Bitcoin Forum

https://picostash.com (https://picostash.com)

What is it?
It basically is an easy way to sell your digital content for crypto currencies. Currently PicoStash supports Bitcoin, Litecoin and DASH (recognizes InstantSend tx.). Initially is was meant to be Bitcoin only but once the high fees started taking over I figured it would be nice to implement multiple currencies.
Once a customer has made a payment, it will be transferred to you automatically. No need to withdraw, this way there's never a large amount of coins in the hot wallet and your earnings are transferred to the safety of your own wallet as soon as possible.
Note that this is NOT a platform where people can browse through uploads, you are responsible for making your link known to your potential customers, preferably through a medium your customers trust and know that is operated by you. (blog/twitter/Facebook etc.)

Why PicoStash?

• No need to withdraw by hand, your earnings will be transferred to the safety of your own wallet as soon as a successful payment has been processed. (As a result very few coins will be in PicoStash's hot wallet, making it a less likely target)
• Up to 2GB of data per upload.
• You decide which coins are accepted. (At the moment Bitcoin, Litecoin and DASH, more to come...)
• Simple but clean dashboard to watch your earnings and manage your 'stashes'.
• Fees are 1.5% with $0.20 minimum.
• Simple process for buyers, no registration/e-mail address required. After a payment, download links are generated that will remain valid for 24 hours.

See it in action.
Once you have uploaded your files, set a price in U.S. dollars and entered your receiving addresses (if you don't want to accept a specific coin, just leave the receiving address blank), you'll end up with a link that looks something like this:
https://picostash.com/stash/a8 (https://picostash.com/stash/a8)

You should really try to lower your fees. You need to give your users a reason to use your service since fees are higher than any other service, and you are not trusted enought considering your website is brand new. Maybe only 1% in the first phase of your website?

For example, selly.gg already offers only 2.5% on larger Bitcoin transactions, supports BTC, Dash, LTC and ETH as payment, and it's already trusted in the market. This makes people prefer their service than yours.

Thanks for the feedback, I wasn't aware of Selly. I get What you are saying, might have to take another look at the fee schedule. However Satoshibox seems to be fairly popular and their fee is 6% or 0.0015BTC. Not sure if it has always been that high though.

What I'd do is go with a minimal fee in the beginning (enough to get by) and slowly increase it as you gain traction. You need users to get visibility but you need visibility to get users. Bootstrap it, essentially.

Good that you have launched your site and made the announcement. But just posting an announcement here won't get you lots of sellers. You need to campaign vigorously like signature campaigns, bounty programmes, etc, so that your site is shown all over the forum. Then you can expect some sellers interested, without that, it won't be of much use.

Thanks for the input guys. I adjusted the fees and they should be pretty competitive now. I'll definitely look into sig. campaigns/bounty programmes.

Well, I think these is the reason they started the Signature Campaign. I just hope many users get attracted to these site. I know that many other sites are doing these kind of services but having other altcoins join the fun is cool.


I am a member of the Signature Campaign and will be doing my job as a member of it. I've also told some of my friends about it and they seem curious about it.

Have you considered offering the same kind of service but for free content, in the same vein as a storage host like Mega but for individual files? For example, you could have the user set an allowance of how much a certain file is to be downloaded by depositing BTC/other crypto into the site's wallet and then start taking from that as the file that your client uploaded gets downloaded by other people that it is shared with. If you do this in a location without DMCA protection I could see it being used by people sharing content that they would otherwise not be allowed to share publicly. It is of course just a suggestion and you could also implement a variation of it or even a temporary torrent seeder, for example. I know this would be of great use to me, at least.

If any of this comes to fruiting please PM me, since I would like to try it out personally.

I'm not sure I am following what you are saying. Do you mean a user can upload a file, then deposit some coins to make it available to download for free until the funds run out?

Yes, exactly. A similar thing can be done where the user uploads a torrent file, then your service leeches it, and then seeds it until their funds run out. I remember there being a service that did exactly this a couple of years ago, but I cannot remember its name. Their business model ran something like charging a small amount per hour of seeding the torrent and then a more significant amount for the actual data upload. I am sure you could use a CLI-based torrent client to make this easier, but of course that is just a suggestion. If anyone who reads this remembers the name of the old service that provided/may still provide this that would be nice too.

That sounds do-able, and as much as I want customers, to me that seems like a surefire way to get involved into all kinds of serious legal trouble. I'm more interested in finding customers that want to sell their music, e-book/magazine, software or even adult material There's a whole lot of girls making some extra money selling custom vids for BTC that understandably don't want to give out their personal details, so cryptocurrencies are the way to go for them.

If somebody remembers the name of the service you are talking about I'd love to know as well and see if they are still in business, perhaps it is viable after all.

