Bitcoin Forum

The pitch:

I will be offering the ability to acquire bitcoins simply, cheaply and without the need to interface with the banking system.

The following will be all one need do in order to acquire bitcoin via my service: Purchase a 1/10th ounce coin or bar from your local coin shop; Use this thread to fill a buy order; Wait for confirmation that the buyer has delivered the requisite bitcoin into my escrow account; Send the 1/10th ounce coin standard post to my po-box; Wait for the bitcoins to be released to the address of your choice.

Gold is so value dense that postage will be a mere 49 cents. Unfortunately there is the extra step of driving down to the coin shop but one must do what one must in-order avoid men in black masks crashing through their windows at night.


The details:

I will run a public order-book on a google drive spreadsheet. Interested parties may place bids, asks or market orders for 1/10th of an ounce of 999 fine gold. Orders will be placed via replies in this thread and processed in the order they are received. When an order is matched payment will be requested from the bitcoin seller. If bitcoin payment is delivered than the gold seller will be notified and asked to send a letter to my po box containing details of his order and a 1/10th ounce gold coin or bar. When the gold arrives at my po box I will forward it to the bitcoin seller and release the bitcoins to the gold seller. If the gold seller does not uphold his end of the arrangement, the bitcoins will be returned, and you may place another order as you see fit. The violator will be banned from using the service until they make restitution to the other party for the time they wasted. Low reputation individuals may be required to post a small bond. Probably just a couple of dollars worth of bitcoin. This is basically an anti spam measure and wont be enacted unless fake bids and asks become a problem.

As for my fee, that will come in time but not until after the project has been successfully bootstrapped.

Gold senders will be required to take a few basic precautions against theft from postal employees. To do this, take a stack of several sheets of paper, fold the stack in thirds, and tape the gold well to the inside of the bundle. Place this bundle inside of the envelope rather than leaving the gold loose and tumbling around. The thicker the stack the better.

You may begin placing orders or alternatively discussion will be welcome in this thread as well. Things you would like to see. Problems you may anticipate. Even just a post to let me know if this is the sort of thing you would be interested in. All non troll comments welcome. If you are interested in seeing this project succeed than this thread will require many bumps :).

My reputation thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=381041

The orderbook: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f2yoPzfcluSlBD3HSSTWg3x_8bthAFq0C5oDM9TmmDo/edit?usp=sharing


FAQ:

What about fake gold? - I have a pretty good amount of experience dealing in gold and silver. I am unaware of any 1/10th ounce fake gold products. Nevertheless I will be using digital calipers and a scale to ensure that the dimensions and weight conform to specifications. The risk of receiving a fake product at this point approaches 0.

I have a pretty good amount of experience dealing in gold and silver. I am unaware of any 1/10th ounce fake gold products. Nevertheless I will be using digital calipers and a scale to ensure that the dimensions and weight conform to specifications. The risk of receiving a fake product at this point approaches 0.

Ill make the first entry in the faq. Thanks for the question :)

Sorry about deleting your comment xetsr. I realized I needed to claim a few of these top reply spots for myself.

off to bed for the night. will check back in the morning.

Anon136 is alive again. ;)

Hey buddy! Long time no see. How are things? Thoughts on the idea?

Hello Anon136,

This is a very interesting service. I wish you luck and that it goes better than you silver selling service. I guess this will work only in the US, right? If so I won't be able to check it out, unfortunately.

For everybody else that are not familiar with Anon136 (there are not many on this forum), if you are interested by his new gold service, I encourage you to try it. Anon is a great guy, I know him since a long time from his involvement in the NXT community and he's 100% legit!

Good luck Anon!

Thanks for the kind words mickey. Yes unfortunately it will be USA only. It would just take too long for packages to arrive from other parts of the world. There would be too much variance in what sort of time buyers could expect it to take for the letter to arrive.

It sounds like you will know the postal address of the person selling bitcoins, but have no knowledge of the person selling gold. What is your position on "know your customer" and money laundering laws?

I wont be handling any money, at-least as far as the US government is concerned. http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/IRS-Virtual-Currency-Guidance

But this does bring up one good point. Perhaps I wont be able to accept gold coins with face value denominations. That could be very restrictive.

Cool service you have here. Some trusted member could start something similar in the EU. Good luck with sales :)

1/10th ounce gold eagle says "5 dollars" on it. Craaaaaap. That would almost certainly be used as a justification to slap me with transmitting money without a money transmitter license or at the very least KYC requirements.

Could still use bars like this.

https://privatebullion.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/NTR-tenth-oz-gold-bar-front.jpg

But that's pretty restrictive.

