Foodler here

[btc_foodler]

Foodler co-founder here.  I've been following the discussion in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=176100.0 from the required forum newbie distance.

Thanks for all the feedback and support.  We're happy to report a growing number of bitcoin deposits and orders each day since we introduced the feature last week.  Operationally and technically, things have been running smoothly.  We've automated the deposit credits and added an exchange rate ticker today.

I'm here for your complaints/comments/suggestions.  We're excited to help support the bitcoin community!

Thanks,
Christian

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[bitcoinget]

Big Foodler fan here, and will be looking forward to spending bitcoins for food. Great job guys!

[btc_foodler]

Thanks.  We just moved to a zero-confirmation model.  There are some heuristics to provide safeguards, but almost all deposits will post without waiting for confirmation.

With Foodler, every minute counts -- when you're hungry, you're hungry.

[Derivagral]

User here as well. Glad to hear about this!

[btc_foodler]

Awesome.  Would love to get feedback on how we can improve the service and the Bitcoin experience on Foodler.

We've decided to reimburse the sender's transaction fee.  Is there a way to determine the fee from bitcoind?  We are applying a 0.001 bonus to all deposits of 0.20 BTC or more.  Hopefully this will cover any reasonable fee for the sender.

Also, is there a preference for a new deposit address for every transaction?  Perhaps the best answer is to provide new addresses after each transaction, while allowing the old ones to continue working.

Thanks for any feedback.  We're trying to continually improve.

[bitcoinget]

Awesome.  Would love to get feedback on how we can improve the service and the Bitcoin experience on Foodler.

We've decided to reimburse the sender's transaction fee.  Is there a way to determine the fee from bitcoind?  We are applying a 0.001 bonus to all deposits of 0.20 BTC or more.  Hopefully this will cover any reasonable fee for the sender.

Also, is there a preference for a new deposit address for every transaction?  Perhaps the best answer is to provide new addresses after each transaction, while allowing the old ones to continue working.

Thanks for any feedback.  We're trying to continually improve.

Yes, you can get the transaction fee from bitcoind. Have a look at the "gettransaction" command from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_calls_list

I don't think a new address for each deposit is necessary. Just one per account should be good enough.

[razoredge]

Also, is there a preference for a new deposit address for every transaction?  Perhaps the best answer is to provide new addresses after each transaction, while allowing the old ones to continue working.

Just for privacy's sake I suppose.

I think the idea behind "use a new address for every transaction" is more paranoia in case quantum computing ever became a reality, then you would never want to re-use an address that was made public, as it could possibly be cracked.

[Atruk]

Awesome.  Would love to get feedback on how we can improve the service and the Bitcoin experience on Foodler.

We've decided to reimburse the sender's transaction fee.  Is there a way to determine the fee from bitcoind?  We are applying a 0.001 bonus to all deposits of 0.20 BTC or more.  Hopefully this will cover any reasonable fee for the sender.

Also, is there a preference for a new deposit address for every transaction?  Perhaps the best answer is to provide new addresses after each transaction, while allowing the old ones to continue working.

A bonus of 0.001BTC for deposits over a certain size is much better than trying to figure transaction fees. Right now I just tack on a fixed 0.002 fee so my transactions confirm fast, but people spending smaller inputs could always rack up much larger fees. Most people just learn to consider the fees a sunk cost.

Requiring new addresses to avoid the quantum computing threat is really on the 10-50 year security timeline from my limited understanding. New addresses while maintaining old addresses is what Mt Gox does, there are probably better and worse ways to do it. A set deposit address is going to probably be safe, Seals with Clubs the biggest bitcoin poker site seems to favor set addresses, people tend to keep these fairly private anyway.

Did you roll your own payment solution or are you using Bitpay(kind of sweet)/Scambase(not so sweet).

I do love me some La Parrilla.

[btc_foodler]

Yes, you can get the transaction fee from bitcoind. Have a look at the "gettransaction" command from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_calls_list

The fee is reported for transactions that are sent from the local bitcoind, but not received.  blockchain.info presents an API that includes fees for transactions.  Is there some other way for bitcoind to report fees on received transactions?

Thanks.

