Bitcoin Forum

https://www.okpay.com/en/company/news/okpay-bitcoin.html


OKPAY is already listed as a way to deposit funds to TradeHill..   but what does the above announcement actually mean?
Is OKPAY on it's way to becoming a sort of bitcoin exchange by doing this?  

It's not clear to me how conversion between currencies at OKPAY is done...  but if I'm reading this right it's now possible to sell BTC using only OKPAY.

Does anyone here use the OKPAY service?
I'm wondering if it also allows converting other wallet currencies into BTC?  

It also seems that once you've set up a verified account - this would be a way (in conjunction with TradeHill) to purchase BTC via credit card.

Interesting.  How big is OKPAY?

Big in Russia, apparently, Alexa ranking of 1268.  15,516 worldwide.  This is a big site.

From their site it says, "Use one of the most anonymous peer-to-peeer digital currency as a direct deposit to fund your OKPAY account."

So I think they now accept it as a way to fund your OKPAY account balance... thus anyone who accepts OKPAY now also indirectly accepts BTC.

OkPay has a prepaid debit card.  I wonder if you can withdraw funds (USD) directly from Tradehill onto your debit card.

Not sure why this isn't getting more attention.  Is everyone asleep?  The site has 300,000+ users (as reported back in March) and probably manages tens of millions of dollars worth of transactions.  This will expose a hell of a lot of people to Bitcoin who have never heard of it before.

Buy buy buy ?

So you send them BTC and they convert it to USD? Has anyone tried?

I opened an account and sent 1 bitcoin.  They advertise 0% commission, but based on the MtGox pricing of 2.95, they are taking about 30 cents.

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g296/tonygal/2011-11-10_0112.png

also, it looks like once you have a balance > $15 you can order the debit Mastercard through the mail.  You can reload the balance anytime and shop with it anywhere Mastercard is accepted.

So yes, I suppose now you can spend your bitcoins anywhere Mastercard is accepted.  But it's much more expensive for you, and the normal debit fees apply for the merchants.  But, if you have alot of bitcoins and you want to cash them out quickly, sure put them onto a debit Mastercard and go shopping!

This is indeed pretty huge. It will be interesting to see if they run into any regulatory problems in terms of money laundering laws. Which also leads to the question of how much identity verification they will or have to do before they give you such a debit card. I mean - a debit card that can be funded with 'anonymous' digital money surely can't be that easy to obtain?

of course they do verification, like any other e-wallet service.

this is interesting news , people in eastern europe can now exchange their btc to cash

I suspect they may be using Tradehill as their partner exchange - Tradehill prices did dip to $2.70 several times yesterday, which may explain the low exchange rate. You may have just got unlucky with your timing

I'm sure btc exchanges are aware of this, because they must sell bitcoins, right?

The next step is asking Steam to add support to okpay.
Than you will see an huge amount of GPU comming! :)

Steam forum are down now.
Someone should ask it on the suggestion section when they will come back.

I just asked yuplay.ru ( a good game key seller ) if they can add OKPAY support :-D
Every game cd-key reseller should support Bitcoin/okpay, because all their costumers have GPUs! (http://twitter.com/#!/HostFat/status/134581320515977216)

Really an interesting development. I think Mojang/MineCraft should look into this payment processor also.

I asked to one of the team about it ( from Twitter )
lol, people will mine to buy minecraft :_D

EDIT:
http://getsatisfaction.com/mojang/topics/can_you_add_okpay_as_a_payment_processor
Put your votes here! ;D

This will be use for international remittance.

Can we call OKPAY   

A BANK ?

tHIS IS HUGE.

It would be great if they sold Bitcoins, too, but I won't hold my breath for it. OKPay currency can be bought with a credit card. They'd be bearing an enormous risk of chargebacks. Moreover, they have an interest in keeping people in their own currency, not replacing themselves with an open sourced one.

It looks good, may not be a bank but certainly useful.

how are they big if they don't even have a wikipedia entry?

heck i once played in a band that had a wikipedia entry.

OKpay is apparently the same company as this:
http://www.essentialdatatools.com

A Russian backup-software company with a claimed 10 people working for it.

