New Deposit Methods For TradeHill via BitInstant Partnership

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

Greetings Folks,

Today we are opening up 3 new ways of depositing US Dollars into TradeHill.
 
Instantly Fund TradeHill accounts through BitInstant using Liberty Reserve, Mt.Gox Coupon Codes, and Dwolla.
 
TradeHill, a leading Bitcoin exchange, announces a partnership with BitInstant that provides users the ability to fund accounts instantly with Liberty Reserve, Mt.Gox Coupon Codes, and Dwolla.  Thanks to an exclusive partnership with BitInstant, a New York based company specializing in rapid funding of Bitcoin accounts, users can now purchase Bitcoins within minutes of opening a TradeHill account.
 
Through BitInstant’s technology, transfers that previously took days or weeks, can now be completed within minutes. This allows Bitcoin traders to easily and securely deposit US Dollars into their TradeHill accounts and increases the liquidity of the overall market. The BitInstant platform enables TradeHill users to take advantage of market conditions much more rapidly than previously thought possible.
 
Customers can use BitInstant with full peace of mind due to a solid infrastructure that handles risk management and fraud protection through the use of dynamic models derived from artificial intelligence techniques.
 
Users can visit www.BitInstant.com for more information.
 
About Bitcoin
 Bitcoin, the world’s first decentralized digital currency provides the same convenience and anonymity that cash has long offered in the physical world. Only recenty introduced, it’s already used by hundreds of thousands of people to exchange physical and digital goods and services without fees. More information about Bitcoin can be found at bitcoin.org.
 
About BitInstant
 The BitInstant Project was founded by two Bitcoin traders Gareth Nelson and Charlie
 Shrem, who saw the need for a quick, easy, and secure way of transferring funds to their
 exchange accounts. Based on efficiency, transparency, and security The BitInstant
 Project aims to grow into the premier Bitcoin transfer service. BitInstant can be contacted
 at info@bitinstant.com
 
About TradeHill
 Tradehill is one of the top three largest Bitcoin exchange market by volume and offers its
 customers the opportunity to buy and sell Bitcoins in multiple currencies. TradeHill’s team comprised of top-notch Silicon Valley-hardened technologists and East-Coast financial experts, pursues one simple vision: to build the most secure bank ever built, and to make Bitcoins as easy to use and as commonplace as credit cards. TradeHill is based in San Francisco, USA and Vina Del Mar, Chile, and can be reached on the web at http://www.tradehill.com/. For inquiries please contact info@tradehill.com

See also the same post at our blog here: http://tradehillblog.com/

Thanks again everybody and happy Bitrading!

Regards,
Adam - Tradehill

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

If anyone has any questions or comments, let us know!

Charlie- Bitinstant

[Gareth Nelson]

If anyone has any questions or comments, let us know!

Charlie- Bitinstant

We actually mean that too

Question, comments, praise, criticism, ideas, suggestions - any and all feedback is welcome and we're always willing to help you out with any problems using the service. Check out our transaction guarantees too - we offer a full refund on fees if we fail to meet our stated deadlines, so why not try us out?

[CubedRoot]

Theres an 11.25% charge to send $20 when using Dwolla.  Just wanted to throw this out there.
It would be cheaper to use Paxum, and just give Paxum your entire personal Identity.

[Bitcoin Swami]

Wow back to Dwolla?

[CubedRoot]

Not exactly Swami...
You have to use Bitinstant as like a man-in-the-middle. You send BitInstant your Dwolla transfer, then you have to have Bitinstant send that money to Tradehill.  You essentially add one more link in the chain that can break.

[Jazkal]

Wow back to Dwolla?

I know, didn't they just stop using dwolla to fund accounts?

[CubedRoot]

read my reply above... the simply added a third party in to handle the dwolla transactions. So, you now have to pay this third party a commision for them to accept your Dwolla, and then they send that money to Tradehill.

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

Wow back to Dwolla?

I know, didn't they just stop using dwolla to fund accounts?

