CoinPal beta - Buying bitcoins with PayPal

[Mike Hearn]

This is just a heads up that CoinPal might be broken at the moment. I just tried to place an order and PayPal told me that there was a problem with the sellers email address that meant the transaction could not be processed.

Given mndrixs performance so far I'm sure this will be resolved shortly.

[1713438466]

1713438466

[1713438466]

1713438466

[mndrix]

This is just a heads up that CoinPal might be broken at the moment. I just tried to place an order and PayPal told me that there was a problem with the sellers email address that meant the transaction could not be processed.

Given mndrixs performance so far I'm sure this will be resolved shortly.

This problem should be resolved now.  [mike], thanks for the report.

For other users who may encounter this problem: this particular error intermittently affects only a few individual orders and for various reasons I've chosen to resolve the problem manually.  If you encounter the error, PM me your PayPal email address and I'll take care of the problem as soon as I can.  Sorry the inconvenience of the manual process.

[Mike Hearn]

Yes, the problem is fully resolved. It's a shame PayPal seems to be flaky but as expected mndrix provided exemplary customer service. He even added me to the beta testers list!

CoinPal is great and I look forward to doing business with Hendrix Solutions a lot more in future.

[ethwit]

This is just a heads up that CoinPal might be broken at the moment. I just tried to place an order and PayPal told me that there was a problem with the sellers email address that meant the transaction could not be processed.

Given mndrixs performance so far I'm sure this will be resolved shortly.

This problem should be resolved now.  [mike], thanks for the report.

For other users who may encounter this problem: this particular error intermittently affects only a few individual orders and for various reasons I've chosen to resolve the problem manually.  If you encounter the error, PM me your PayPal email address and I'll take care of the problem as soon as I can.  Sorry the inconvenience of the manual process.

I just ran into the same problem about 90 minutes ago.  i tried using the link i received in email a while later, and got a message that my order had expired.  Upon attempt to re-order i received a message that i exceeded my weekly limit...

?help

thank you

-tom

[MDKing]

Great service, I've used it several times already. Today was my first large purchase of 40 BTC. Is the weekly limitation of 40 BTC still enforced?

[mndrix]

Great service, I've used it several times already. Today was my first large purchase of 40 BTC. Is the weekly limitation of 40 BTC still enforced?

Thanks.  Yes, the 40 BTC limit is still enforced.  Once I have a better handle on fraud levels, I plan to increase the limit for returning customers.  It may be another month before that happens though.

[abstraction]

I'm now getting an invalid bitcoin address message. I've not seen this before.

[mndrix]

I'm now getting an invalid bitcoin address message. I've not seen this before.

The bitcoin daemon on my server crashed causing the BTC address verification to fail.  I've restarted the daemon and test orders appear to be working fine.

[mndrix]

The bitcoin daemon hung again.  CoinPal is closed until I can figure out what's going on

[mndrix]

CoinPal is open again.

I wasn't able to pinpoint the bitcoind problem, but I did upgrade to 0.3.20.01, so we'll see if that fixes it.

[mgiuca]

Good work on CoinCard. I have been wondering for awhile how to get coins out of the Bitcoin system without doing a mass trade on MtGox. I just wrote up a blog post about CoinCard (but I haven't yet tried it myself).

The Domino's "proof of concept" was a good idea. Any idea whether Domino's gift cards work outside the United States? (Actually, given that last week I went to a Domino's store with one of their own vouchers and they told me it was invalid and I had to pay full price, I'm unlikely to try CoinCard on them. But I might try the PayPal approach.)

[doublec]

The Domino's "proof of concept" was a good idea. Any idea whether Domino's gift cards work outside the United States?

They are US only, excluding Hawaii and Alaska.

[mndrix]

Good work on CoinCard. I have been wondering for awhile how to get coins out of the Bitcoin system without doing a mass trade on MtGox. I just wrote up a blog post about CoinCard (but I haven't yet tried it myself).

Thanks for the write-up.  doublec's response is spot on about Domino's gift card validity.

For anyone who tried to buy coins through CoinPal yesterday, I've restocked my inventory.  I added a bunch more coins on Saturday night, but it still wasn't enough to see us through Sunday's purchases.

[mndrix]

PayPal approved me for one of their merchant rates.  I've passed the full savings through to buyers by decreasing CoinPal fees 0.4 percentage points.

I've also finished some analysis on past fraud rates and patterns.  As a result, I've increased purchase limits for customers 14 and 45 days after their first successful order.  This is a calculated risk and I may reverse this decision as more data comes in.  You can read details about the new limits.

[8668]

PayPal approved me for one of their merchant rates.  I've passed the full savings through to buyers by decreasing CoinPal fees 0.4 percentage points.

I've also finished some analysis on past fraud rates and patterns.  As a result, I've increased purchase limits for customers 14 and 45 days after their first successful order.  This is a calculated risk and I may reverse this decision as more data comes in.  You can read details about the new limits.

Good deal! You can count on my orders increasing by around 0.4%   

[mndrix]

CoinPal was down for a couple hours while I upgraded the server.  It's back now

[mndrix]

bitcoind crashed last night.  I've restarted it and the site is taking orders again.  If you placed an order before the crash and didn't get your coins, hang tight.  I'll send them shortly.  Sorry for the trouble

[Mike Hearn]

Did you get a core dump? It might be useful. There must be a memory corruption or race in there. Maybe time t break out Valgrind.

[dsg]

Did you get a core dump? It might be useful. There must be a memory corruption or race in there. Maybe time t break out Valgrind.

Not sure it'd be wise to post bitcoin coredumps online publicly, as it seems likely there might be private keys in them. This may not be obvious to everyone.

[mndrix]

Sorry, I should have said "hung" rather than "crashed".  The daemon process was still alive and the debug log showed it was still involved in peer exchange, but it wouldn't respond to RPC calls.  This has happened enough, I'll post what I know in the developer channel.