How will the BTC price of the transaction be established? With BTC being so volatile, this seems tricky, and possibly one of the participants may not get the deal they were looking for.
We will explore 2 options:
1. We determine the price at the time Buyer initiates transaction. Spenders fund account with let's say 100% price in BTC, which gives him some room to handle volatility. If BTC prices drop significantly, then his account is no longer sufficiently funded, and his order will be removed from order book.
2. Price is set at the time Spender placed the order, and the Buyer can always refuse to accept the order if the price of BTC has shifted enough to make it too unfavorable.
In either case, we would like the site to operate in such a way that a majority of orders can be expected to be filled within a day. Additionally, I've been thinking of lately of how we still rely on mtgox price as the "value" of bitcoin when their daily volumes are often 10-20k. The bitcoin economy has outgrown this and we as a community should look into better ways to determine the value of bitcoin.
Who do you believe wants to pay a 5% premium to get bitcoins? Seems there are very established/trusted ways to buy BTC for much less, and it's really not much work to sign up for say Coinbase or CampBX (just to name a couple). Do you believe there's a benefit of getting BTC through your service that I'm not seeing?
In both examples you gave, bank account info are required. Unless you trust coinbase with your bank account password, to verify account ownership takes several days. It also suffers from the 10btc/day limit. Credit card cannot be used to purchase, and GBSB can potentially be anonymous by using store bought gift cards. In any case, you will never have to trust
us with your personal info, as we will never require you to provide it to us.
I'd say from the bitcoin buyer's perspective, this service is more comparable to bitinstant. With major differences being 1. Rate of exchange is known prior to transaction, 2. Longer wait, 3. Do not depend on other exchanges. 4. Never have to leave the house.
Seems everyone who participates is at some risk, since a middleman could grab bitcoin, get product sent to friends, and take off (I'm not saying you would do that, but seems you could do that). Or a middleman could get shut down, mid-transaction.
I'm not sure what you mean by middleman. There are 3 parties involved in these exchanges. GBSB, Spender, and Buyer. If you mean GBSB=middleman, then yes, there's always counter party risk when using any bitcoin service. Products cannot be sent to anyone besides Spender's input address and still have a valid tracking #. If GBSB is shut down, we still retain all contact info and bitcoin withdraw addresses to refund users.
Do you have a plan to assure participants of safety? Will you and your business be anonymous?
What do you mean by safety?
We will be a registered LLC, so no. Customers' anonymity will be preserved however.
Have you consulted with a lawyer? Seems many sites that helped people use coin for Amazon have come and gone, I figure there must be good reason.
Yes because they are buying the items themselves and abusing Amazon Prime. This services leverages the wishlist functionality, which doesn't require us to conduct any business with Amazon. With that said, yes we are consulting lawyers and will do everything to avoid any cease and desists from Amazon.
Do you have a plan in place for when a buyer wants to return a product (say it's defective, or just crappy, or whatever)? Or are all transactions final? Seems you'll have to lay out a ton of ground rules, and I can't help but think people will figure out ways to game this in some way.
No returns is current policy. I agree there will be many ground rules and procedures for Spenders(which will be well documented), and hopefully that the discount incentive is enough for them to overcome that. The process will be designed to be much simpler for the Buyer. There will always be ways to game any system, and we can only learn and update as we go. Eventually, we want to develop into a more open exchange that allows users to set their own rules, pick their own escrows, and take full responsibility of their own actions.