Thats not to say its per se fraudulent, I suppose Paypal also had only 10 employees at one point, but this isnt huge guys. And its potentially risky:

http://ptc-investigation.com/okpay.aspx

Wouldnt switch my life savings to there just yet!

No

It is but they still aren't a bank.

Uhm… why not just vote for this one directly? http://getsatisfaction.com/mojang/topics/add_bitcoin_to_payment_options

Ok, you quoted me but you have also used an automatic translator ;D

I've tried deposit , it's fast.  ;D

16 April 2011:
http://www.getecurrency.com/interviews/188-getecurrency-interview-with-okpay-ceo

Did you try depositing bitcoin?

yes, very quick.

This is going to end well.   ::)

bitcoin can be withdrawn through a debit mastercard????? FUCK YEAH

If there really are a few early adopters with a huge chunk of the total bitcoins, this might be exactly what they have been waiting for. What happens when someone dumps them there and then buys a car of a house.

If they dont have some kind of cap on how much bitcoins one can deposit, they might find themselves with huge problems unloading them without crashing the market.

Um someone hacked into steam and took all the credit card infos....

It's registered as an entity in the British Virgin Islands?  Domain name is anonymous?  Looks like red flags all over the place.  Only the time will tell this is not MyBitcoin v2.0.

It is probably one of the many Russian money laundering outfits. Incidentally Slashdot had an article recently about that industry:

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/11/10/2131233/how-cell-phone-money-laundering-works

With friends like these Bitcoin doesn't need enemies.

my guess is okpay is a front for the russian mob  these guys look like mybitcoin 2.0 :/

Well, the financial dynamics is somewhat different. mybitcoin looked like small-time scam. If OKpay is involved in money laundering they will go out of their way to offer very good deals to the non-laundering customers to create a legal cover and detraction from their primary moneymaking enterprise. If they have 10%-30% margin on their laundering revenue they can plow some of it back to the side bets that provide the cover.

I remeber the days when money laundering was done through the prepaid long distance calling cards. Some of the best deals one could get were offered by the shadiest outfits. One could just call the customer service number and ask for credit for bad quality connection and they would give that over and over, practically with no limits for a single person making phone calls.

give them a call (https://www.okpay.com/en/support/index.html#Talk) and see if Tom W. works there  ;)

ps: too bad you can't customize the credit card they offer with a bitcoin logo, sucks

http://ptc-investigation.com/okpay.aspx

https://www.okpay.com/en/support/faq.html



https://www.okpay.com/en/services/debit-card/fees.html


https://www.okpay.com/en/services/fees.html

Their fees are literally worse than those charged by banks. They seem like real predators who intentionally target those who are unable to obtain credit cards or conventional debit Mastercards.

Ouch I was expecting fees but those are just downright stupid.

Up to $15 to get my cash from an ATM?  No thanks.  I will keep using free checks from TradeHill.

Sadly if someone did offer a decently priced bitcoin backed debit card they would get all the BTC -> USD flows.  Someday it will happen but it isn't OKPay.

Maybe someday Dwolla will offer a Dwolla debit card?  That would be at least a half step.

ehh, that would be the upper limit of their card withdraw fee, 2% of 750 $. If you exceed 750$ the fee would remain at same level.

You can get more than $750 from an ATM somehow? Or is that like the monthly max of ATM fees?

Really I'm not going to be happy until there is a guy standing in the mall with pockets full of cash and a smart phone wearing a bitcoin shirt charging $2 for exchanges up to $1000.

How do you know they allow withdrawals of greater than $750?  Pretty big assumption to make.

The "solution" for withdrawing $15K might be make 20 withdraws for $300 in fees.

i don't know things or make assumptions, it's only the way i understand that statement... if they put that high limit assuming no one will be able to withdraw more than 750$ it's not very nice from their part.

