Bitcoin Forum

I was inspired by this topic: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4667.0 and it is related, I just didn't want to make too much noise there.
What worries me a little it may end up a little spammy: "Damn those bitcoin mails again, last time we accepted them nobody wanted to buy anything for them"

So here's the deal. Let's do bitcoin groupon. If your favorite shop would accept bitcoins, what would you buy there? Post it there, let's create a list. If you wanted to buy something anyway, and you are not in a hurry with this, post here shop name + items and their prices (I was wondering if shop + sum of prices could be enough, but I'm afraid they may have different earnings on different items so they may be interested which items). Once we collect sum of items for given shop for some nice amount (I don't know maybe $100, maybe $500, maybe it will be like $1000 for XKCD tshirts ;), (btw yes please give amounts in dollars)), mail can be send with with proposition of accepting bitcoins.

Then it's something like "There's this new payment method, and there are many people interested in using it on your site, and if you accept it, these people declared to make orders".

This should work great for accepting donations too. I'm not setting any threshold, let's see how it goes.

PS:
About shops. There's this part of implementing payment method on the shop site. We have mtgox and bitcoinme merchant APIs, but to be honest I don't think they are very good. At least in the part of being user-friendly for company that implements the payment (implementation in example languages, detailed documentations, test envs). I also think these shops need quick introduction along with easy implementation. It's not so easy to grasp quickly how bitcoin works and why can you trust it. I'm working on something on my own, but I wonder what do you think about it. Do we need a better and easier to implement payment implementation?

You can find current offers at: http://bitcoinity.org/wanted

I'm still wondering about my orders, but I'm lacking 2 t-shirts from XKCD, so from me:

XKCD (store.xkcd.com) 2 x t-shirt $19 = $38

I guess I'll update with more possibly from thinkgeek :)

It'd be nice if we could compile our Amazon wish-lists. Here's mine: http://amzn.com/w/3B8X6GC7WECRZ

Too lazy to list its contents.

1. Are you willing to buy all this stuff at once in case all shops from the list would start accepting bitcoins?
2. I'm afraid we need to be more specific, contribution here is not donating money, but preparing such list, which costs time, but may result in more online stores accepting bitcoin

I sent an email to Thinkgeek saying I was prepared to buy a minimum of 40BTC worth of goods as soon as they started accepting it for payment. So I'll repeat that here.

I think it's a great idea that could benefit everyone.
Maybe it would be better to make a website along the lines of slickdeals and use twitter instead of spamming emails.
That way people interested could just check it everyday.

I'd make damn sure the people offering the deals understand what's going on because if someones first experience with BTC is getting burned it won't help the cause.

It made my day to see that you have safety glasses on your wishlist.


Also, I would like to add that I'm pledging a Bitcoin purchase to ThinkGeek, including the annoy-a-tron (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/8c52/) and the Pocket Ref book (http://www.thinkgeek.com/books/nonfiction/c289/)

I see what you're saying now. I'm not prepared to buy all of those things at once. I suppose I could create an amended, ready to buy now with bitcoins, wish list. I just think this forum is an inefficient way to do it. We need something that can merge same items and sum bids. What about the wiki?

Oh, heh. There's nothing like a good pair of safety glasses.

Should we have separate threads for separate merchants? Since I'm trying to convince Thinkgeek that accepting Bitcoin is in their interest, it would be great if there were a single thread I could point them at, full of people just waiting for the chance to give them money.

OK, so I do agree forum is not the most efficient way for this, like for also so many other stuff that we are doing here.

I'm happy to put a site. Site will have a feature to confirm your forum account there (by sending private message to dedicated forum account), so while browsing it you still have some idea that these are not random people.

It will look awful, and it will work nice. But if I create such site (I need about 15h for this, I have a full time job so I'd need 3 days), are you willing to use it for such purpose? I do think it is more efficient, but I don't want to try to spread community outside forum. I'm happy to spend my time and create such thing if only there is some interest.

I think it's a great idea. I don't live in the US so I won't be able to get anything but I imagine others will.

I'd use it.

me too.

You mean, a site where I can register that I'm willing to buy ### BTC worth of goods/services from Vendor X if they'll start accepting it?

Definitely a good idea. If you just make a bare-bones site, I'll prettify it for you---I'm pretty decent with layout, but don't know how to maintain a database.

If others want to help with the phrasing and the FAQ and such, we could make a real project out of this.

The only caveat is that we should try and make sure people don't back out of their pledges. Pledges alone are good enough to start with, but some sort of escrow would be ideal. If Vendor X is promised 200 BTC in sales and he only gets 30, no one will trust the site in the future.

