Alt. to LocalBitcoins. Buy bitcoins from your social network

[leek_rs]

I was thinking of making an alternative to LC that allows you to buy bitcoins from friends of friends. Has anyone thought of doing something like this yet?

It would show you who in your extended friend network has bitcoins. Obviously, they'd have to have signed up for the app too. But that would probably make people more comfortable than buying from complete strangers on local bitcoins.

What do you think?

*EDIT: link to completed site www.friendswithcoins.com

Benefits

For Sellers

• Instant payments using PayPal or email money transfer
• Reduced risk of chargebacks since you're dealing with friends and friends-of-friends
• Free social advertising
• The average facebook user has 245 friends. FWC includes friends of your friends giving you a potential reach of 60,025 (245 x 245) people

For Buyers

• No lengthy account approval process
  
• Send money instantly and cheaply instead of waiting days for a payment to process
• Personal Bitcoin wallet created on sign up with a new address generated for each transaction
• Withdraw Bitcoins at any time or keep them in the online wallet
• Only pay current market prices since sellers don't include risk fees

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[Elwar]

Hmm, perhaps a Facebook app that shows on your wall that you purchased X BTC for Y fiat along with the transaction ID.

This would help prevent chargebacks via humiliation of your friends and family if the payment does not go through.

Plus the added bonus of people being exposed to Bitcoin.

[b!z]

I think there would be a lot less people you could buy BTC from, if you did that. LocalBitcoins shows all of the people in your area, but your idea would only show a few of the people.

[leek_rs]

Hmm, perhaps a Facebook app that shows on your wall that you purchased X BTC for Y fiat along with the transaction ID.

This would help prevent chargebacks via humiliation of your friends and family if the payment does not go through.

Plus the added bonus of people being exposed to Bitcoin.

I made a wireframe of it last night. It's the landing page but it functions as diagram as well. http://bit.ly/1aWVoCk

[Elwar]

Hmm, perhaps a Facebook app that shows on your wall that you purchased X BTC for Y fiat along with the transaction ID.

This would help prevent chargebacks via humiliation of your friends and family if the payment does not go through.

Plus the added bonus of people being exposed to Bitcoin.

I made a wireframe of it last night. It's the landing page but it functions as diagram as well. http://bit.ly/1aWVoCk

Looks like something that could work quite well.

[Sindelar1938]

Don't have the broad based critical mass in adoption yet that would make this feasible yet

Great thought though. My sense is could be feasible in another 6 to12 months time

[Elwar]

I believe this could be big. Plenty of our friends and family are probably curious about Bitcoin and would want to buy some if they could do it easily through something like PayPal or something easy like that.

Having something pop up on your wall saying "I am looking to sell bitcoins (or buy)" may get some people on your friends list interested.

I am up for being part of this if you want to go ahead with it. Though I would not be in 100% as I already have a project.

I could possibly contribute programming or money toward such a venture.

[leek_rs]

I'm a developer but there's a few things I'm gonna need some assistance with. I'll send you a PM and we can talk on skype.

[greBit]

This could be quite cool.

You could just focus on the "discovery" element, i.e. matching a bitcoin-newbie with a bitcoin-seller on his social graph. I agree that they would be more inclined to trust people that are friends or friends-of-friends than random folk on the interwebs.

How about a simple facebook App?

You could model it a bit like "bang with friends" app.  Sellers can enable the App which will only let interested friends or friends-of-friends find them.

There is also no great need to help manage the buying process (escrow / bitcoin addresses etc) since the mutual trust that already exists means this is largely redundant.

