CoinFunder.com - Bitcoin Crowdfunding for Bitcoin

[coinfunder]

The CoinFunder Team is proud to announce the launch of the initial version of CoinFunder.com.

CoinFunder.com allows 2 types of crowdfunding initiatives:
-Projects - A user can post a project and solicit Bitcoins from the community for their idea.  If the idea is fully funded, bitcoins are transfered to the project owner
-Bounties - A user can post a request for a bounty, and fund it.  Other people within the community can contribute to the bounty.  Once a bounty is funded, other people within the community can post solutions for that bounty.  If there solution is approved by the project owner, they can choose to award the solution contributor the bounty.

Our Fees:
CoinFunder charges a 5% fee on all initiatives.

In order to start a project, post a bounty, fund an initiative, or post a solution you must be a member of CoinFunder.com.

This is our initial launch, we know that there will be many additional features and requirements that will need to be supported.  We would like to use this thread to solicit feedback.

Best Regards,
The CoinFunder Team

Update 4/10:
What makes CoinFunder different from other CrowdFunding platforms?
1) CoinFunder allows you to post projects / fund projects based on your currency (BTC amount floats as exchange rates change / we support 19 currencies)
-This feature is especially important given the volatility of the BTC market if you are trying to fund projects in a local currency
-Of course, you can choose project owners and funders can choose to pledge in BTC, in which case the amount does not fluctuate
2) Flexibility - CoinFunder allows you to pick between 2 Campaign Types:
-Escrow - A funder is not counted toward your project's goal until the pledge is paid.  Any funds that are pledged are held in escrow until the project reaches it's funding goal.
-Pledge - A funder is counted toward your project's goal immediately once they pledge.  Funds are not requested until the project reaches it's funding goal - they go directly to the Project Owner.

View our Youtube video here for more information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD5Ghec_CA0

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[justusranvier]

-Bounties - A user can post a request for a bounty, and fund it.  Other people within the community can contribute to the bounty.  Once a bounty is funded, other people within the community can post solutions for that bounty.  If there solution is approved by the project owner, they can choose to award the solution contributor the bounty.

Can the bounty have a time limit such that if no qualified solutions are proposed before a cutoff all donations are returned?

[coinfunder]

Currently there is no time limit - but the bounty owner can close the bounty, at which point in time any funders can request a refund!

That is one question that we had, who should have control over withdrawing a bounty, and how should refunds be handled.  The above is what we have implemented at this point in time.

[justusranvier]

If donors were encouraged to register a refund address and given separate bitcoin addresses to donate to it would be easier to automate that process in the case of a cancelled bounty.

[coinfunder]

Makes sense - currently we only allow someone to enter a Bitcoin address for a refund if one is actually available.  In other words, the refund has to become available, at that point in time, the user is prompted for refund address.

[Stephen Gornick]

Your domain is newly registered and has privacy protection enabled.

Your forum account is new.

You have not shown any trust history in the -otc Web of Trust.

And you hold (escrow) user's funds.

The history of sites run anonymously is not very good.  Even those that build up trust by being honest seem to eventually succumb to the allure of anonymous digital cash just sitting there for the taking.

If this is a gift-based crowdfunding (like Kickstarter) then it can be offered legally and there is no reasonable excuse not to disclose who the operator(s) are.

That still doesn't protect against against a claim of "oops, the site got hacked, coins are gone" or the operator simply disappearing.

In the instance where the person listing a project is soliciting funds, if things go wrong, that person may feel personally responsible for using a service that didn't have protections against a loss like I describe.

What assurance does this person have that any funds raised are secure (other than a claim of innocent intent)?

[coinfunder]

Hi Stephen,

I can respect what you are saying.  The site is currently gift-based crowdfunding like kickstarter.  We will be adding some contact information to the website to add some level of trust.

All funds are kept in segregated Bitcoin account, and we have taken a variety of steps to ensure that funds are stored in a secure fashion.  We believe that our policies around these areas will evolve with time.  The real test is time, I do not expect that this website will be an immediate success.  I think it will take time, and there will we need to be feedback from the community regarding our services.  I am in this for the long haul.

We believe that Bitcoin needs a service like this, even if ours doesn't take off.  Of course, we would like to be the vendor of choice.  We saw a gap, we are trying to do our best to fill it.