We built a multi-tiered Dwolla verification system that initiates while you place a transaction, rooting out fraud.

Previously when using Dwolla, transfers take between 1 hour and 2 days. Now, its instant with BitInstant!

Once the instant verification approves, we move the USD over to your TradeHill account  

[2112]

a solid infrastructure that handles risk management and fraud protection through the use of dynamic models derived from artificial intelligence techniques.

I'd like to have a reference about those "dynamic models derived from AI". Is this Pixelon 2.0 or something real?

Thanks in advance.

[CubedRoot]

Wow back to Dwolla?

I know, didn't they just stop using dwolla to fund accounts?

We built a multi-tiered Dwolla verification system that initiates while you place a transaction, rooting out fraud.

Previously when using Dwolla, transfers take between 1 hour and 2 days. Now, its instant with BitInstant!

Once the instant verification approves, we move the USD over to your TradeHill account  

I also would like to mention, the fees are INSANELY high for low value transactions!!!
https://www.bitinstant.com/fees

Their fees can be as high as 20.25% for low USD amount transactions.

[Gareth Nelson]

Theres an 11.25% charge to send $20 when using Dwolla.  Just wanted to throw this out there.
It would be cheaper to use Paxum, and just give Paxum your entire personal Identity.

Hi, I can see how the 11.25% fee on Dwolla seems excessive, but one must consider the small volume - small volume transactions cost more to handle at these speeds (and we mean speed - under a minute is the goal for ANY payment - including the time taken to handle fraud checks which protect our ability to continue to provide the service).

The dynamic pricing system we use is intended to lower the rates as volume increases, but as I can see the high fees have been unpopular we are reviewing the fees right now and will evaluate whether the increased overall volume makes up for the lower commission.

When you use our service and pay the fee, this is what you are paying for:
 Upstream fees (Dwolla charge $0.25/transfer for example)
 Bandwidth, disk space and CPU time - we keep a full audit trail of all transactions which allow us to correct rare mistakes or errors very fast and we monitor transactions in realtime to look for problems, which leads onto.....
 Speed and customer support - we offer you guaranteed times on deposits after which we refund your fees in full
 Risk factors - our pricing system increases our rates if the current market conditions make it more difficult for us to move funds around internally (internally, the transactions can take a LOT longer than just 1 minute, we swallow that waiting period on your behalf)
 Automated payments API - for programmatic traders this is going to be huge (and we have a lot planned in this area) - sending funds in seconds from point to point B as your algorithm dictates becomes easy with our API

Currently, we are reviewing the rates internally and will release an update within the hour. Then we will review rates and transaction volume on a weekly basis. I hope this helps.

[CubedRoot]

Their FAQ page is also enough to make me question their seriousness as a viable business. It reads like something a high-schooler would put on their Facebook page:
https://www.bitinstant.com/faq

Bombs going off in the datacenter? Magic? Laundering huge piles of money? Come on guys, lets get serious here.

There are so many discrepencies with it, I highly question them:

From their FAQ:

How much is this "small" commission and what other charges are there?

It varies depending on the exchange, the payment method and risk factors but at the time of writing the highest is 10% and we expect to be able to reduce commissions as volume increases. Our system will on average try to add a maximum of 1% over our costs in providing the service but it must be understood that our costs do include the risk factors inherent in providing our service.

As for other charges - there aren't any. We don't do fixed fees at present and don't intend to, and there are no hidden charges - the fee you see includes any charged by payment providers and should be the total amount you can expect to pay. Some banks or card providers may impose their own fees in addition to those imposed by our payment providers and we regret we have no control over this. This means that when you make a transaction using our service and are provided with a figure for how much will be paid into your exchange account it will simply reflect the amount you wish to transfer minus our commission and will not include any bank charges. We apologise for not controlling the international banking system.