Instead you could use some friends help and cash-in on a POS, pay with the card and they give you cash. I do that sometimes. Lower fees and higher limits too

edit: I don't like a small thing though, they locked in the exchange rate of bitcoin > usd much lower than market price and they state "no fees" :(

A couple points:

1. OKPay is like Payoneer. It's for people who don't have access to a USA bank account, an International Debit Card and PayPal.
I'm from Tunisia. I can't have an International Debit Card. PayPal doesn't accept payments for Tunisia for some reasons I still don't know. And you can't have a bank account other than your "nonconvertible" country currency.

They are a great solution. Period.

2. The fees are small compared to the hassle it'll take you to setup a USA bank account or the risks of using a fake PayPal account.


So for someone like me, this encourages me to start mining because I can withdraw money somehow to a service I already use.

how many customers does okpay have?

Why, so he can get mugged?  Bad idea.

+1.  This is the reason we have this forum.  Most people in North America or Western Europe won't have a need for OKPAY, but there's a whole world out there that needs a solution.

And anyone in Tunisia, or all of Africa for that matter, can now have a business and accept payments over the Internet using Bitcoins.  We live in exciting times!

Feature request on Steam :)
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2231533

If you use the Steam service and you like the Bitcoin project, you should +1 this request! ;D

No one would do that. Everyone loves mall bitcoin guy.

Why?  Just request that Steam take Bitcoin as a payment method.

OKPAY charges its users $35 to transfer funds to your bank account.  >:(

Just like nobody robs the Salvation Army Santas that collect change outside of stores.  Oh wait, they do get robbed.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1824081
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2070297

Interesting to see all the negative reactions in those threads, by people who are already dealing in purely digital goods. 

People often attack what they don't understand.  If Steam ever did accept BTC the same people attacking it would be telling their friends how awesome and revolutionary it is.  A large portion of population is always going to follow. 

BTC = Stupid. 
Steam adopts BTC = Awesome.

On a related note Steam = Stupid

MEH I never thought I would, but I like Steam.  No need to keep copies of games, no worries about scratched CD, lost CD keys, etc.  Often I find good discounted games that I wouldn't otherwise even realize (or buy if gamestop wanted full price for them).  I think it is a win-win.  

I can't remember the last non-Steam (or Steam alternatives) game I bought.

Even though Steam doesn't accept bitcoin directly, this might already be happening.  A great way to obtain games for a discount is by buying keys online (where people have found the games discounted in retail outlets and offer them up for sale online).  Bitcoin is a great way to mitigate the risk of handing out a game key online.  The keys are effectively bearer instruments and irreversible once distributed.  So, selling them for paypal or CC is risky for the merchant.  Here are a couple places you can buy them for bitcoin:

gamerkeys.net
bitcoin2cdkey.com

Helllo folks,
I'm OKPAY Company representative, will be glad to answer your questions.
As you have noticed we have added BTC as one of the deposit options, it means that you can fund your account and spend your money pretty much everywhere (wire transfer, exchangers, online stores, debit card withdrawals, etc.)

We are not offering BTC withdrawal option but we are going to add it as well.

As per verification: you do not need to be verified to be able to fund your account with BTC. Unverified accounts have 300 EUR monthly limits. To get your account verify you need to provide a prood od ID and address.

HELLYEAH!
Hello from Russian mob, we hunt for bears with our bare hands and laney maundering all day looong!  ;D

OKPAY does not, it's an approx. correspondent bank fee, anyone familiar with international wire transfers know that ;)

I see that you ask for verified account for Ukash deposits also.
Why? Are there easy chargebacks?
Can you add the possibility to deposit them without verified account?
You can add days/weeks/months limits to protect your self from dangerous chargebacks, but you will make very easy/fast to anyone to enter on the Bitcoin market.

HostFat
Certain e-currencies are available to verified clients only. We are protecting the system from abuse as well as preventing so called "laney moundering".
Absolutely non-refundable currencies are available to unverified accounts.

This debit card thing, how does that work? Can I use that to pay for services on the internet that only accept creditcards? Or is that generally impossible?

Speaking of which, your requirement to have all documents translated to English for verification is stupid and unnecessary expensive. Both my ID card and my driver's license are official documents recognized in EU (ID card) and worldwide (driver's license) AS THEY ARE. They are NOT translatable. I used them to verify a lot of accounts to other services and never had a problem. Until I created a OKPAY account, that is. Very-very disappointing experience.

