Hi coinjar & Co,
Firstly, congratulations on launching a service which many in Australia will no doubt use. I do have one question though, you specify there's only 2% on the current spot price. For Australian customers does this include the GST element of 10%? If it does and given that once your revenue exceeds $75K you would be required to charge GST how is charging 2% on current spot price sustainable?
Thanks,
Stuart
Without a specific ruling from the ATO, we consider Bitcoin input-taxed supply, just like shares, bonds, derivatives, foreign currencies and precious metals. That means you have to pay GST for goods and services when you make purchases using Bitcoin. The 2% fee itself already includes GST, because we charge 2% for the service we provide, and we will absorb it for now. (We may increase the fee to 2.2% if our profit is affected by GST, but there's no immediate plan.) Currently for CoinJar Checkout merchants, we give them access to a paper trail of GST paid, so they can easily claim GST credits if they are eligible. (We are still in the process of GST registration, but the registration will be backdated to our incorporation date.) |
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You are now attacking the messenger. This is an ad hominem attack. I can clearly see how you were able to manipulate everyone into giving your coins for Bitcoinica for you to run away, with your professional fraudster skills.
I don't know what's an "ad hominem attack" (never studied psychology). I was just telling the truth. Everyone knows how to tell the truth. It's the easiest thing to do. I'm happily developing products that make the world a little bit better. I enjoy what I'm doing - building stuff. Defrauding people will be obviously downgrading my life. Who wants that? |
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coinjar is the next attempt of zhou tong in stealing your coins like bitcoinica
HE WAS RESPONSIBLE for the bitcoinica hack.. guilty as pirate.
don't buy bitcoins from him. I suggest btcquick or mtgox
Transfer money, get Bitcoin and immediately transfer out of CoinJar wallet. - Suggested workflow if you just want to buy Bitcoin and not spend it with CoinJar Checkout merchants. Keeping large amounts of coins in CoinJar is discouraged. We don't get interest from the deposits. Also, Name: hennessyhemp
Posts: 183
Activity: 154
Position: Full Member
Date Registered: February 16, 2013, 06:33:27 AM
So you weren't even here when Bitcoinica was being liquidated. What's your authority on this matter? |
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I signed up to check you guys out, then jaw drops, seriously have you guys done your research on this? You know why there's no others doing this?
There's been a few attempt at this by others you do know that? You know why they've failed?
Care to point out some hints? We're VC-backed so I'm fairly sure that we (and our investors) have done thorough research on everything we've done so far. At the very least we have access to professionals in the field. It'll be great if you can be more specific in your questions. ok then so you don't know and you never actually did the ground work......OTHERWISE YOU WOULD NOT ALLOW DIRECT TRANSFERS INTO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT FROM CLIENTS BANK ACCOUNT......101 of trading btc in Oz dumbass and don't even comback saying oh but we sat down with the banks business advisors told them what we were doing and its all cool with them....lol cause that means squat. BTW not attacking what you guys are doing, your platform is good, your fees are great and a breath of fresh air in Oz (but trading via bank transfers will be your undoing). Thanks for the insult. I'll take that as your sincere request to help us grow. I'm interested in the "ground work" you've done. Please drop us an email at info@coinjar.io and we're happy to listen to your opinions. Evidence or detailed explanation will be more appreciated than advice in all caps. |
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I signed up to check you guys out, then jaw drops, seriously have you guys done your research on this? You know why there's no others doing this?
There's been a few attempt at this by others you do know that? You know why they've failed?
Care to point out some hints? We're VC-backed so I'm fairly sure that we (and our investors) have done thorough research on everything we've done so far. At the very least we have access to professionals in the field. It'll be great if you can be more specific in your questions. |
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I use BuyBitcoinAus frequently and don't have to worry about trust, because they never hold my cash or my bitcoins, the BTC is delivered straight to my wallet.