But we can see on their pricing page, that they do indeed charge more than the 10% they state in their FAQ:
https://www.bitinstant.com/fees
It clearly goes as high as 20.25%

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

Their FAQ page is also enough to make me question their seriousness as a viable business. It reads like something a high-schooler would put on their Facebook page:
https://www.bitinstant.com/faq

There are so many discrepencies with it, I highly question them:

From their FAQ:

How much is this "small" commission and what other charges are there?

It varies depending on the exchange, the payment method and risk factors but at the time of writing the highest is 10% and we expect to be able to reduce commissions as volume increases. Our system will on average try to add a maximum of 1% over our costs in providing the service but it must be understood that our costs do include the risk factors inherent in providing our service.

As for other charges - there aren't any. We don't do fixed fees at present and don't intend to, and there are no hidden charges - the fee you see includes any charged by payment providers and should be the total amount you can expect to pay. Some banks or card providers may impose their own fees in addition to those imposed by our payment providers and we regret we have no control over this. This means that when you make a transaction using our service and are provided with a figure for how much will be paid into your exchange account it will simply reflect the amount you wish to transfer minus our commission and will not include any bank charges. We apologise for not controlling the international banking system.

But we can see on their pricing page, that they do indeed charge more than the 10% they state in their FAQ:
https://www.bitinstant.com/fees
It clearly goes as high as 20.25%

CubedRoot, thanks for your feedback.

Yes, at the time of writing our fees were alot lower. We had a flat fee system which benefited lower volume transactions but not higher volume transactions.

At the moment, we are reviewing the fee structure and will give you an update within the hour.

[Gareth Nelson]

Not exactly Swami...
You have to use Bitinstant as like a man-in-the-middle. You send BitInstant your Dwolla transfer, then you have to have Bitinstant send that money to Tradehill.  You essentially add one more link in the chain that can break.

Or one more step between TradeHill and Dwolla.

Dwolla caused problems in the past for TradeHill due to high fraud rates. By specialising in handling the deposits side of things, our partners at TradeHill can focus on the trading systems and not have to worry about dealing with fraud or the painful Dwolla API.
MTGox still take 15 minutes or longer to take Dwolla payments - we do it in 1 minute (well, 57 seconds to be precise).
We monitor our servers to verify performance metrics are reasonable so that we can stay to our guaranteed times and have an insane amount of automated systems to handle problems before a human need intervene.

[S3052]

Overall, this is a step in the right direction to address the need to have fast access to bitcoins.

To Tradehill and other exchanges: Apart from offering your "exchange  product", what are you doing to market bitcoins to the people out there? Are you "just" waiting for others to do PR, advertising, hoping to profit from that?

What are your bitcoin advertising / marketing plans?

[Gareth Nelson]

Their FAQ page is also enough to make me question their seriousness as a viable business. It reads like something a high-schooler would put on their Facebook page:
https://www.bitinstant.com/faq

Bombs going off in the datacenter? Magic? Laundering huge piles of money? Come on guys, lets get serious here.

There are so many discrepencies with it, I highly question them:

In the interests of transparency, i'll tell you what inspired the more comedic style of that page - a hosting provider called nearlyfreespeech.net. While their FAQ page has a lot of casual language, it provides the information in a very easy to understand way and without being too intimidating.
Personally, I believe that adding a human touch to things is better than trying to portray ourselves in a cold and detached manner - but I apologize if the more causal tone disturbs you.

From their FAQ:

How much is this "small" commission and what other charges are there?

It varies depending on the exchange, the payment method and risk factors but at the time of writing the highest is 10% and we expect to be able to reduce commissions as volume increases. Our system will on average try to add a maximum of 1% over our costs in providing the service but it must be understood that our costs do include the risk factors inherent in providing our service.

As for other charges - there aren't any. We don't do fixed fees at present and don't intend to, and there are no hidden charges - the fee you see includes any charged by payment providers and should be the total amount you can expect to pay. Some banks or card providers may impose their own fees in addition to those imposed by our payment providers and we regret we have no control over this. This means that when you make a transaction using our service and are provided with a figure for how much will be paid into your exchange account it will simply reflect the amount you wish to transfer minus our commission and will not include any bank charges. We apologise for not controlling the international banking system.

