Bitcoin Forum

First of all, what is Instawallet's background, who backs it, financially? I understand that it is related to Bitcoin Central, Paymium, Paytunia and Instawire. But it has a different guarantee than govt. regulated Bitcoin Central, namely, no guarantee.

I don't understand the fees: from Instawallet to Instawallet is it free? And instant, too, regardless of payment size? Can I set my fees and delivery times for outgoing payments? Case A: I want fast transfer, I pay a fee. Case B: time doesn't matter, I want to avoid fees.

I read that transferring Bitcoins through numerous Instawallets doesn't add to your privacy, is it the same as transferring from one Instawallet to a second one but to no more? Any sort of "mixing," happening, so that the coins got obscured and cannot be traced back to me?

Bump?

Bitcoin-central bought the small company, they probably havn't figure out how to deal with it yet. (generate revenue) So it is free now (to still attracting user base)

From my understanding all the InstaWallets share the same bitcoind wallet, meaning that it naturally provides some mixing (although not guaranteed).

If you require (vs desire) privacy then one of the mixing services might be better for you.

It has lots of value in terms of traffic and positive image. You'd be surprised at how traffic we get on our other services coming from Instawallet by just putting four little links on the bottom of the page.

You nailed it.
Instawallet does not provide absolute taint removal.
It however provides more plausible deniability than any paranoid Bitcoiner could ever need IMO.

If traffic's at all a concern maybe should fix that.

It is probably that way because every time you goto the home page you get a new wallet.  If they didn't tell the site to not be crawled then everytime bing/google/whoever visited the site then you would get a ton of needless new wallets.

I understand that, but it doesn't have to work that way does it?

I'm not sure of what you mean.
If it doesn't work that way it's hardly Instawallet anymore, is it ?

Theoretically I could test for every possible crawler and serve a search-engine specific page, put I don't like the idea of having some sort of massive "if search_engine" clause before serving each request. And in addition to not liking it, working on Instawallet's SEO is probably at the same priority level as fixing Bitcoinica's leaked source on my TODO.

Ahaha would that include fixing RoR too?