This is a cool idea, I posted up some of my pics for sale for BTC/USD/ETH/LTE etc. already on another platform but I wish I saw this earlier. Seems like an awesome way to get recognition, coins, and cash.

You can post those pics again in picostash if you like.

What I really like about picostash is the fee structure, 1.5% on every purchase is really small if compared with other competing platforms. Also  it is quite easy to sell your contents in picostash because of easy to follow step by step guide site have.

Without much ado, picostash shall emerge as the best digital goods online at least better than its predecessors because it accepts other alts compare to other markets that only accept one type of cryptocoin.

The Op also needed to update the website information because the homepage only have this information PicoStash demo. (do not buy) Created 2w 0d ago, Price: $15.00, Accepted currencies: BitcoinDASHLitecoin.

My apology i clicked on https://picostash.com/stash/a8 instead of https://picostash.com/

Better than those payivy or whatever links.Thing I need to know is weather our files are secure from third party viewing/downloading from your server.And that third party is you,do you store the files with access only from the client server,meaning only client and the one that client requested to pay has access for downloading the files ? Otherwise I don't trust your service.

The point with encrypting the files is that you have to somehow get the decryption key to the customer. The best way to do that is through a secure communication channel with you customer. E.g. You upload an encrypted (archive) file to PicoStash and then after purchasing the user will have to message you for the password.

I am not aware of any less inconvenient methods to achieve the same level of security. There were some hosting service that used client side JavaScript encryption but that's basically using the hash of the URL to transport the decryption key. So sharing that URL in public is dangerous and you'd have to be sure that the decoding JavaScript file isn't actually compromised and secretly sharing the key.

Very nice project with simple and elegant interface, nice to see fees are just 1.5%. Happy to promote this project, hope more people will use PicoStash service.

Checking out the service and I am impressed with the details you have put up there but at the same time, I think more more publicity should be done on the digital section of the forum. Also, I want to know if there is a kind of dispute resolution because a situation whereby service provision is misrepresented in other to gain more attention.

Thanks. You mean a dispute over the contents of the files? Since all transactions are final due to the nature of the cryptocurrencies you would have to contact the seller directly. All the coins are directly transferred to the seller and not held by us, so we do not have the coins any longer after a successful payment has been received. That's why there currently is no marketplace like section on the website (until the seller rating system is in place). You should only considering buying files if you have found the link to them on a blog/forum/twitter feed etc. you trust.

Thank you for the response which is even timely at that. And I think more is to be done to make the sellers responsible the reason why I said that is because people who are morally deficient might want to use that as a means to scam users and it won't be long before people start tagging the go between as the platform to scam people. My opinion though.

Well, online buying is always risky. No one casually fall for online buying without complete trust and knowledge about seller. So 'After Sale' dispute don't have much relevance here.
But yeah, I feel Picostash should have some verification process to check authenticity of files before sale link is off since sale/purchase will directly affect company reputation. 

If there would be verification first before selling files then that would mean that it would be a tedious process for both the user/sellers and picostash. Scale this situation to hundreds of submissions per day, imagine the nightmare of reviewing each and everyone of the files.

An escrowed transaction is always best for this. The only time picostash should be involved is when there is a problem with the files. And because the money are not released yet, the buyer has a chance to dispute the problem.

Yeah nice solution. Despite of any separate escrow, it would be good if picostash itself hold money till buyer approves the authenticity of document. This will build the environment of trust between both buyer and seller as well as of customers towards picostash.

This kind of functionality will add a bit more manual processing, but I agree that it might be worth it. Most likely with a time window in which a dispute can be filed, and if not filed within that window the earnings are transferred to the seller (if the buyer indicates everything is OK, the earnings can be transferred immediately)

There are many such sites coming up every day and being announced here in bitcointalk.
To get users, particularly buyers you will need a continuous campaign across the forum by means of bounties and signature campaign, without which the site cannot self sustain.

The reason why the Signature Campaign was made, to make the site more popular. Well, it is the obvious way to advertise a new site. But it don't need to be a continuous one, if you think you can stop the campaign, it can be stopped. But if you really need more buyers and users for your site or service, I think you will be needing to keep it a little longer.

good project
picostash allow to add more files, other services allow only one file (and i need to zip it)

Thanks. Yes it allows up to 20 files (after 20 you'll have to zip eventually) with a total max size of 2 GB.

Its good to see some improvement suggestions and even willingness for implementation which was will make the site a place to trust. Trust they say is not cheap especially in this crypto space that services like this is being provided. Also, I would suggest if the timing talked about is put in the FAQ section or HOW TO section of the site for easy access to users.

I am sure this is something that has been implemented. In this current round of campaign there is even an opening to include boards on the Altcoin section of the forum in other to reach more potential clients and users.