Dear OK Company representative, I have a question for you:

is it possible to load funds to OKPay account via SEPA transfer?

This is very interesting.

I've been getting annoyed, Gox and Paxum just don't cut it currently. I just want a debit card I can charge with BTC and use in the Euro area!

On OKPAY, if I read this correctly, I get BTC->USD at market rate, then get charged 2% to a maximum of 15 USD for an ATM withdrawal, the USD conversion happening at daily rate? It remains to find out what the ATM owners charge, but that sounds like a decent offer! Are there any other hidden fees I have to watch out for?

Ah, whatever, time to make an account and just try this. Hell yeah.

BTCurious yes, like a regular mastercard (ATM, online, stores, etc.)
ovidiusoft unfortunately we can not accept docs in non-Latin language family without translation
Jaagu absolutely, you can use sepa transfer
Vandroiy you are right, no hidden charges actually. Did you check out the debit card fees page (https://www.okpay.com/en/services/debit-card/fees.html)?

Man, your PR isn't very professional..

If you would have bothered to check, you'd realize that Romanian is a language in the latin family. Even more:

* my ID card includes Romanian/French/English descriptions for fields. For example: "Nume/Nom/Name".
* my driver's license includes Romanian and English description for fields. For example: "Categorii de vehicule/Vehicle Categories".

So you don't actually look at the documents which are sent to you for verification. Otherwise, I fail to understand how are my two documents unacceptable?!

Ahh, the hostility...

OKPAY, thanks for your services and being part of the community!

On the other hand I think they are. Russians are straight shooters: the best defense is a strong offense. Don't  expect passive-aggressive cotton-balling from them.

+1, this kind of PR is way better than other BS PR I see from Western companies.

+1 also.  I am way more inclined to do biz with this outfit because of it.

I would never trust them with more than I can afford to lose, but I would say the same thing of my BTC exchange, and of Wells Fargo.

This may sound stupid, but where is the Bitcoin depositing page? I can't find it in "add money".

Also, what's the deal with the separate ok-change website... kinda confusing.

What seperate OKPAY website?

https://i.imgur.com/b89E4.png
Sounds perfectly legitimate!

ovidiusoft There should be no problems with Romanian, if you can PM me your email address registered with OKPAY - i will look into this.
Vandroiy should be there, give me a few moment to check

Have been waiting almost 3 days for verification.. Not the fastest it seems :P

Nicolai Larsen Hey, did you request verification (request button). It's done on business days, PM me your email with OKPAY and I will take a look.

I'm a British person living in China - I have several documents that I could use for verification, though I'm unsure what you would need. How would I produce an acceptable translation or transliteration to Roman characters? Which Chinese organization do you accept as official translators? How would you know if the the translation is correct?
I notice your website is available in the Chinese language so obviously you are keen to attract Chinese customers - why not just employ a Chinese person who can verify and communicate with Chinese people?

edit - my wife is Chinese and would like a job, and she'd be happy to work for peanuts

dancupid Hi, we already have a website in Chinese https://www.okpay.com/cn/index.html and the support guys in China, they do also speak English so that they will be able to help you with translation. The thing is that our banks are still in Europe and even if we can verify a client via our Chinese support stuff the bank will require certified translations into English (or docs in the Latin-based language)

Thanks for your reply - I'll get my (Chinese) wife to contact the Chinese people to see how it works

dancupid they also speak English, you can contact them directly  ;)

Hey guys, here's my okpay story:

I needed a credit card to make some EUR payment to get a train ticket. My debit card wasn't working because I apparently had entered the wrong PIN 3 times. This was reset by my bank and I make the purchase with my "classic visa debit card".

Now checking on my payment to okpay I discovered that,

• I couldn't get my credit card without some tedious process that takes weeks
• by 20 bitcoins where automatically exchanged to USD 41.51
• I could not withdraw bitcoins

Now, I would've expected okpay would keep my bitcoins as BTC, not exchange them automagically to some stupid FIAT currency. (looking at the bitcoin deposit page again, it clearly states a BTC/USD exchange rate and gives the "value" of the BTC you want to transfer as USD. I probably didn't care at that point, because I wanted to make a EUR payment with my shiny new credit card anyways)

Well, it was my fault for not reading enough before sending BTC.