[moonb]

This sounds like a really good idea! I hope someone makes it happen

[leek_rs]

Beta site

www.friendswithcoins.com

Benefits

For Sellers

• Instant payments using PayPal or email money transfer
• Reduced risk of chargebacks since you're dealing with friends and friends-of-friends
• Free social advertising
• The average facebook user has 245 friends. FWC includes friends of your friends giving you a potential reach of 60,025 (245 x 245) people

For Buyers

• No lengthy account approval process
  
• Send money instantly and cheaply instead of waiting days for a payment to process
• Personal Bitcoin wallet created on sign up with a new address generated for each transaction
• Withdraw Bitcoins at any time or keep them in the online wallet
• Only pay current market prices since sellers don't include risk fees

*bug found on Chrome Browser: the "Share Transaction" popup won't close after clicking "Post". Once you click "Post", click outside the popup to close.

[lclc]

Good idea, but remove the online wallet. I don't want my friends to use webwallets.

For later (when it's finished) you could also use the distributed identity&reputation database http://identifi.org/.
Other ways you have to trust Facebook a bit.

[whiskers75]

Beta site

www.friendswithcoins.com

Benefits

For Sellers

• Instant payments using PayPal or email money transfer
• Reduced risk of chargebacks since you're dealing with friends and friends-of-friends
• Free social advertising
• The average facebook user has 245 friends. FWC includes friends of your friends giving you a potential reach of 60,025 (245 x 245) people

For Buyers

• No lengthy account approval process
  
• Send money instantly and cheaply instead of waiting days for a payment to process
• Personal Bitcoin wallet created on sign up with a new address generated for each transaction
• Withdraw Bitcoins at any time or keep them in the online wallet
• Only pay current market prices since sellers don't include risk fees

*bug found on Chrome Browser: the "Share Transaction" popup won't close after clicking "Post". Once you click "Post", click outside the popup to close.

Oh, cool! What's it coded in?

[leek_rs]

Beta site

www.friendswithcoins.com

Benefits

For Sellers

• Instant payments using PayPal or email money transfer
• Reduced risk of chargebacks since you're dealing with friends and friends-of-friends
• Free social advertising
• The average facebook user has 245 friends. FWC includes friends of your friends giving you a potential reach of 60,025 (245 x 245) people

For Buyers

• No lengthy account approval process
  
• Send money instantly and cheaply instead of waiting days for a payment to process
• Personal Bitcoin wallet created on sign up with a new address generated for each transaction
• Withdraw Bitcoins at any time or keep them in the online wallet
• Only pay current market prices since sellers don't include risk fees

*bug found on Chrome Browser: the "Share Transaction" popup won't close after clicking "Post". Once you click "Post", click outside the popup to close.

Oh, cool! What's it coded in?

The front end is coded in Ruby on Rails

[leek_rs]

Good idea, but remove the online wallet. I don't want my friends to use webwallets.

I'm looking at ways to encourage users to download the QT. There's also the issue of getting them around the frustrating realization of having to download the entire blockchain from the beginning.

[Elwar]

Good idea, but remove the online wallet. I don't want my friends to use webwallets.

For later (when it's finished) you could also use the distributed identity&reputation database http://identifi.org/.
Other ways you have to trust Facebook a bit.

This type of setup will open up a lot more people to Bitcoin. People who barely know anything about Bitcoin but want to get a few.

We need to take baby steps and hand hold through the process. Getting people a few mBTC first is a good start, then they can withdraw to their client once they learn about how to keep their coins secure.

The web wallet also helps with an escrow portion of the trade.

Friends With Coins is a great way to expose people to Bitcoin. People will see a post on your wall about buying or selling bitcoins and start asking questions, and if they see it on enough of their friend's walls they'll want to try it out. This is the word of mouth type of viral growth that can put bitcoin into a lot of people's hands.

Facebook is worldwide, even in China. This will be a way that people in China can get bitcoins within the law through something like alipay which is like China's PayPal with over 550 million users.

[lclc]

And then we get the message: "Friendswithcoins got hacked" / "Bitcoins hacked" an all that bullshit again. That's bad press and easy to avoid.
If they want a webwallet point them to Blockchain.info/Coinbase, they have a big team of people looking for the security of their webwallets, which the OP probably doesn't have.

They don't have to download the Bitcoin-Qt client, better use Electrum or Multibit.