I think im going to have to switch to a gram standard rather than troy ounce. Maybe 5 gram resolution with the option to use either 5 1 gram or 1 5 gram bar.

People could buy/sell Canadian Maple leafs. Not legal tender in the US.

Also, aren't there already gold dealers that accept BTC for buy/sell of gold bullion and coin? I'm not sure why I would use your service over theirs? Is the idea that you have no KYC requirements?

There are definitely some advantages to going that route to be sure. But I like to think there are also some unique advantages to this approach as well. When you go to a website like that you have one seller and one price on one item, take it or leave it.

I am hoping instead to build a vibrant market with many competing buyers and sellers and price discovery. It is reasonable to expect that under these circumstances you may be able to get a much better deal than you could on a website like that. But I see mostly the trade off will be simple off the grid OTC purchases of bitcoins on the seller side, and very competitive prices on gold for gold on the buyers side. Each can have their interests met through the exchange in a way that would be difficult if they were forced to trust each other.

Also yes. No KYC requirements. No licenses. No red tape. No government bullshit of any kind. Just simple beautiful peer2peer exchange.

OK well I'll give it a try.

WTB 1/10 oz Gold Canadian Maple Leaf or Gold American Eagle for $95 USD worth of BTC.

Order good for 3 days.

(I assume payer pays shipping?)

Just factor shipping into your ask.

Also buyer doesnt get to choose what type of gold. The reason it has to be this way is I want to build a market and inorder to have a market the good has to be homogeneous. Which means if I allow buyers to specify the type of gold, than i have to break it up into different orderbooks for different products. Which means liquidity gets cut in half or thirds or quarters ect... Sorry, if this is deal breaking let me know and ill pull it down.

Cmon guys I need orders or else this thing is going to die. Even just place an order that you dont think will fill just so I have something to put on the spreadsheet. :D

Its a network problem. This service is of no use at all to the early adopters but maybe will be someday. So I need altruists to step forward.

Gold coins from countries (Us, Canada, Aus) have a premium over spot, however, a third party round or bar doesn't possibly have as high of a premium. But, I guess for 1/10 oz it's not too much of a variance. So, that's fine.

So, my price includes shipping to me right?

Sure. If you want to send me 59 cents I wont object but otherwise It's a pretty inconsequential amount to pay to get this thing started.

Remember the seller will be sending the XAU to me and ill be forwarding it to you. In order to prevent anyone from needing to trust anyone (except me).

Right, so I guess I don't get how that would normally work.

The seller sends you the gold so they are paying for a stamp. Then, you forward it, sending him the bitcoin. Are you expecting me to send an extra $.60 cents to you, or are you going to deduct the money from the BTC you send the other party?

I guess I'm not sure how you normally expect it to work. I would guess any normal fee you charge would cover the small amount of postage.

You got it. Until such a time as I decide to charge a fee, ill just comp the postage.

Doesn't it require a 250,000 dollar bond and a license in every state?

That sounds awesome! Send him to this thread for me. Or alternatively I'm happy to just provide escrow services for w/e sort of deal your parties require. I am also a general purpose escrow provider in addition to little pet projects like this.

Thanks for all the info. I don't think im going to go spring for a MSB license before i even do a single trade but thanks to your comment ill probably move forward with that a little sooner than I otherwise would have if the community starts to show interest in the project. Also if msb is easy enough, i just wont worry about accpting coins with face denominations, its not like they are going to come throw me in federal prison for a few dozen trades, ill only get a knock if this service becomes sufficiently popular so i have plenty of time to worry about that in future.

So if you have an idea for what this local coin dealer would pay you, you might consider going ahead and posting up some buy orders (and potentially sell orders) that would allow enough room to arbitrage. Even if the offer is low it would be nice to have something to start filling up my orderbook with. You could supply some liquidity if nothing else.

And thankyou for your interest and advise. It is greatly appreciated.

Minimum resolution is 0.1 troy ounces. So I can either place the order for 0.2 or 0.3 troy ounces. Ill set it for 0.2 at the price you specified. You can update the order in this thread anytime. More often means more bumps so feel free ;D

I'll extend my order through Monday.

Also, shouldn't my order be on top since I'm offering a better rate?

Sorry I don't understand your whole idea on localbitcoins. I have used localbitcoins as a bitcoin seller quite a long time ago.

