Hmm, well that's positive news, I guess.

Thanks for doing that, btw.

Well, like I said in an earlier post, I had to send photo ID and verify my identity in other ways (answering questions that related to my home address), in order to expand my buy and sell limits, so I'm not sure why I would need to send all that stuff again.

Unless I'm expected to fax photo ID every time that I want to sell.

Thanks for the suggestion, OROBTC.

I might just end up moving my coins elsewhere, if this doesn't get solved soon.

PS: I was mistaken earlier when I said that coinbase won't allow me to withdraw my bitcoin.  I can spend and move my bitcoins, but they won't let me withdraw from my $USD wallet to my bank account and they removed the sell button for exchanging bitcoin for $USD.

I've tried to sell my coins.  The not selling of the coins is an issue on coinbase's end, not mine.

Or maybe it isn't their issue.  Perhaps I am just ignorant as to why I don't qualify for selling, but coinbase should have a rep who can respond to my situation in less than a day, right?  Because I've been trying to contact them for the better part of the last 6 or so hours via email w/ no responses and their chat box says that they're "away" (unable to chat).

So, what's a man to do?

Do I have to send them proof ID every time that I want to sell bitcoin?

I already sent them photo ID and jumped through all kinds of other hoops to verify my identity way back when I first opened the account and went through all the steps to increase my buy limit, have $1000.00 instant buy, and $10,000 sell limit.

And, since this forum will only allow me one post per 360 seconds, to answer a question from another person, I would chat with them about my issue if the chat feature were made available to me.  They've been "gone" all day.

How is that?

When I put in $250 to buy a bitcoin, that $250 was my money.  The agreement between myself and coinbase, I assume (perhaps I have to read the TOS more closely), is that the exchange of cash for the bitcoin means that I now own it, as in, I can now spend it or withdraw it from the account (just like any normal bank account) and, being that it is an EXCHANGE after all, I should also be able to exchange that bitcoin back for cash.

I would understand if Coinbase sold on a spread (say 4 to 8 dollars under the listed price), taking some commissions on the sale like a normal exchange, but not freezing your withdraw function and erasing the sell button without explanation.

PS:  I'm not stressed, just disappointed.

Well, I'm logged on.  So I'm not sure why it would qualify as unverified.

I can't be the only person who's getting the silent treatment from Coinbase with a greyed out sell button, can I?

They'll let me buy as much bitcoin as I want, but they won't let me sell not 1 of my 20+ bitcoins on my account.  So, here I'm sitting with over $3K profit, trying to sell, and not only do they not allow me to sell, but there's no one around to give me an explanation.  The chat feature isn't running and they won't answer email.

This is criminal if you ask me.  I'm sure this bullshit is covered in their TOS (read: legalized criminality), but I don't care.

This is my money.  When you tell me that I can't withdraw my bitcoins and I can't sell my bitcions...well then, that tells me that they aren't really my bitcoins.  So what did I pay over $5K for?  Some numbers on a screen?

I'm wondering if it will be convenient for coinbase if I sell when it's back down in the $200 ~ $250 range, or if they'll only allow me to buy "bitcoins" (if that's what they're really selling there) again.

What a joke that place is.  No wonder why bitcoin hasn't went mainstream yet, when the world's biggest bitcoin exchange blocks you from withdrawing or selling your "own" (again, I question this) bitcoin.

A few more suggestions:

1.) Add a "community" tab that has a forum and a live chat feature, so that members have a place to discuss their ideas about SearchTrade and have their questions answered by other members regarding its use.  Something like this would allow members who're invested in keywords to strategize together how to widen product awareness, among other things, and it should also lessen the number of email inquiries that your company receives, as most of their questions will already be answered via community chat or forum.

2.) Place a good amount of your focus on optimizing speed for search results.  I noticed that your homepage is run on a blog template (wordpress?), which is fine for what you have there, but definitely isn't optimized for high traffic searching.  Obviously, you have to be smart about scaling in terms of how many servers you run on vs. how many users you have on average in order to avoid over-spending, but the bottom line is that users are going to be turned off if their searches take anything more than a few fractions of a second longer than they're used to seeing from search engines like Google or Bing.

Bells and whistles are the icing on the cake, but there's no cake at all if high traffic is going to bog your service down.