Everyone: don't make promises you aren't going to keep!

What if there was an option for vendor feedback. They should have a place to make an announcement that they accept bitcoins so the pledges know they can start buying. An RSS feed would allow pledges to not keep checking back. An if a vendor reports an increase in sales after announcing their acceptance of bitcoins, it might encourage other vendors to participate.

Vendor feedback is a good idea---my only concern is how to verify that it's really the vendor.

I was thinking more along the lines of letting people make "pledge accounts" that they can no longer withdraw from once a vendor starts accepting Bitcoin payments, but would have to spend at that store. This may be too strict, since I've just promised 40 BTC to Thinkgeek and I don't actually have 40 BTC at the moment (but I expect to in the next few days). A mixed system of "hard" and "soft" pledges might be possible though, reported to the vendor as something like "150 - 300 BTC pledged".

I'm not so much worried about people forgetting as I am about someone offering to give 30 BTC apiece to ten or eleven organizations, and being unexpectedly "lucky".

What if you pledge 40btc and they never accept them or they do in a few months and the exchange rate is way up etc.
I agree it would be nice to lock it in but if they have a lot of people asking for it then it shows interest and I think that's good enough.

I agree that taking promises is good enough. I just disagree that "good enough" is the thing to aim for.

I've been meaning to do an XKCD order for a while, so this would be great. I would get a polo and two t-shirts for $42 + $19 + $19 = $80. I have the equivalent value of Bitcoins available.

Instead of only pledging a one time purchase, why not allow people to list either items and amounts or a monthly or yearly estimated purchase? That way the site can support service providers and utilities as well.

As a business owner, I would actually be a little bit suspicious of an offer that came with guaranteed escrow by someone else of coins to buy things from my store even before I've agreed to take them? That sounds like setup if you don't know more about bitcoin and the motivation. As that business owner, I'm interested in my market and how much they think they might spend, but I'm also likely to be realistic enough to know that the only sales that count are the ones I've deposited (after any refunds, charge-backs, fraud and counterfeiting, taxes and transaction fees are removed of course).  The selling point for bitcoin isn't new business, it's no transaction fees and no crazy charge-backs.

I think a bitcoin wishlist site is a great idea, and I would post to it. I would be happy to help build it if you don't mine putting it up on Google App Engine. A simple, but solid site would take about a day, but it will be a few days before I could start.  I'm coming up on soft and then hard launch on my current project.


Another opportunity if someone wants to go for it.
For vendors who don't want to support bitcoin, someone else could build a concierge service.
You pay the concierge in bitcoin covering the price, shipping and a convenience fee, she buys your item using legal tender and ships the item to you.
Maybe the service could use the wishlist to find and contact customers.

I agree and as a business owner I'm going to accept BTC because I want to not because it's going to do great things for my business at this time.
If I were larger then maybe it would matter more. If I had 100 people saying they want to buy things from me if I take BTC I'd go for it though.
I think the wishlist is simple but could easily grow and it's simple. Simple is good.

I'm really glad there is some interest. I was missing some project lately that I'm not doing for money :) I already started and I will let you know how it goes.

About discussion:

• I think we should stick to dollar amounts - btc value still varies quite much and $ value is something that mechants understand
• about escrow, I'm skeptical. ScriptGadget argument seems valid for me, and also I think our community is still small enough to trust these people with higher number of posts. From our side, I'd like it to be understood that if you declare yourself, you gonna buy it, but from the store owner side, it's rather obvious these are not 100% transactions, it rather only shows potential interest, so my vote would be rather against the jar, but I'm totally open for discussion

Yeah we need to list it in USD for sure.
Even if a few don't actually buy it shows that there are a lot of people with BTC looking to use it and it's growing.

Listing in USD is a good idea, since it nullifies my other concern: people pledge 20 BTC when that means 16 USD, and their offer is accepted two years later when it means 130 USD.

What if people chose whether to denominate their pledges in bitcoins or USD?

Youre missing something obvious here. Would a bitcoin  merchant want to be involved in a bitcoin groupon ? Then you can use bitcoins or at least a link to the product....

Its also good if a hundred bitcoiners get a discount at a USD store  :)

This gives me an idea. People want to buy stuff with coins, but the merchant doesn't take coins. Intermediary accumulates orders and bitcoin payments from consumers and negotiates a bulk deal with the merchant. Consumers get to use bitcoin. Intermediary pockets the difference. Merchants get extra sales and eventually take Bitcoin directly.

