From SMS to Bitcoin

[boonies4u]

A (long) night of research has allowed me to produce a way to get Bitcoins from SMS Payments (from any Country PerfectMoney accepts, I will edit thread to clarify later).

First off (hopefully you already know this), you need a contract phone that is connected to a Credit Card, or a prepaid phone with a balance.

Using said phone you can fund an account on https://perfectmoney.com with an SMS Payment.

• See "Instant SMS deposit" under "How to Deposit"

PerfectMoney can then be used to fund an https://www.okpay.com/ account.

• https://www.okpay.com/en/company/news/okpay-perfectmoney-support.html

From there you can fund your USD balance on https://tradehill.com where you can trade the USD for bitcoins.

• https://www.tradehill.com/DepositOverview/USD/

I would not be surprised if there are other ways to go about this, especially if you live in a country that is covered by websites that allow direct bitcoin purchase by SMS payments. SMS payments certainly aren't the most efficient way of buying bitcoins, but it's a good use for all of those unused minutes on your prepaid phone.

[boonies4u]

According to their website TOS they can pull a MtGox on you and freeze your funds whether new or existing user and demand additional identification at any time before processing requests.

It's good to know there are additional alternatives for europeans (seems like euroupe has the edge on e-currency awareness) but for this particular situation I'd say DialCoin.com might suit better, especially since it's vurtually anonymous and takes 30 seconds to get bitcoins.

Which website are you talking about? Tradehill?

Yeah, DialCoin.com looks like a really nice service. I can't wait until it comes here to the US. I mean that quite literally, I pulled an all-nighter on this incase i need to liquidate my minutes.

[boonies4u]

US integration comes this week. We hit a crossroads (the good kind) that wasted a bit of time but in the end allows us so much more freedom to provide more options in the future. We're pretty stoked.

Ah, I thought your name looked familiar. Glad to hear US coverage is coming soon, maybe I won't have to go through 3 exchanges just to get some bitcoins by SMS!

If anyone outside the Unites States AND DialCoin's coverage was wondering if I'm still going to investigate my method further, don't worry, I will. I'm hoping that it is still relatively fast and practical. I'll change OP to reflect what i find out.