3.) It might not be the right timing just yet, but I think running youtube ads for your product on crypto-currency (specifically bitcoin) and stock market/ investment related videos would drive a lot of the right kind of traffic to your site.

It might be smart to experiment with having your 1+ min ads run (with the two men talking) for a while (maybe two weeks to a month) and then switching to a shorter ad that only runs for like 5 to 10 seconds that merely flashes something like "click here to find out how you can earn free bitcoins by using your favorite search engine", for the same amount of time that your ran the other ad(s), and then comparing the results, taking account of new traffic to your site during the running of those ads and the cost-effectiveness in those increases.

Does one make any commission for having someone enter the site through their referral url?

Your homepage looks pretty.  I really like the choice of colors, it catches your attention - good color balance too, IMO.  The beauty of it should persuade most newcomers to stick around long enough to get the gist of what your project is about.  After that, it's just up to their personal biases and level of flexibility to make a minor shift of habits, whether they look further into it or choose to give it a try.

I notice too that you added "searches funded" and "registered traders" to your pre-sale stats.  Those are good things to know.  Better that there are 690+ people out there with keywords than 3 people with 300+ words each.

I do like what you have running so far, and I like to see that you're putting energy into perfecting what you have there; however, I do believe that there are a few additions that you can make to your search engine/ interface to make the experience even more engaging and personable.  I've been thinking about what would make it more enjoyable for me over the past few days while I was using your demo...here's what I've come up with so far:

1.) I think it would be fun to have a "trending" tab that shows what's trending up in the last X days, weeks, months... showing all in one place what people are searching for most on searchtrade and what is gaining in popularity over time, with detailed stats, even graphing the number of searches for these phrases/ words on an hourly basis.  Something similar to "google trend" would be nice, but I think it could be made even better by giving the user power to "zoom in" on the graphs and see precise stats on a minute to minute basis and the option to compare against other search terms.

If this idea (your search engine) really takes off and grows to become something big in the internet world, I would imagine a trend feature like this would become invaluable to the people whom enter the searchtrade for the trade market aspect - a tool that allows you to quickly compare updated search stats, a way to do your homework before making an investment.

2.) It'd be nice to have the option to "streamline" the searchtrade search engine (page?) interface to our own preferences, making it possible to show only the tabs/ stats that we want to show on the screen, or even giving the option to "hide" it all in the background, making it like you're searching from the google search engine, itself, and perhaps allowing you to get the interface back by pressing the Esc button or clicking on a small tab on the top of the screen, etc.  

In order to get around the problem of people not knowing how many searches they've made or how many satoshis they've made by those searches, you can implement a clickable option to have a box quickly flash on the upper or lower corner of the screen after every search, showing how many searches are left for the day and how much has been earned on the day, or even an alarm that notifies the user after every x amount of searches and/or once all the (40) payable searches are used up.

3.)  Adding a youtube search box to the search-engine list.

I'm a big youtube user and there are millions more like me.  I probably make three times as many searches on youtube on any given day than I do on Bing or Google and all the other search engines combined, so I would profit from having this as an available search engine, as I'm sure other users would, too.

I certainly hope that you are mostly focused on building a great product.  But one mustn't forget that every "on the fence" customer is a possible advertisement for your product.  Being as transparent about your product as possible builds confidence that it's a legit operation, a fundamental step towards developing a relationship of trust between the business and customer.

The customer is happy, he sees a product that he likes and is excited about, run by a group of people that he trusts, so he is less likely to feel hesitant to spread the word about it, and, most importantly, his genuine interest towards and enthusiasm about your product draws a lot of positive attention around it.

It's not the right perspective, as a start up business with a very small initial following, to act as if people are being too unreasonable in their questions regarding said transparency or taking the stance that they're "too lazy" to take the time to understand your product, when you yourself can admit that it's a revolutionary idea that's different from anything else out there.  

Why would you want to turn off people that are seriously considering investing in your product?  Not only is that counter-productive, but it can mean the difference between success and failure in the long run.