Okpay also credited my bitcoin deposit twice to my account, so I had 2 x 41.52 = 83.02 USD at one point. I shamelessly tried to transfer these USD to my paypal account using an offered exchanger, ok-change.com. That failed and the double-deposit error was discovered and corrected, paypal transfer aborted. Notably, this all went pretty quickly (within 30 minutes or so).

I asked okpay support for my Bitcoins back. Let's see what happens. They're probably not obligated to do this, but maybe they are nice enough. Told them I would accept up to 5% loss (1 BTC) on this.

I could've been clear to me that okpay would exchange my precious BTC to USD, but the fact that you can't change these back to BTC and withdraw them, is a little disturbing, to be honest.

I was never under the impression that OKpay functions as a bitcoin wallet - they seem to be a way of getting virtually any electronic currency into $ on to a prepay card.
The bitcoin exchange they seem to use is Tradehill - they list BitInstant as one of their exchange partners, so presumably you have to pay tradehill and bitInstant fees at the point of exchange.

Edit - I doubt they actually have any Bitcoins themselves - they use exchange partners. So I doubt they can return your bitcoins without going through BitInstant at the current exchange rate.

molecular if you were talking about OKPAY Debit Card then the process of obtaining it is fairly easy: verify your profile and phone # and then request it. Bitcoin deposit option is basically an automatic exchange operation to USD with the help of our exchange partners. At this point we do not offer vice-versa transaction.
There was a technical issue with your deposit, it was credited twice. By the way we are giving rewards to our clients who help us to improve by reporting bugs because some people would prefer to contact the support service instead of trying to withdraw other people's money next second on one of our partners exchanger. :D
p.s. our company is not positioning itself as an e-currency-to-debit card service, this is only one of the many options.

OKPAY:  When will bitcoin withdraw functions be available ?

Yeah, I know that was quite an ass-move on my part trying to exchange the erroneously credited money. I was pissed at that point that I couldn't get a credit card quickly. I can see that you need to verify me for that, of course, and this can't be done in the matter of hours or days even. I was naive.

So now how can I get my funds out to a bitcoin exchange most elegantly? Would I have to use paxum or something? It'd probably be bad to use paypal, because who in his right mind accepts paypal payments for bitcoin?

After contacting OKPAY by PM, he explained to me exactly what they need (in my case a printed account statement, signed and stamped by the bank, then scanned. They accepted it in romanian, as the bank didn't provide me with a english statement). After submitting, the account was verified in a few minutes, so karma++ from me!

molecular no problem, I will try too find a solution for you.
ovidiusoft awesome!

TradeHill will take OKPAY transfers directly.

Cool. I have an account there already. How can I initiate a transfer?

yup!
molecular TradeHill should have the information on their website https://www.tradehill.com/DepositOverview/USD/

cool. I initiated the transfer on tradehill and sent to tradehill's okpay account, hopefully with all the correct numbers in the comment. Tradehill says "up to 24 hours" to get through, so I'm guessing it's some manual work involved.

thanks for pointing out and/or making this possible in the first place ;)

Thanks! It has all been taken care of :)

OKPAY, you are so strange. Your representative called me on phone (overseas!) in order to drive my online business to your system. I asked to send me email with the details. Got it. Replied asking for some specific details. No answer. Sent the same request to the generic sales email address. Got some bullshit pasted from companies marketing agenda without any attempt to read what exactly I was asking.

Stn that's weird..what email address did you reply to?

hmm, so nothing has been credited yet on tradehill side, okpay payment to tradehill account OK856634147 went through instantly, will mail tradehill.

EDIT: 20 minutes after writing email to tradehill, the transfer got through. Thanks to okpay again and tradehill also ;)

You're welcome.

So far we've been very pleased with OKpay and this is a big step for Bitcoin.
I just read the wired article and I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with the title... Bitcoin has a long life ahead.

Jered