You're under no obligation to keep any money with CoinJar. Simply make a deposit, and buy Bitcoin immediately when it's approved. After that, you can withdraw Bitcoin to your own wallet instantly. Many people do exactly this and we encourage them to. Why take the security risk when we can comfortable making profits from the transactions themselves? Remember that there's no interest in holding Bitcoin. We designed our system to provide a convenience. If it's a trust issue, we're on the same page. |
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I find it a great pity that Bitcoinica wasn't revived though, we need such a trading platform
Unfortunately the GP of Bitcoinica didn't choose this route even when a few creditors have displayed interest to take over the platform and re-launch it. |
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Zhou tong is back? This will be interesting.  Yeah man, I am really concerned after reading about the founder of this website. I read on many threads that he has scammed many people with previous websites... [search Zhoutong] Some have actually coined the term: "getting Zhoutonged" meaning to get ripped off or raped... "to loose all your BTC" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63831.0I have always been a big believer in "if it sounds too good to be true, it usually isn't"... 2% fee just doesn't sound like it is a sustainable business model. All the other websites charge much higher fees, SpendBitcoin is the highest and his website explains very well why the fees are so high in Australia. To be fair, I have friends who have used this new CoinJar service and got their Bitcoins fine (although not instantly as claimed)... However, that is how scams usually work, build everyone's trust and then scam hard for heaps of money. The fact that all the money and bitcoins in your CoinJar account are held in their possession is very scarey. CoinJar is backed by Melbourne-based startup accelerator AngelCube (can be verified from their press release). Please be assured that VCs do due diligence much more carefully and responsibly than a few random forum members. You're under no obligation to use CoinJar Filler or keep your Bitcoins with CoinJar. We discourage our users from saving excessive amount in their CoinJar Bitcoin wallet (and any hosted wallet in general). There's nothing scary about it. We want to facilitate instant transfers and innovative use cases of Bitcoin, and we made the decision that we need to hold the private keys. CoinJar's business model is to make money from Bitcoin-fiat transactions, mainly from our Filler and Checkout services. 2% is very sustainable because we have access to wholesale foreign exchange rates (1-2 pips vs 300-400 pips by Big 4). We have been gross profit positive since the launch of Filler and our investors are quite happy with our progress. A key thing to remember is that CoinJar has a long term vision that prevents us from taking excessive short-term profits. Instead of asking whether 2% is sustainable for CoinJar, you probably want to ask yourself whether 10% fee is sustainable for Bitcoin's growth in Australia. CoinJar is not simply a place for you buy Bitcoins in Australia. It represents our vision to bring innovation to Bitcoin and potentially the financial services industry. We are keen to solve problems for Bitcoiners, and buying Bitcoin is just one of them. It'll be great if you can spend some time to learn more about our products at https://coinjar.io. If you come to Melbourne, you're welcome to come to our office or join a meetup organized by us as well. Our business is tied to the broader market (that is Bitcoin) and it's in our every incentive to grow with the Bitcoin economy and we will never work against this principle. |
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Damn it... I just got caught in their NON-instant btc.
I've been only positive of coin jar as I've made several transactions. All have been quick smooth and instant. All have been for $100.
I just transferred $500 into btc but no instant coins...
I had an online purchase already to go and now I dont have enough btc to buy.
Damn it, I thought you guys were INSTANT coin jar.
Unfortunately, due to huge spikes in demand, we had to fall back to manual processing to deliver the Bitcoin purchases. This usually takes no more than a few hours and we have arranged a source to continuously supply Bitcoin in large amounts. We're already doing something like $5k a day within 2 weeks of launch. It's expected that instances like this will be very infrequent in the future. Thanks for your support BTW. :-) |
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You guys claim to be instant, but I have been told by friends that have tried to use this service, that it is not instant.
One of my friends deposited money on a Friday and could not get bitcoins from you guys until Monday!! (you guys really should not be claiming instant bitcoins - It's false advertising)
I also really don't like the fact that we have to put so much personal information into your website before being able to buy coins, that is why people hate using Mt Gox.
None of the other bitcoin sellers in Australia demand any personal info...
Interbank deposits usually take 1 business day. If you want the deposits to clear as soon as possible, please transfer from a CBA account or before your bank's cut-off time. Bitcoin purchases are instant. Once you have the deposit in your account, you can buy Bitcoin and get any number of instant exchange rate quotes. If you confirm the quotes within 30 seconds, they are locked in and the Bitcoins are automatically sent to your wallet. The only personal information we collect includes your name, email and phone number. And we accept cash deposit. |
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Are you accepting customers as of now? I am really tempted to buy a couple BTC from you  Yes. Definitely. |
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Very interested in the Checkout feature and paypal compatible API, but why does that need to be restricted to Australia only.
I work with several online merchants that would add bitcoin as a method of payment to their sites if there was an easy way to integrate with what they are already using and this sounds like it might make that possible.
We didn't restrict to Australia only. Our system supports over 10 different currencies and everything was designed to be global. However, we can only do daily settlement to Australian bank accounts at the moment as we don't have bank accounts elsewhere. International wire transfer will cost $20-$25 per transaction for us. We are happy to take any international client onboard if he is willing accept the wire fees. EDIT: We will definitely expand into more countries in the future. At this moment we can't overcome the geographical and legal limitation to support international clients globally. We're also interested in partnerships (Email us). |
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Well, that's not an accurate description of CoinJar's business model. CoinJar is Australia's first VC-backed Bitcoin startup. We aim to bridge the divide between fiat and digital currency. Besides CoinJar Filler, which becomes extremely popular today on Twitter and Reddit among Australian Bitcoiners, we also have a wallet service and a merchant solution, with a well-designed iPhone app coming soon. As of today we already have 90+ wallets and 10+ merchants signed up. Soon you will start to see payment pages powered by CoinJar Checkout around the Internet. (FWIW, CoinJar Checkout has a PayPal-compatible API! Just change the endpoint of your PayPal plugin and ready to go.) |
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Hi Zhou, just signed up, was wondering if you were going to implement a 'buy order' feature, where the order is automatically executed when the price falls to a preset price?