Customer is KING, especially when you're in the initial stages of trying to build awareness of your product.  Impressing people as they come in small numbers is the cheapest form of advertisement, because, like I said before, a happy customer is a point of spreading positive news about your product to other people.  It's also more powerful than running an ad on TV, played by a couple of paid actors, or having people read the CEO's positive words about his own product in some small market online blog.  People trust the words of their own family and friends over someone that they don't know, whom they realize can benefit from flat-out lying to you.

You should be after expanding PASSION for your product through the people that come to you,  if you're serious about being focused on long term success, not so much concerned about having a lot of people simply glance over yet another, of probably about 10,000 sales pitches they read, each promising their own rewards, in any given year.

Every moment builds Karma.  Don't think that you'll build trust in the future by making a good product now.  It doesn't work that way.  Build trust in the future by doing everything in your power, coming from a space of genuine passion, to build trust IN THE MOMENT and every future moment, while ALSO building a great product that will keep your level of passion high.  That's how you build positive momentum.  

Yes, the growth will be slow at first.  As an example, two happy customers each tell two other people, and only one of those four goes on to tell one other person, etc.  But, eventually, the right person will hear about it, a person who's very passionate by nature and is connected to many people who trust his/her opinion, and this is your "TIPPING POINT", your "LUCKY BREAK" - a growth of passionate people who use and spread their positive energy about your product (the most powerful form of advertisement) that is your karma for being open, fair, and patient with each customer in every moment.

Don't overlook the influence that each little event has on the future by focusing too much on the future.  Be in the reality that is NOW.

On an aside note:

I was looking over your site's FAQ and came across this:

"If user searches 1 word eg ‘bitcoin’ than payout is 100 Satoshi
If user searches 2 words eg ‘bitcoin mining’ payout is divided between two words and both earn 50 Satoshi each
So on so forth. ……"

There's a grammatical error in there.  It should read "If user searches 1 word eg 'bitcoin' THEN payout is 100 Satoshi..."

"then", not "than" (if, then...not if, than)

I like to use bitcoin like I use fiat currency to grow my money: trade indexes/ stocks/ commodities for profit.

Using an online broker that accepts bitcoins and pays out in bitcoins allows me to store my value in BTC vs. having to be exposed heavily to the US dollar with another online broker.

The best option I've found so far is 1broker.com (https://1broker.com/m/r.php?i=4303)

It not only has a large option of stocks, currency pairs, indexes, and commodities to trade, but it has the cheapest and fairest leverage trading options, allowing up to 300 times leveraged trading on some currency pairs and as low as 0.000077% charges for overnight holding on leveraged positions (only charges for 260 days out of the 365 days per year).

It also allows you to trade bitcoin, against the dollar, at up to 5 times leverage.

And the best part is that I can make a deposit or withdrawal from the account and have money ready to trade or cash "in hand" in less than 40 minutes, with penny fees, vs. waiting three to five workdays for most online brokers that only accept fiat, unless one chooses to be penalized with $20+ fees by wiring the money.  It makes it feel like I actually control what's going on with my money and I like that feeling.

Yes, you'd think that they'd want to be building up all the confidence in their site as they can.

This definitely throws up a red flag and is the sole reason why I decided to stop investing at the amount that I'm currently in.

It's interesting that you say that, because two of the most recent words purchased are Spanish: el and la.

Wouldn't happen to be yours, would they? 

Thanks for that input, searchtrade.  The things you shared on this post are the type of things that the investors (in keywords) need to know, IMO.  The more detailed your plan, the less the perceived risk, so long as the plan seems feasible.  The more that's left in the dark, the greater the risk appears.

I think what you lay out could work.

The one caveat being: I believe it would be less risky for you, and give your company better chances at success in the long-run, if you start (pre-launch and early post launch) by focusing most of your attention/ money/ ads domestically (in your area and maybe India, as well), wherein, I'm assuming costs will be much lower compared to trying to reach a global market, at least, in terms of running radio and television ads.  This will allow you to experiment with different types of approaches at advertising (should we go late night, low cost, for many months or burn more for day-time television, running for a week?) without burning all of the money on, essentially, a hope and a prayer.

Which leads me to my next question(s):

If you don't mind sharing, what are your plans for advertising?  Is it going to be solely online ads?  Television, locally? Radio?  Billboards? Combination of all of the above?

I like the videos you run on youtube and think that they'd make good television ads for the US market, but I'm sure costs would be quite high to run on a popular television channel here in the US.