[Atruk]

Yes, you can get the transaction fee from bitcoind. Have a look at the "gettransaction" command from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_calls_list

The fee is reported for transactions that are sent from the local bitcoind, but not received.  blockchain.info presents an API that includes fees for transactions.  Is there some other way for bitcoind to report fees on received transactions?

Thanks.

No good way...

[btc_foodler]

A bonus of 0.001BTC for deposits over a certain size is much better than trying to figure transaction fees. Right now I just tack on a fixed 0.002 fee so my transactions confirm fast, but people spending smaller inputs could always rack up much larger fees. Most people just learn to consider the fees a sunk cost.

We might as well dial up the reimbursement to 0.002 if this is common.  It's a small thing, but for example, I appreciate the banks that reimburse foreign ATM fees.  Hopefully this will create the same feeling.

Requiring new addresses to avoid the quantum computing threat is really on the 10-50 year security timeline from my limited understanding. New addresses while maintaining old addresses is what Mt Gox does, there are probably better and worse ways to do it. A set deposit address is going to probably be safe, Seals with Clubs the biggest bitcoin poker site seems to favor set addresses, people tend to keep these fairly private anyway.

We'll leave it as a single address for now.  For increased privacy, a customer can order takeout rather than delivery, and then pick up their pizza or convenience store items discretely.

Did you roll your own payment solution or are you using Bitpay(kind of sweet)/Scambase(not so sweet).

I do love me some La Parrilla.

Interesting story: We started with a public service, but it was having reliability issues at the time.  We decided to stay up all night last week and roll our own.  Basically it's bitcoind running on an AWS EC2 instance, talking JSON RPC with our back-end network.  bitcoind has been reliable.  It crashed once but we had a simple monitoring script in place that restarted it.

Next up should be some sort of calculator with a currency lock to allow customers to deposit the precise amount of BTC they will need to pay for their order.

Enjoy La Parrilla.

[Atruk]

Interesting story: We started with a public service, but it was having reliability issues at the time.  We decided to stay up all night last week and roll our own.  Basically it's bitcoind running on an AWS EC2 instance, talking JSON RPC with our back-end network.  bitcoind has been reliable.  It crashed once but we had a simple monitoring script in place that restarted it.

Next up should be some sort of calculator with a currency lock to allow customers to deposit the precise amount of BTC they will need to pay for their order.

Enjoy La Parrilla.

Cool, for the trouble I might have to pick up the rest of the crew's tabs as well.

0.002 is a bit high, I set mine there because I like my sports bets to post quickly. 0.001 would probably cover more than 80% of the transactions fees headed your way. A middle ground of a 0.0015 rebate might cover 90-95% of people's fees. I'm something of an outlier when it comes to fees...

Currency locking can be a bit tricky. Especially since any exchanges tend to either fold or lag when the DDOS's hit. Depending on how brave your team is using MPEX futures either through MPEX.co itself or Coin.br could maybe do quite a bit to mitigate your foreign exchange risk. There are other avenues for hedging, but a lot of them are built on broken and recycled code. Anywhere you might decide to hedge the FX risk is going to be iffy, but of all the futures options available at this time MPEX's seem the most solid (disclaimer: I am not a licensed broker, attorney, or agent of any sort). Not hedging and just holding extra coin you can't immediately unload at cost on the other hand to sell later might just be viable if you have the capital on reserve to wait before converting back to dollars.

[yapusi]

thanks for your share

[Atruk]

Requiring new addresses to avoid the quantum computing threat is really on the 10-50 year security timeline from my limited understanding. New addresses while maintaining old addresses is what Mt Gox does, there are probably better and worse ways to do it. A set deposit address is going to probably be safe, Seals with Clubs the biggest bitcoin poker site seems to favor set addresses, people tend to keep these fairly private anyway.

We'll leave it as a single address for now.  For increased privacy, a customer can order takeout rather than delivery, and then pick up their pizza or convenience store items discretely.
[/quote]

Cool, the theoretical threat that makes reusing addresses potentially undesirable is only to a small degree an anonymity threat. The big threat would be finding a shortcut to compute private keys for addresses known to hold substantial values back to their private key. The sort of power to pull this off is a long way off though, and before that happens another address scheme using a still more secure scheme could rather trivially be added to bitcoin.

