Bitcoinexpress - Bitcoin to PayPal exchange site

[allinvain]

Hi everyone. I'd like to share will you all a new site me and my friend have setup. It's called bitcoinexpress and basically it allows you to sell or buy bitcoins with PayPal. Pretty simple eh? Well it is. All you gotta do is register and then you're ready to buy/sell.

We've got thousands of bitcoins to sell.

Our rates are just a tad bit under and over the going market rate listed on the Mt. Gox site.

Minimum bitcoin sell/purchase amount is 10 bitcoins.

Please only VERIFIED PayPal accounts!

To start buying/selling bitcoins with the convenience of PayPal checkout our site here:

http://www.bitcoinexpress.com

If anyone has any questions please feel free to post them here.

We're looking forward to serving the bitcoin community.

Cheers!

[Cryptoman]

What is your plan to deal with chargebacks?  I wish you the best of luck.

[allinvain]

What is your plan to deal with chargebacks?  I wish you the best of luck.

To be honest I'm not sure I can do much about that. I am thinking of limiting the number of bitcoins a user can buy per day or something of that sort. But there is no surefire way of preventing chargebacks. If this happens to much I will just shutdown the service. I really pray that it won't have to come to that though.

[caveden]

You'd better do whatever you can to prevent fraudsters. They will try to get your coins. Trading irreversible digital currencies for reversible ones is dangerous.

[allinvain]

True, there are plenty of fraudsters out there.

OK, I shall have to get on it then and see what I can do to protect the site from the scammers.

If anyone has any good suggestions I welcome them all!

[deadlizard]

Trading irreversible digital currencies for reversible ones is dangerous.

No more dangerous than trading physical goods for reversible digital currencies.
or anything else for that matter.
I'm not looking them up but Paypal "should" have some sort of seller protections in place.

[allinvain]

Trading irreversible digital currencies for reversible ones is dangerous.

No more dangerous than trading physical goods for reversible digital currencies.
or anything else for that matter.
I'm not looking them up but Paypal "should" have some sort of seller protections in place.

Even so your bitcoins are gone the moment they get sent to a different account. It's not like paypal is going to refund my bitcoins. PayPal is ok if you're a BUYER but for a seller (ask the people on ebay) it just plain SUCKS!

You know what would be really useful, a bitcoin escrow system? Is there any around? If not I may consider setting one up.

Cheers!

[epii]

Is it possible to pipe the transactions through https://clearcoin.appspot.com/ ?  Would that help?

[allinvain]

well I've shut the site down for now..I will bring it back up once I take out 98% of the bitcoins from the site's account. This way if I get scammed I won't lose much. This is a temporary solution until I figure out a way to better secure paypal transactions or maybe even switch the site over to use Pecunix or Liberty Reserve, c-gold etc ...basically a method of payment that can't be reversed.

[allinvain]

Is it possible to pipe the transactions through https://clearcoin.appspot.com/ ?  Would that help?

Nice! Thanks for sharing!

Using this service would mean that the site would no longer be 100% automated though. I'd have to manually process each transaction AND have the customer wait a week or so until he/she gets the bitcoins. Indeed that would kill the whole convenience idea behind my site. Hmm, time to do some hard thinking.

[caveden]

Trading irreversible digital currencies for reversible ones is dangerous.

No more dangerous than trading physical goods for reversible digital currencies.
or anything else for that matter.
I'm not looking them up but Paypal "should" have some sort of seller protections in place.

It is actually more dangerous, because physical goods normally are not that anonymous, you have at least a mailing address. And as they are not that liquid either, they're less interesting for thieves.

Paypal doesn't have much protections for sellers. If you sell something for somebody who has stolen somebody else's paypal account, they will reverse the transaction and you'll end up without your money.

@allinvain, take a look at how coinpal is working. You may want to mimic some of his fraud protection techniques.

[allinvain]

Have a verified PayPal account
Enter your primary PayPal email address below
Receive an email verification at that address

Excellent. That's exactly what I have in mind to implement. I was also thinking of giving users a specific cryptocard keyfile that the user would have to match and type in my site in order for the transaction to get processed..

[Anonymous]

Hire mndrix as a consultant imo.

[zer0]

There's a reason nobody exchanges Liberty Reserve and other currencies for Paypal, and if they do they hold for 5-7 days no matter how much the amount and charge a huge fee typically 15-26%

They also use those sketchy PayPal w/ATM card accounts you get from VCC vendors in Russia so if their account is limited or seized by PayPal they hopefully already have the money. Read the e-book 'Auction Stealth' by askpin.com they tell you how to set up stealth PayPal if you don't want to buy accounts.

Once carding forums find out they can use all their stolen PayPal to irreversible currency you're screwed. Also, customers can still charge back even with a crypto verification. They just call PayPal and say their kid authorized the transaction while out of the room, it's an instant chargeback up to 180days later. Merchant then must prove service or goods were provided. Once you mention 'Bitcoins' they will assume you're trading in e-currency which is against TOS and keep your money anyways

PayPal is the Antichrist of digital currency freedom. Bitcoin should be killing it not enabling it. If you're American based use Dwolla or cash deposit though haven't heard back from Dwolla on their official ecurrency trading policy, and their no information terrible hipster site has no real info. Somebody at their merchant support did at first say it was fine then reneged for further info. I also don't trust their payment apps, too easy to hack useless Iphone apps and drain accounts, also waiting to hear back on fraud policy like if somebody's phone is stolen/lost then used for transactions... no info if they will do chargebacks. Can also use simple bluetooth roaming to break into unsecured phones and drain accounts through apps. If they can guarantee me I won't be charged back because somebody left their phone on the bus and bought Bitcoins through me I'll use them.

