Hello everyone,
I would like to introduce a new website and pet project of mine.
http://bidbitcoins.com If it takes off and people like it, I’ll make it better and better as I can afford to. It’s basically a buyers and sellers marketplace like E-Bay but all sale are conducted in bitcoins only. I’m almost done with the site setup and I should be ready to take customers registrations starting tomorrow, Aug. 1 So what is Bid Bitcoins? I invite people to check out the site.
*I intend to make it a competing site to the largest online auction site in as many ways as possible. The benefits will be:
*No Chargebacks unless agreed to by both parties.
*Anonymity from banks in all transactions.
*No banking fees for money transfers to sellers from buyers.
*Every auction or item placed for sale and sold through Bid Bitcoins supports the whole bitcoin community and helps further bitcoins acceptance into the marketplace.
*Much less fraud potential for both parties. Credit cards lend themselves to fraud by their very nature, as card numbers can easily be stolen and used to make purchases, than mailed to themselves at unwitting victims addresses.
*Users/Members accounts with money cannot be frozen due to “suspected” fraud.
*No user credit card data is stored onsite. Anyone who hacks the site will not have access to accounts of any kind and therefore cannot cause financial damage directly to any user by theft.
What kind of features does Bid Bitcoins have? Here is the full list:
* Currency of all goods and services denominated in Bitcoin
* All Merchants will be required to accept Bitcoin, although other arrangements can be made offsite.
* All forms of auction including Dutch Buy it Outright, Reserve Price, Reverse Auctions, Wanted Ads.
* 1 Day, 3 Days, 7 Day Days, 14 Days, and 30 Day auction choices.
* Make Offer Options.
* First Bidder Auctions
* Select Starting Price
* Define Offer Acceptance range
* Swap Offers Option
* Upload up to 3 Free images and 6 images total.
* Auto Relist
* Batch Uploads
* Personal Store Options. Basic Store 100% Free
* Block Users
* Postage Calculation Setup
* Reputation / Comments / Feedback
* Preferred Seller Features
* User Enabled Skin Changes
* Combined Purchase Invoices
* Ask Seller a Question / Member Messaging
Now, I’ve decided for this to be a personal hobby project for now. If it becomes widely used and accepted, I may change it into a business, file and all that. But for now, it’s a n experiment, and no more.
Since I wanted to site to be closest to the true spirit of bitcoin, I decided I did not want to accept money at all for the services, and it will all be done in bitcoin. This means there is no way for me to identify people who use the site without either taking credit card and drivers license info myself or having people email in their paperwork to prove who they are. Instead I opted for using a 3rd party service called Trufina located at
http://www.trufina.com – They are completely unrelated to Bid Bitcoins.com. As a matter of fact, I only recently stumbled upon them, signed up and found I approve of their service enough to incorporate it into the site. They charge a flat one-time fee of $5.00 for their service to sign up. That’s the downside. The upside is, that we’ll give you $5.00 in bitcoin credit towards your fees on the site.
I intend to launch the site for FREE USE for 3 Months, starting on Aug. 1. This is to help everyone get acquainted with it without risk and for me to get important feedback from the members on how to make improvements and for me to fix all potential problems. I do appreciate the feedback and help.
The only services that will cost are enhanced auction services such as Home Page featured, highlighted, bold text, and extra categories. Those all cost just a small fee. The Starting Fees and Closing Fees are going to be waived for the first 3 months, and we will charge a reduced fee for Reserve Price Auctions and Buy Out Auctions.
As well, I’m offering up a series of FREE Prizes as soon as our member grows to 250 members, 500 members and 1000 thousand members. The way this will work is that once we achieve 250 member status an award will be given at random for $250 worth of bitcoins. Then this will repeat when we reach 500 members. (Each member must have one 7 day auction closed and positive feedback for it to qualify.)
The site will open on Aug. 1. In the meantime, I welcome all comments and feedback and will do my best to answer any questions. Also suggestions and ideas are very much appreciated.
Currently, I am looking for someone trustworthy and experienced to help implement a quality shopping cart checkout/gateway system for the site which will run full time or at intervals, create bitcoin address connected invoices, generate new addresses upon invoice creation, enable invoice generation connected to bitcoin for the site itself, record paid invoices from bitcoin gateway (if possible).