[btc_foodler]

Currency locking can be a bit tricky. Especially since any exchanges tend to either fold or lag when the DDOS's hit. Depending on how brave your team is using MPEX futures either through MPEX.co itself or Coin.br could maybe do quite a bit to mitigate your foreign exchange risk. There are other avenues for hedging, but a lot of them are built on broken and recycled code. Anywhere you might decide to hedge the FX risk is going to be iffy, but of all the futures options available at this time MPEX's seem the most solid (disclaimer: I am not a licensed broker, attorney, or agent of any sort). Not hedging and just holding extra coin you can't immediately unload at cost on the other hand to sell later might just be viable if you have the capital on reserve to wait before converting back to dollars.

If we offer the currency lock, it would be offered during checkout so the time window would be small.  For example, during checkout, suppose a customer has a $22 order with a $4 tip.  We would quote per the current exchange rate, 0.20635BTC at the moment, if paid within the next 5 minutes.  Since we accept 0-confirmation deposits, this should be plenty of time for the customer to open their wallet and initiate the transfer.  We'd bear the currency exposure risk, as we do today.  It works in both directions so it ought to average out.

MPEX.co is interesting.  They should position themselves as an alternative exchange for companies considering a smaller, less complicated IPO than traditional markets.  The market depth isn't there right now, but it has to start somewhere.

[Atruk]

Currency locking can be a bit tricky. Especially since any exchanges tend to either fold or lag when the DDOS's hit. Depending on how brave your team is using MPEX futures either through MPEX.co itself or Coin.br could maybe do quite a bit to mitigate your foreign exchange risk. There are other avenues for hedging, but a lot of them are built on broken and recycled code. Anywhere you might decide to hedge the FX risk is going to be iffy, but of all the futures options available at this time MPEX's seem the most solid (disclaimer: I am not a licensed broker, attorney, or agent of any sort). Not hedging and just holding extra coin you can't immediately unload at cost on the other hand to sell later might just be viable if you have the capital on reserve to wait before converting back to dollars.

If we offer the currency lock, it would be offered during checkout so the time window would be small.  For example, during checkout, suppose a customer has a $22 order with a $4 tip.  We would quote per the current exchange rate, 0.20635BTC at the moment, if paid within the next 5 minutes.  Since we accept 0-confirmation deposits, this should be plenty of time for the customer to open their wallet and initiate the transfer.  We'd bear the currency exposure risk, as we do today.  It works in both directions so it ought to average out.

MPEX.co is interesting.  They should position themselves as an alternative exchange for companies considering a smaller, less complicated IPO than traditional markets.  The market depth isn't there right now, but it has to start somewhere.

Cool, so hedging should be less important then. MPEX options and hedging can be something of a hassle if you don't need it.

[btc_foodler]

Cool, so hedging should be less important then. MPEX options and hedging can be something of a hassle if you don't need it.

Do you think there's investor demand for IPOs on MPEX?

[Atruk]

Cool, so hedging should be less important then. MPEX options and hedging can be something of a hassle if you don't need it.

Do you think there's investor demand for IPOs on MPEX?

There seems to be. I'm not the person to be asking about that though. MPEX tends to be much pickier than the other bitcoin stock exchanges when it comes to IPOs. A large reason for this has been the tendency for most bitcoin IPOs to be crap. MPEX IPOs tend to have a much better chance of getting a decent amount of funding though.

This thread contains some reading to get started on: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124441.0
Probably also wouldn't hurt to read some articles on Trilema: http://polimedia.us/trilema

Once you have some idea how Mircea views bitcoin business the IRC channel #bitcoin-assets is usually a place where you can ask questions to Mircea directly.

Off the topic of MPEX, one thing you might want to do is poke around the development and technical discussion threads to check out ways you can protect your business while still taking zero confirmation transactions. There's a lot of information about that subject here on the forums and there's a decent chance a developer working on the issue can answer questions you might have.

[rtw]

Love the idea. I really hope you guys do well.

[btc_foodler]

Thanks.  I'll check it out.