Moneypack to Bitcoins would even be better than PayPal

[Meni Rosenfeld]

When I started out with Bitcoin, one of my family members asked, "But that's just play money, right? You can't convert it to real money". I said, "Sure I can! Here, watch me - " and thus began a long process of frustration, tearing my hair out, digging in forums and sending furious emails, until I finally found CoinCard. Most people - and even more so, businesses and organizations - need to be able to trade bitcoins for currency they are familiar with before the whole thing is real to them. And it needs to be downward scalable, because they won't invest in Bitcoin (in the general sense of the word) before they accept it.

People always talk about how PayPal is inferior to some services I had never heard of and that nobody accepts. But PayPal is ubiquitous and international. I already have an account because it's useful to me, and I know that funds I receive to it I can withdraw to my local bank account. Converting BTC->PPUSD is an extremely important service, and CoinCard provides it very well. When I suggest accepting bitcoins to organizations, I will recommend that they use it, not go to the marketplace and look for people willing to relieve them of their bitcoins for a service they might happen to need (or go to MtGox and try to figure out how to withdraw USD from it).

PPUSD->BTC is less important IMO, and it is already served by CoinPal and the MtGox PayPal exchanger.

So what I'm trying to say is, it's great that you started this service, competition is good. And please consider relaxing the 10 BTC minimum. People need to be able to try it out with small amounts, even 1 BTC is limiting. I'm sure what you'll lose in transaction fees will pay for itself in attracting new business.

Good luck!

[grue]

site is offline

[allinvain]

Sorry guys, yeah the site is offline. I am working with my coder to come up with an improved version - possibly totally rewrite the site as it is currently based on a Drupal framework which is hard to work with and possibly insecure.

I thought of some ideas on how to secure the transaction. Perhaps giving people a physical crypto card of some sorts that they will use to verify the legitimacy of the transaction along with a regular password. I dunno, I just want to help the bitcoin system grow by making it easy for people to convert between normal fiat currency and the superior bitcoins.

Holy-Fire, I agree that having the ability to buy/sell bitcoins in micro increments is important, but like you mentioned the paypal fees would eat so much out of it that I'm not sure if it's really worth it for both parties. Plus I'm not sure if PayPal would like it if we pushed thousands of $1 or less transactions through their servers on a daily basis.

zer0, Hmm, perhaps the answer is doing only bitcoin to other e-currencies? The problem here is that the user would have to jump through extra hoops and first convert fiat to another e-currency and then finally to bitcoin. Another problem is that other e-currencies are all centralized and could potentially be taken down by governments or be hacked, etc.

Guys, maybe in the end the best thing to do is to just exchange cash to bitcoins and vice versa?

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Holy-Fire, I agree that having the ability to buy/sell bitcoins in micro increments is important, but like you mentioned the paypal fees would eat so much out of it that I'm not sure if it's really worth it for both parties. Plus I'm not sure if PayPal would like it if we pushed thousands of $1 or less transactions through their servers on a daily basis.

People will do <$1 transaction for testing, not on a regular basis, so it won't be thousands a day. Also, mndrix says he uses PayPal's mass payment API which doesn't require fees, if you don't you should look into it.

zer0, Hmm, perhaps the answer is doing only bitcoin to other e-currencies? The problem here is that the user would have to jump through extra hoops and first convert fiat to another e-currency and then finally to bitcoin. Another problem is that other e-currencies are all centralized and could potentially be taken down by governments or be hacked, etc.

Guys, maybe in the end the best thing to do is to just exchange cash to bitcoins and vice versa?

Terrible ideas.

[allinvain]

Holy-Fire, I agree that having the ability to buy/sell bitcoins in micro increments is important, but like you mentioned the paypal fees would eat so much out of it that I'm not sure if it's really worth it for both parties. Plus I'm not sure if PayPal would like it if we pushed thousands of $1 or less transactions through their servers on a daily basis.

People will do <$1 transaction for testing, not on a regular basis, so it won't be thousands a day. Also, mndrix says he uses PayPal's mass payment API which doesn't require fees, if you don't you should look into it.

zer0, Hmm, perhaps the answer is doing only bitcoin to other e-currencies? The problem here is that the user would have to jump through extra hoops and first convert fiat to another e-currency and then finally to bitcoin. Another problem is that other e-currencies are all centralized and could potentially be taken down by governments or be hacked, etc.

Guys, maybe in the end the best thing to do is to just exchange cash to bitcoins and vice versa?

Terrible ideas.

I agree. But are you saying bitcoin to cash and vice versa is also a bad idea?

As far as using PayPal's mass payment API I will look into it! Thanks for the info!

[Meni Rosenfeld]

I agree. But are you saying bitcoin to cash and vice versa is also a bad idea?

Doing only that is a bad idea. I'm not going to take a plane to wherever you're located to give or take some cash, or trust that cash in the mail will reach its destination. As an additional service this is of course wonderful, though not as important IMO.