Specific suggestions on how to address these areas would be appreciated.  Would it help if the service allowed you to launch your project with your own BitCoin project address, rather than keeping the funds in escrow.  Then the issue of security is isolated to that user?  That has it's own issues, but perhaps in the beginning this would be the best approach?

[Vod]

Hi Stephen,

I can respect what you are saying.  The site is currently gift-based crowdfunding like kickstarter.  We will be adding some contact information to the website to add some level of trust.

All funds are kept in segregated Bitcoin account, and we have taken a variety of steps to ensure that funds are stored in a secure fashion.  We believe that our policies around these areas will evolve with time.  The real test is time, I do not expect that this website will be an immediate success.  I think it will take time, and there will we need to be feedback from the community regarding our services.  I am in this for the long haul.

We believe that Bitcoin needs a service like this, even if ours doesn't take off.  Of course, we would like to be the vendor of choice.  We saw a gap, we are trying to do our best to fill it.

Specific suggestions on how to address these areas would be appreciated.  Would it help if the service allowed you to launch your project with your own BitCoin project address, rather than keeping the funds in escrow.  Then the issue of security is isolated to that user?  That has it's own issues, but perhaps in the beginning this would be the best approach?

In other words, there is no guarantee that you won't run off once you've accumulated a large number of coins.   

[coinfunder]

Hey mlawrence,

I don't think that is what I am saying at all.  I think this would be a potential solution in the short term:
Would it help if the service allowed you to launch your project with your own BitCoin project address, rather than keeping the funds in escrow.  Then the issue of security is isolated to that user?  That has it's own issues, but perhaps in the beginning this would be the best approach?

I am open to other suggestions - would it make more sense to keep it in a third party escrow?  Suggestions are welcomed - we will do our best to implement them.

[Stephen Gornick]

Would it help if the service allowed you to launch your project with your own BitCoin project address, rather than keeping the funds in escrow.  Then the issue of security is isolated to that user?  That has it's own issues, but perhaps in the beginning this would be the best approach?

One of the reasons Kickstarter is "all or nothing" (i.e., meet the target level or funds are returned to the contributor) is because the funds returned on projects that never reach the goal get funneled into the remaining ones giving those leaders a better chance of reaching their goal.

Occasionally a project that only gets partial funding can still become a successful project but other projects will fail unless the entire minimum level of funding is achieved.  Two successful, fully funded projects and twenty projects that never reached full funding is better than twenty-two partially funded projects, and all or nearly all failed.

So I don't think letting the project owner provide the bitcoin address is ideal either.

This is an example of where M of N signatures would come in useful.

[coinfunder]

Thank you to those who have registered an account with us!  For those of you who have posted a project, has the process been pretty smooth for you?  I have noticed that some projects have been published without a project picture, please go ahead and upload an image so I can feature your project on the home page!

We are working on some more updates for the site as we speak, please let us know if you have additional feature requests.  Also, please do not think that we are ignoring the feedback provided by Stephen. We are actively working toward an acceptable solution for the issues he has raised.

[j980]

I was still marked as newbie, so I could not reply earlier.

I think it's an interesting project.  To give it a test, I copied over some of the easier requested features I could find on github for the default bitcoin client and made them into coinfunder projects. 

I can't spend much time/effort on marketing though, so I hope it will just meet it's goal like this.

You might want to give people the option to tweet about existing projects (if this option is not there yet), because I think you mainly need to get a lot of people to see the projects.

[globalvillage]

SUPERB IDEA!  Looking forward to participate in it (y)

[rayvellest]

This sounds like a really great idea, but really, who are you? Who's the team behind the site? If you really want the community to support you on this project, I think you would not hurt to be more transparent. So here's my two cents, why don't you make a formal presentation of who are the people behind the project? What are your skills, and perhaps, just for the fun of it, why did you started it in the first place? I'm sure people would feel much more confident using your site once they know who's running it.

[coinfunder]

You are 100% right - here is a quick intro for now.

We have a team of 3 right now.  My name is John Pike - I am based in Texas.  My background is in IT, I have been building web applications and running websites for over 10 years.  We started CoinFunder.com because I saw an opportunity to build a valuable crowdfunding service within the Bitcoin community.  From a little research, it looked like some had tried in the past, but there were none that were active within the community.