I would be fine with any sort of shipping that the buyer wanted to pay for. There is a potential problem with trying to get the seller to do some sort of fancy shipping. He could just pretend like he was going to send some gold inorder to get the buyer to send him shipping money and then cut ties and never send any gold. There is also a problem with an expectation that the seller do fancy shipping. Either every single one of them does (thus making small purchases impractical) or none of them do. If you have some who do and some who dont you fracture the market. It loses its homogeneity and you have to make 2 different markets each with half the liquidity. Mainly this service is for people who arent in a terrible hurry. Of course if its some massive amount of gold than at some point shipping costs become negligible and it definitely becomes worth it to have tracking. So in sufficiently large amounts its reasonable to expect the seller to use good shipping just out of his own self interest.

It is very unlikely that you would ever receive a fake 1/10th ounce piece that conformed to weight and dimensional specifications. I don't think such a thing exists.

Ill have to think about the request for limitations on brands. I'm not sure how badly that would fracture the market. If you look at the spreadsheet you will get an idea for what im trying to do. I want it to be like a market like any of the other bitcoin exchanges. Inorder to do that people cant be requesting specific kinds of bitcoins. Each order has to be as good as any other. Now you do have altcoins, and if there is sufficient liquidity and volume in the future than we can fracture the market into two based on the sorts of distinctions that are most important to people (could be fast shipping from seller or potentially government mint vs non government mint or large coins vs small ect...). But until such a time as there is significant liquidity, its best to keep it all as one market, which entails some sacrifices.

Updated

Rather than explaining it with words, I added a few faux orders to show the sort of thing I had in mind. Let me know if that helped.

It could of course just as easily be done the completely opposite way from top to bottom, and that wouldn't be wrong in any way, and in that situation your order would be on top. Just to me this way makes every so slightly more intuitive sense.

Yes both will be sending to me and and I will be forwarding along after performing quality control.

Yes please do let me know what you find. I have been wanting to buy an ultrasonic thickness gauge which is pretty foolproof and works great with thick bars. I'm not sure how well it would work with 1/10th ounce. Also as far as conductivity is concerned, im not sure, but i dont think you would get a different reading in terms of conductivity with thick gold plate tungsten core vs solid gold. I think the current would simply take the path of least resistance around the core.

*edit* can you find any examples of fake 1/10th ounce gold coins on the internet. like a video with someone showing one or some good pictures and a convincing story. im having a hard time finding evidence that such a thing even exists. And if there are, as a bonus, can you find any example of one that would have conformed properly to all specifications? (besides gold content  :P)

How is this better than a straight up escrow? You take 2x the chances of a shipping issue. Why not use an escrow to hold coins while the other party ships. Also it requires 2x the trust of the escrow here.

What?  One party holds the BTC and the coin/gold and once has both releases them to buyer/seller. What is 2x risk about that?

I assume it would work like this.

Joe decides to sell Pilot (me) a .1 ounce of gold for $95.

Escrow agent (Anon) tells me to remit BTC to him. Once it's received he tells Joe to send him gold. Once that is received Anon sends Joe the BTC and Pilot (me) the gold.

That is "straight up escrow."

what pilot said

as far as increased shipping risk. yea that's pretty unfortunate. hopefully the service is still useful to some people despite this.

The risk was that the gold coin needs to be shipped twice. I am not saying this is a bad idea by any means.

I doubt its worth it on a 1/10th ounce gold coin unless you have particular extenuating circumstances. Let me give example. Say your gold coin is worth 100 dollars, and shipping in a box with insurance is 10 dollars instead of the 49 cents it would have been standard post. In this situation you would need to have > ~9.5% chance for the letter to be lost inorder to make insurance an net positive expected ROI. Those are just rough numbers, but I think it illustrates the principal which makes it the case that it will be highly unlikely that insurance will have a net positive expected ROI.

It doesn't matter who pays it. Its all just moving numbers around. If acquiring 1/10th of an ounce of gold costs 12 dollars more than it otherwise would have, than there is the potential that people wont want to use the service for that reason also. They dont care if they have to pay that money to the post office or to me in the form of bitcoin. Its all just a cost.

In order to justify 12 dollars on insurance you have to have >12% chance that a gold coin worth 100 dollars will be lost. Else its a losing proposition. Now once you get into bigger orders definitely. At like 1/2 ounce im sure it becomes worth it. But i dont have to enforce that. If a senders gold gets lost on the way to me he doesnt get bitcoins because i have no way of knowing he really sent it. So he is incentivized to make the right choice for him. And similarly the buyer can pay for any kind of shipping he wants by just sending me the bitcoins that it costs. I have no problem with that at all.

Bitcoin is now classed as a commodity within the United States (http://www.pressexaminer.com/bitcoin-is-now-classed-as-a-commodity-within-the-united-states/74376)

Relevant news for the purposes of this project.