Bitcoin Forum

Hello Bitcoiners,

Just thought I'd pop on this forum to announce that we have full Bitcoin automation operational now. It is a trial. A big "experiment"; if you will. Any/all feedback will be appreciated of course.

We have deposit limits of $25 USD/mo per account to limit financial risks to our business. We don't mind being a guarantor of Bitcoins.

We would like to partner with competent exchangers, so please spam us. :)

Warm regards,
Steven Lee, CTO of Link2VoIP

Hello again,

I am happy to report that we have seen 12 automated Bitcoin payments overnight. Everything seems to be working great so far.

Average time between a spend and it showing up in our accounting system is about 1.2 minutes. That isn't bad considering that the transactions have to be peer reviewed first.

Have a great weekend guys! :)

That's great to hear! I'm in the process of getting my exchange service up, so maybe we can co-operate in the future. :)

Up to 19 transactions now. And we've noticed a growth in the number of Bitcoin client IPs since we started promoting it to our "tech savy" user base.

I will post again once we have enough data for a daily transaction average. :)

I hope this message will offer encouragement.

:D

We have proper statistics running now. Here is a dump of our stats for the last few days:

Payment Stats
Total Number of Payments:   17
Total Value of Payments:   $49.63
Estimated Monthly Income:   $206.74 (BC33,830.93)
Estimated Daily Income:   $6.89 (BC1,127.48)
Average Number of Daily Payments:   2.36
Average Value Per Payment:   $2.92

Wow, so how does it feel to be the first company that adopted a new payment system?!

Feel? You are asking a faceless corporation how it feels? :P j/k

It is working and our developers are excited at the possibilities that Bitcoin offers.

Yes, you are how I heard of Bitcoin. I am so very glad you sent out that email.

By the way, I signed up an account with you but since you don't support IAX2 I went with another provider. Your IPSec support looked cool though.

IAX is crashy crashy crash! WOO HOO!

Nice moronic guess pnnac, but you will see shortly how you are wrong about my interest in Bitcoin. My original post was the plain truth. Keep checking the 'We accept Bitcoins' thread.

As for Link2Voip people:

Do not judge IAX by freeswitches shoddy IAX implementation. That is freeswitch crashing, not IAX silly.

As for SIP, it is obviously an inferior protocol. However, due to it being out there first, and due to where it came from, it is unfortunately probably not going away for a long time. That doesn't change that it is an archaic POS protocol that can never be patched enough to bring it into the modern world. You can polish that turd...

But anyways, I posted originally because I wanted to thank you for the email you sent which is how I found out about bitcoin, and also because I was very interested in trying out Link2Voip due to you IPSec support, but I wouldn't do so without IAX support. I simply hoped my comment might motivate them to try setting up IAX properly (since I never have had a crash due to IAX in my life). If you ever go, send me another spam and I'll try out your service.

I think pnnac was referring to Asterisk's IAX2 implementation. I have witnessed Asterisk lock up after a few hundred connected IAX2 calls myself. I personally use SIP because reinvites actually work without truncating billing data.

In any event, this forum is for discussing Bitcoin not VoIP. Let's try to keep VoIP related flames elsewhere. Thanks. :)

We used to offer IAX2 many years ago until we experienced rapid growth that rendered our Asterisk server farm useless. They would consume threads into oblivion and crash. Back then the SIP stack for Asterisk was quite shoddy but it actually would hold up a lot better than IAX2 (surprisingly).

We were forced to buy Cisco gear and run opensips in the end.  Ah well.. :P

Stats dump update:

Payment Stats
Total Number of Payments:   33
Total Value of Payments:   $123.60
Estimated Monthly Income:   $281.25 (BC46,943.44)
Estimated Daily Income:   $9.38 (BC1,565.62)
Average Number of Daily Payments:   2.50
Average Value Per Payment:   $3.75

Link2VoIP,

Do you have them use your website's static IP or do you give each person unique bitcoin addresses?

If you do the IP, what do you do when you get some bitcoin payment and you can't match it up?  Bitcoin payments have no return address.

Hello,

That's a good question. :P

We generate a new Bitcoin address for each new payment. Once we receive payment to a Bitcoin address we look it up in our database, deposit it into the applicable Link2VoIP account, and expire the Bitcoin address. Very simple.

We also recycle abandoned addresses after 72 hours in order to keep the Bitcoin database as small as possible.

Feel free to signup and try it out if you wish.

Cheers!

How do you expire a bitcoin address?  On the windows software, it has a "Your Bitcoin Addresses" screen and then I made some test addresses which I never used.  And then well the software only lets me create more and more addresses, but never delete them or no way to "expire" them.

We don't expire them. We recycle abandoned ones. It isn't a feature of Bitcoin, it is a feature of our integration software.

Payment Stats
Total Number of Payments:   41
Total Value of Payments:   $137.05
Estimated Monthly Income:   $208.42 (BC36,654.83)
Estimated Daily Income:   $6.95 (BC1,222.30)
Average Number of Daily Payments:   2.08
Average Value Per Payment:   $3.34

Hmm wouldn't it be better simply to have them send to your static IP and then put their account name and likely some reference number in the message instead?

I'm pondering which one is better to do.

Having our customers pay by IP won't work well for us.

We'd have to coach customers into entering their username and other bits of data that we need in a special format into the payment message body. It is too prone to user error. I'm sure the IP payment option will work well for others. :)

Stats update:

Total Number of Payments:   61
Total Value of Payments:   $216.12
Estimated Monthly Income:   $191.16 (BC46,623.92)
Estimated Daily Income:   $6.37 (BC1,553.64)
Average Number of Daily Payments:   1.80
Average Value Per Payment:   $3.54
Days since we started accepting Bitcoin:   33

After discovering and listening to the audio book at bitcoinmoney.com called Rebooting Money, I have decided to offer bonuses for Bitcoin payments. The part about the two gas stations really got me thinking.

All Bitcoin payments at Link2VoIP now enjoy a 2% deposit bonus. We will likely leave this bonus in place to incentivize Bitcoin over traditional payment methods.

I haven't seen that posted before. It's an excellent overview of Bitcoin.