That's a good idea. I will tell my team about this. In the future, feel free to contact us at support@coinjar.io. Thanks! |
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I just signed up, the site looks very nice! One question - is there plans to implement some form of 2 factor authentication like Google Authenticator? Also I just arrived in Melbourne today and - it seems - JUST missed the bitcoin meetup  Thanks! 2-factor is in our planned feature list. We spent a lot of time on the infrastructure itself, but features like this are easy to add. If you have more ideas after trying out our services, please give us feedback at info@coinjar.io. If you haven't, you can join the meetup group to subscribe to our updates. |
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What if you get a court order to freeze/seize someone's account? That's simply not possible with Blockchain.info-styled wallets. With growing crackdown on "money laundering" and how the blockchain is 100% public, imagine some rubber stamped warrants for Bitcoins with known silk road taint Anyways, you guys have made the decision to go with a shared wallet. Best of luck, I'm just expressing the concerns and problems with shared wallets in general. This is a valid concern. I like your reasoning and feedback. Even though we have made the decision for our version 1, we are still innovating every single day! (That's how VC-backed startup should work right?) If you come to Melbourne sometime, feel free to come to our office to say hello. We are currently working in Inspire9 ( http://inspire9.com). EDIT: We don't charge any fees for CoinJar wallet service. We absorb all Bitcoin transaction fees. Our business mode is to make money from Filler and Checkout services. |
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It's a fair comment. We had two options to choose from, either Blockchain-style wallet or Coinbase-style wallet. We decided to go with the latter because we need full control over the whole user experience. This decision should make a lot of sense to many people if you have seen the one-click payment button on CoinJar Checkout page. Not really. There's plenty of technical ways where you can allow the user to store the private key, and provide a one click checkout experience - for example, storing a encrypted (so only CoinJar can access it) paraphrase in a cookie. Giving a user access to their private keys is important as anything that relies on Bitcoin address will not work. Also, managed wallet solution makes instant payment between CoinJar users possible without paying network fees. This instant payment is used by our own platform components. For example, when you buy Bitcoin from Filler, the Filler application will actually send money from its own CoinJar account to yours. We also heavily utilize the internal payment system to do our accounting and hedging. I saw that! (Pretty sleek UI btw) - that is actually possible while letting a user control their own private key too. The same way where you can make a multi currency wallet. Sure, it would take some time to develop, but seeing as what happened with Bitcoinica.. Bitcoin is designed[1] where each user has access to their own private keys. Going against this will mean that when you get hacked, it's bankruptcy for you, instead of a "Oops, we'll have service restored soon". Sites get hacked all the time, especially when there a multiple vectors. Take a look at Sony, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google. Luckily, they don't store the most liquid form of money  1: "A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what. Its time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless." -Satoshi Nakamoto Thanks for your feedback and I really appreciate it. As a huge believer in Bitcoin and Libertarianism, I share the philosophy that ultimately every user should be able to gain absolute liberty over his money (i.e. medium of exchange and store of value), both technically and legally. We will definitely think about the solutions you proposed. Maybe we can implement a CoinJar "Advanced" mode for non-shared wallet and limited-trust private key management (client-side encryption). |
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Also, is this a shared wallet?
Yes it is. We have to do that due to the reasons above. I believe that there are plenty of good solutions available for client-side wallets, and personally I use Blockchain.info wallet service (but infrequently). After all, for a security paranoid, the only no-trust solution is to use the official Bitcoin client and only update after reviewing the source code. We *may* be able to contribute to reduce the "trust bar" for Bitcoin services in the future, but that's not our focus right now. |
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Seems pretty good and I may use it but why not a .com or .com.au or something?
coinjar.com is already taken by a domain squatter. coinjar.com.au is registered by us, but as we may want to use it globally, it looks a bit inappropriate. That said, we will consider making coinjar.com.au a localised version of the platform, as most features are useful in Australia anyway. .IO is a really popular "gccTLD" right now, and many startups (such as GitHub and App.io) started using it. We think it's cool. |
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It's not encrypted in the client - the user doesn't control the private keys.
Your reset password function is also broken FYI: "1 error prohibited this user from being saved: Reset password token can't be blank"
It's a fair comment. We had two options to choose from, either Blockchain-style wallet or Coinbase-style wallet. We decided to go with the latter because we need full control over the whole user experience. This decision should make a lot of sense to many people if you have seen the one-click payment button on CoinJar Checkout page. CoinJar also has full APIs available for programmatic access to wallet. Self-managed private keys will greatly increase the complexity. Also, managed wallet solution makes instant payment between CoinJar users possible without paying network fees. This instant payment is used by our own platform components. For example, when you buy Bitcoin from Filler, the Filler application will actually send money from its own CoinJar account to yours. We also heavily utilize the internal payment system to do our accounting and hedging. Many new Bitcoiners are not familiar with the concept of private keys. As long as they don't hold a large amount of deposit with a hosted wallet, we shouldn't close the door for them. I'm thinking of a system to notify users when their balance cross a certain threshold, to give them tips and guides on how to set up a secure Bitcoin storage themselves. Do you think that will help? Again, we are only interested in facilitate the transactions as there are no interest to be earned from Bitcoin anyway. |
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