Bitcoin Forum

What is Sendbitcoins.net?
Sendbitcoins.net is a new payment processor for Bitcoin which uses well known technologies to simplify the day to day use of Bitcoins.
While a regular Bitcoin transaction can take up to one hour to properly confirm Sendbitcoins.net allows to send and receive coins instantanously.
To use this you dont need a new client, a blockchain or any new software - all you need is to register at bitcoinpal.net to start using it.

Why would someone want to use this service?
This service aims at the everyday user who just wants to send and receive Bitcoins without the spending too much time thinking about the easiest way to do this. Shops and merchants can use this software, just like Paypal, to set up simple payment systems or modify their existing software to use Bitcoins just like Eur or USD.

What makes this service unique?
You can adapt pretty much every existing Paypal IPN compatible software by just editing (literally) two lines of code. In every Paypal compatible software you will find a line that leads to "paypal.com/webscr". If you change it to "bitcoinpal.net/backend.php" you are done.
You can find an example of such an adaption in the example package provided on the about page for the OpenCart software. No need to setup a bitcoind, no need for custom payment systems, just your e-mail and standard software available for all shopping carts.

Built in rating system:
Every transaction can be rated from 1 to 10, which is basically a score from "transaction failed" up to "everything worked perfectly" to rate the transaction with another user or shop. Doing so enables users to give and receive scores for and from other users which can be seen in the profile section of the page.
This page lists how many transactions a user has rated, how many ratings he got and send and what his average score is. That should ensure that a user is transparent enough to be sure about him wether he is a scammer (more likely to receive bad scores) or a reliable trading partner with lots of good scores. Of course this offers no safety from scammers, but it is a tool for receiving and giving reputation.
 
Payment options and Fees:
To use Sendbitcoins.net you will just have to register on the website and deposit coins to the address you are given. A deposit is credited to your account after 4 confirmations. The address you have is fixed so you can even point your Pools payout address there. Upon reaching the 4th confirmation you will receive a notification and the coins will be added to your account. From there on you can either send coins directly to any other user using his E-Mail address or withdraw coins to any Bitcoin Address, but waiting for multiple confirmation for the coins to arrive. There also fees on transactions to keep the server running. For user to user transactions (including shops using the backend api) the transaction fee is 0.2% of the transaction volume, for withdrawals a fee of 0.01BTC will be taken.

 


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Changelog:

03/01/13
Website openes up, but some features remain "beta".
Domain name changed to Sendbitcoins.net

-reserved-

Paypal is going to be all over your ass lol

Seems silly to use the term "pal" in a payment processor name other than paypal.  Are you broadly familiar with trademark law and its purpose?

Not predicting the outcome of any cases that may come up about this, just amazed that you're choosing to expose yourself to a risk unnecessarily.

Even though this an announcement of a new service I'll leave this thread here because it's the first operational service that is specifically addressing off chain transactions which I believe are a significant issue for Bitcoin.

This does not however mean that I endorse this service or the OP in anyway so any bitcoins you are trusting this service to handle for you you better make sure you can trust the operator.

Well, tbh i just checked if the trademark "Bitcoinpal" was claimed. If need be i will change the name of course, but so far i dont see any threat from Paypal as long as i dont use their name.

ALright.. i came to the conclusion - after a night of sleep - that it might be right that the url might be some sort of big red bullseye for Paypal.. so i am going to change this. an other name which is less Trademark offending ;)

So for the moment the website will still be available as bitcoinpal - but address and name will change in a few days.

The address is now Changed to

SendBitcoins.net

But it will take a few hours for the domain to get fully online.

Multiple web pages ending in .php usually signify a poor codebase with a developer with poor web development knowledge. A clusterfuck of html mixed in with php is a recipe for a unmaintainable hodgepodge and may imply other not-so-great web development practices taking place.

I would be wary of the security practices taken here, including general "common sense" practices (not live editing db/files/presence of backups)

It seems like a weekend project with no intent to expand beyond a couple of users.

Thats pretty much the case. Till now i didnt use  mod_rewrite ..  since i am not using Apache things are a bit more complex...

I like the idea of a drop-in replacement for paypal!

Yes *2

Updated the examples: www.sendbitcoins.net/example.zip


Mod_rewrite will still take a while since i have an assignment today.. so i can start working on it tomorrow...

Thank you to all of the people who have already registered and tested SendBitcoins.Net

To offer all of you a small incentive to test the whole process I give 0.1 BTC each to 10 randomly chosen users who have a total transaction volume of more than 1BTC by Friday the 9th of March.

Love your idea, and ignore the naysayers, however I think it's a good idea to do everything as original as possible, you don't want a company like PayPal on your neck. While adapting their API to your usage is a great idea, in many ways, I'm not sure if the legal department at PayPal would agree. :) Anyways, most of luck with your service!

Relevant:
"So before deciding to do ClearCoin, I was thinking I was going to clone one or more of the PayPal shopping cart / payment APIs." - Gavin Andresen
Link (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5187.0)

Well.. that post is close to 2 years old...

lol +1

"He used .php extensions which means he must be using windows 98 and doesn't know nothing 'bout compotas"

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” ― Albert Einstein

Is it really a good idea to allow reversals though? It could increase your own costs and the point of having reputation in feedback is so that people can make educated decisions.

As of no i wont allow reversals in 99% of the cases but i am planning to build up a budget from the fees and offer that service maybe later. If someone was scammed and can proof and the scammer still has funds on his account a reversal is possible, but unlikely.. at least in the near future. I really want to take too many big risks right at the start, things will come later on i am sure, but not as of now.
But for security i am planning to introduce two more layers for "trust":

- Escrow
Dont have to say much about this, do I?

- User verification
I will start offering this service sometime next week. It is basically, although i know its a bad thing to compare to, the same mechanism as in GLBSE. I am planning to offer verification of users by accepting some credentials form them, like telephone number or snail mail address, Skype (..whatever, the exact things i have not yet decided on) and mark them as trusted users in addition to the ranking system. Chances are just better the more verified users are that they are more trusted. And before people ask: No i will neither store nor sell nor do anything beyond verifying the existence of users  with private data. BUt I think i will just go so far as to verify phone, skype, snail mail and maybe some picture ID.. we will see about that. Still have to decide about that like i said.

One small feature to add to sendbitcoins is "Subscriptions" for recurring payments that get payed, like the paypal api offers, every so and so days interval until either stopped or the user having no mor emoney on his account.
Another thing i am thinking about is an accountless payment. Instead of logging in you get an address and pay it. IPN notification is withheld until the payment has confirmed 4 times and then gets verified.. still have to see if that somehow breaks APIs i test with.

If chargebacks are possible, you are providing escrow.

As long as the Coins are in Escrow, yes.. but i am not planning to offer a whatnot hundred days of possible chargebacks like Paypal does in near future. that is what i meant.