We are working on some changes to the website - they should be ready within the next few days.  These changes are focused on building trust in our service, I think that is the biggest problem we have right now!

j980 - Thank you for the suggestion, we have added a plugin that allows you to share each project page on your social website of choice!

[coinfunder]

2 New Features Have Been Added:

1) To address potential security concerns, we have added split Projects into 2 different Campaign Types:
-The first Campaign Type is Escrow. This is the campaign type that we launched with.  Under this campaign type, once a pledge is made, the user is immediately requested to make a payment for their pledge.  Until they do this, the pledge does not count toward the funding goal.  In other words, as the escrow account for each project builds, so does it's progress toward it's funding goal.  We chose this campaign type because we wanted to collect the payments up front and hold them so that when the project actually completed, the funding was there.  The downsides to this approach include:
-Single point of failure in CoinFunder.com (What happens if we get hacked / run off with all the coins).   I would like to take this opportunity to point out that funds are routinely transfered to a segregated Cold Wallet for each project.  Hopefully this alleviates some concerns regarding the potential of getting hacked.
-More complicated workflow for refunds, etc (This isn't really a huge downside, it is already built in, but it is a more complicated process in general)

-To help address Security Concerns we are launching a second Campaign Type that we refer to as a Pledge.  Under this campaign type, once a pledge is made, it counts immediately toward that project's funding goal amount. The only way a pledge wouldn't count is if the pledge is canceled.  Once a project reaches it's funding goal based on the total of the Pledge Amounts, the project owner is given the ability to enter the Bitcoin address they would like to receive payment at.  Once the project owner does this, the funders are given the ability to submit payment for their pledges.  These payments go directly to the project owner, without going through CoinFunder.com controlled accounts.
-Obviously, this approach has it's own downsides (someone Pledges, but then they do not pay)
-Over time we will build controls around how many of these type of Pledges you can make toward each Project.  In addition, we will build a rating system that shows how often someone walked.

We firmly believe that each process has it's own advantages and disadvantages.  It is up to each project owner to pick the process that they would like to follow.

EDIT: All existing projects will continue with the current Escrow model unless you tell us to move it to the Pledged format!

2) The second feature we would like to announce is that each project page now gets it's own Slug that the project owner can manage.

Happy Funding!
The CoinFunder Team

[rme]

Like Kickstarter but with Bitcoins, great

[coinfunder]

Wurish, you never know!  We will help out where we can.

I have posted some marketing content - we are trying to boost are marketing efforts to get projects more visibility.  Let me know what you think of the video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBlqYUM9hgY

[coinfunder]

Man - no comments on the video. = )

I just received some feedback from a Project Owner. He suggested that we allow the Project Owner to tie the goal amount to a particular currency (instead of tying it to a BTC amount).  Obviously, the funding would still be in BTC.  I could see this as being a good feature, especially with the fluctuations that we have seen in the BTC value over the past month.  What do you guys think?

I have always been a fan of Keep It Stupid Simple - myself.

[BTCLuke]

The video was sweet, but kinda long. Perhaps splitting it up to answer different questions would be better.

He suggested that we allow the Project Owner to tie the goal amount to a particular currency (instead of tying it to a BTC amount).  Obviously, the funding would still be in BTC.  I could see this as being a good feature, especially with the fluctuations that we have seen in the BTC value over the past month.  What do you guys think?

Well of course you have to allow people to pledge their local currency's worth!

That's the first thing I thought when I learned about pledging... Could you imagine if someone pledged a bitcoin today and 6 months later the project is done and funding is due and their bitcoin is now worth $5,000?  Or half a million?

That's a deal killer, plain and simple. No one would honor their pledges if the price of bitcoin rose considerably.

After you fix that gaping hole, you really need to spend some time and money on advertsing. I know you're only a week or two old but logging in and seeing no bounties and just a tiny few projects is really disheartening.

...Add some small ones yourself if you have to!

(Oh yeah, and don't forget to put your real information on your WHOIS data at your registrar. The whole outfit looks shady without it.)

...Just my 3 bitcents.