Also, do you plan to use a good percentage of the keyword earnings to pump this up before the launch, or do most of your plans involve post launch spending?

If your product is already great, then it might be a good idea to drive as many eyes at it as possible, ASAP.  But if it still has glitches, then it might be a better idea to treat the "first wave" of users as "beta testers", touching it up a bit, before really throwing money at it.

I did some number-crunching after purchasing a few keywords and "scoring" my words against the search word "porn" on "google trends".  My words scored over 700% of total searches for "porn", per month (774% to be exact).

At 33.34 Satoshi per one of my keywords being searched (I divided 100 satoshi by 3, as I figure searches will probably average 3 keywords), and figuring that there are 100,000 users per month on the searchtrade search engine, each averaging about 6.667 searches, my list of keywords generated only about 0.0171 BTC after one year.

So, according to my calculations, unless the value of Bitcoin shoots through the roof (over $10,000 per Bitcoin...staying there), searchtrade's search engine must achieve 10 million users per month, or more, to be profitable to the community pool (keyword owners).  

At 10,000,000 users (or 66.67 million searches) per month, my keyword list would generate about 1.71 BTC per year, meaning that the word "porn" would generate 1.71 BTC divided by 7.74, or 0.221 BTC per year ($50.35 per year at Bitcoin's current price), since my list is projected to generate 774% of "porn" searches - this all assuming the same distribution of search "habits" for visitors between searchtrade's search engine and Google's.

BTW, there are roughly 5.8 billion searches per day on Google's search engine.  This would likely equate to around 870 million users of the Google search engine per day, using the same math from earlier (total searches/ 6.667 searches per user = number of users).

This is valuable information to have as an investor in this, which is why I chose to share it here.

*edit:

Another bit of interesting info for you: this same list of keywords would generate about 12.26 BTC per day on Google's search engine, at 1,103,172,409 searches per month for my keywords!  I wouldn't mind it if searchtrade could grow to that size...

*edit 2:

I likely used a low-ball figure for the number of searches for the word "porn", per month.  According to "google adwords", the word "porn" is searched about 124 million times per month, currently.  Since "porn" scores an 87 at the moment on "google trends", when it was at its peak (100) it would have been searched about 142.5 million times per month (assuming the google adwords estimate is reliable).

The problem with using google adwords is that, I believe, it only counts how many times the word is searched, alone (without other words included in the search query...so, for instance, the search "hot porn" wouldn't count as a search for "porn", since another word is included) ...which would likely make this a VERY low-ball figure.

But even if the word "porn" is searched ten times as often as google adwords suggests, putting the total searches per month at 1.24 billion, 1.42 billion at its peak, it would still only generate about 0.0244 BTC per year for the word "porn", at 667,000 searches per month (what I figured to be the number of searches for 100,000 users).

The planned payout system requires that there be tens of millions of searches per month for this to become profitable.  At hundreds of millions of searches per month it would become very attractive for those who hold keywords that generate a high number of searches relative to the pool of keywords (words like "the", "porn", "sex", "facebook", "youtube", etc).  At billions of searches per month, if Bitcoin can maintain above $200, this might be able to replace your job for income with a high scoring word and give a decent yearly profit for even average scoring words.  At tens of billions of searches per month, one can retire and live beyond his/her means with a high scoring word and perhaps replace their job's income with one or two average scoring words.  At hundreds of billions, you might make it onto Forbes magazine with the highest scoring words!

Thanks for quick reply.

One more question about the search payout: so, if a person searches "how to rock climb" and "how", "to", "rock", and "climb" are all keywords that are owned by community members, then the person who made the search would get 400 satoshi (100 for each keyword hit)?  And if one person owned three of those four words, they would get 300 satoshi, if I understand you correctly.

I have two questions for you searchtrade:

1.) your site still isn't running, correct?  I see that your link to the keyword crowd-sale is still running, but it appears that "searchtrade.com" is giving server error messages.

2.) can you go into a little more details about the "math" or algorithm to calculate the payout per search?  Is the payout per day pre-determined as a percentage of the community pool, or based on extrapolating rate of growth to last so many days, as to allow more money to enter the pool before it dries up?  How does it work?