But we can see on their pricing page, that they do indeed charge more than the 10% they state in their FAQ:
https://www.bitinstant.com/fees
It clearly goes as high as 20.25%

"At the time of writing"
When that FAQ was written, the highest was indeed 10%, since then we've crunched the numbers and had to update the fees so that lower volume transactions are more expensive.

[CubedRoot]

Not exactly Swami...
You have to use Bitinstant as like a man-in-the-middle. You send BitInstant your Dwolla transfer, then you have to have Bitinstant send that money to Tradehill.  You essentially add one more link in the chain that can break.

Or one more step between TradeHill and Dwolla.

Dwolla caused problems in the past for TradeHill due to high fraud rates. By specialising in handling the deposits side of things, our partners at TradeHill can focus on the trading systems and not have to worry about dealing with fraud or the painful Dwolla API.
MTGox still take 15 minutes or longer to take Dwolla payments - we do it in 1 minute (well, 57 seconds to be precise).
We monitor our servers to verify performance metrics are reasonable so that we can stay to our guaranteed times and have an insane amount of automated systems to handle problems before a human need intervene.

For me, funding my Mt.Gox account with Dwolla costs me a whopping $.25 no matter what the transaction amount.  Those transaction happen fast enough for me to be happy, and not miss any market swings since I keep a fair amount in MT. Gox anyways.

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

Not exactly Swami...
You have to use Bitinstant as like a man-in-the-middle. You send BitInstant your Dwolla transfer, then you have to have Bitinstant send that money to Tradehill.  You essentially add one more link in the chain that can break.

Or one more step between TradeHill and Dwolla.

Dwolla caused problems in the past for TradeHill due to high fraud rates. By specialising in handling the deposits side of things, our partners at TradeHill can focus on the trading systems and not have to worry about dealing with fraud or the painful Dwolla API.
MTGox still take 15 minutes or longer to take Dwolla payments - we do it in 1 minute (well, 57 seconds to be precise).
We monitor our servers to verify performance metrics are reasonable so that we can stay to our guaranteed times and have an insane amount of automated systems to handle problems before a human need intervene.

For me, funding my Mt.Gox account with Dwolla costs me a whopping $.25 no matter what the transaction amount.  Those transaction happen fast enough for me to be happy, and not miss any market swings since I keep a fair amount in MT. Gox anyways.

Fantastic!

Many customers have expressed interested in paying a little higher (about $0.75 total) to have their transactions done instantly.
If theres ever a need for you to get funds in fast, please feel free to use our service!

Charlie

[Gareth Nelson]

Not exactly Swami...
You have to use Bitinstant as like a man-in-the-middle. You send BitInstant your Dwolla transfer, then you have to have Bitinstant send that money to Tradehill.  You essentially add one more link in the chain that can break.

Or one more step between TradeHill and Dwolla.

Dwolla caused problems in the past for TradeHill due to high fraud rates. By specialising in handling the deposits side of things, our partners at TradeHill can focus on the trading systems and not have to worry about dealing with fraud or the painful Dwolla API.
MTGox still take 15 minutes or longer to take Dwolla payments - we do it in 1 minute (well, 57 seconds to be precise).
We monitor our servers to verify performance metrics are reasonable so that we can stay to our guaranteed times and have an insane amount of automated systems to handle problems before a human need intervene.

For me, funding my Mt.Gox account with Dwolla costs me a whopping $.25 no matter what the transaction amount.  Those transaction happen fast enough for me to be happy, and not miss any market swings since I keep a fair amount in MT. Gox anyways.

If you are happy enough without our service, then by all means continue using your current method of payment. However, if you at any point would like to try out our service with a reduced fee for volume trading then let us know. In particular, one of our specialties is in automation and inter-exchange transfers and we have some exciting features planned in this area.

We have now released a new fee structure and other misc fixes, I encourage you to check the site as we will be making constant improvements to it.