that much - please visit the Buy/Sell page to add more funds to your account..

Any Suggestions?

JoshTriplett2• 13 years ago

As far as I can tell, there's no way to claim the remaining bitcoins at the end of this without creating a new coinbase account, even if you already have one.

Given that coinbase pays for referrals, that makes sense, but it nonetheless seems tacky.

ewoodrich• 13 years ago

drivebyacct2, if you read this, you have been hellbanned for at least the last month.

I don't know why you were banned, and I can take downvotes for irrelevance to the article, but I feel I should let a 3+ yr user with over 10,000 karma that they're posting to the aether. (I wish there was a better way to do this).

Try Bitcoin

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