Easier said than done I'm sure.

I guess it's essentially a sales affiliate who handles currency conversion too.

Idea is obviously neat, but putting it in compressed version I think we are still far too small for this to work.

Its also good if a hundred bitcoiners get a discount at a USD store  :)

Basically as above. I think we are too small yet. Intermediary would also need to take high risk currently because of bitcoin price changes while collecting bitcoins. And there are not that many of us, so discount rather wouldn't be high, so I would prefer to exchange my btc to dollars manually at desired rate, and then have pleasure of just clicking and having (without sharing with 3rd party what am I buying, and possibly also my address?)


But I'm just saying I don't think it would work yet. Whoever implements some idea first gets some advantage, so...these ideas are nice indeed.

That would be ideal, but we already have a volunteer building the site and I don't want to throw too many specs at him at once. Once it's up we can start refining it.

Obviously he can do whatever he wants and owes me nothing. I promise my gratitude as long as the result contains the original idea.

I hope comboy frees his source code so we can add features ourselves, instead of driving him crazy with coding requests.

OK I've prepared something. And before I share in public I would love some alpha testers, to make sure it works not only for me. If you have a few minutes, please PM me.

More info to come.

I have some travelling on the weekend, but I wanted to show you something before going away so here it is:

http://bitcoinity.org

I've implemented I think the most important part that is confirmation of forum accounts, and this very bruteforce basic wanted sites list. If you like playing with software that may crash at any moment, feel free to check it out.

Little problem is, that once I started coding I couldn't stop myself and now I want to add 100 things there :/1

Usability will be improved, currently I just focused on collecting data properly. I'll be very happy to hear about issues and suggestions. As for these already stated:

• I guess I can add entering amount in bitcoins if you really think there is need for it (then I would recalculate their value according to some exchange everyday so that we have up to date total amount in dollars)
• About open source, yeah well I think why not (no guarantees), I'm doing this for fun non profit, however I would prefer to build solid skeleton on my own, if there are any requests currently I think in many cases I may code them faster than it would take to cooperate with somebody on this.

PS. Looks awful as promised.
PS2. Fixing my english welcome.

Um... sorry dude, I won't tell my mother my password and I won't tell you either.

Maybe I'll create a dummy account and use that login to check it out.

Very nice. Much better than I expected. I recommend either not rounding dollar amounts or rounding up. I pledged 8.99USD for a DVD, but the site says 8.00$. Also, use USD instead of a dollar sign. Perhaps you'll allow users to select different currencies?

You use the same password for everything?

Read carefully and tell me where I wrote something that may suggest such thing (so I can fix it). I do not need you forum password. Forum account confirmation is done with sending a prvate message on the forum to bitcoinity user.

I'm about to hit the road so I won't be responding fast. Form of data presentation will be improved for sure because now it's hard to read.

Oh, sorry! The suggestion wasn't on the site, it was my own assumption when I saw you say here "you need a forum account" and then saw the login and password thing on the site. Apologies.

Okay, now I've looked at the site and it looks great. Pledged $65.00 total so far.

When it asked for a URL I first wrote "http://www.xkcd.com" and was told "Hey, that looks like a new site!" so I changed it to just xkcd.com. This is okay right now since we're small and duplicates can just be manually merged if they happen, but maybe it's a point for future work.

My pledge to ThinkGeek at 17.98 USD still stands. I will get the Pocket Ref Book and the Annoy a Tron.

I think that site is great idea - need more propagation here around!

The site is great, I made a couple pledges. If you wanted to open source the code I could probably help you work on it :)

Awesome work comboy.  Would be good to have url added to OP for newcomers to this thread.

My weekend got a bit longer, anyway, I'm glad there's some feedback :)

I've added link to the first post, may be helpful indeed, thanks. Also I introduced something like:

http://bitcoinity.org/soup

Because I like idea of reading all bitcoin news in one place. I'm putting the whole RSS's body there currently so I don't know if it won't turn out that somebody has problem with that (then maybe I'll just leave some links and little body with stripped html). You can add url manually, and I'm thinking about some voting (you know to have like news.ycombinator.com kind of news site for bitcoin), but I'm not sure if people want to visit site to view them (I like my rss reader personally), and because of this I'm not sure if there would be enough votes to make it usable.

Any kind of suggestions and ideas are actually worth more than my coding so very much welcome.

About open sourcing: I don't want to decide now something that I'll regret later, so I'm still wondering if that can really work out (but I guess it sounds good, but psst).

PS. http://bitcoinity.org/wanted?compact=1 XKCD leading so far :)