CARDCOINS.CO: Buy Bitcoin with Cash in Minutes - 60,000 Locations, No Accounts

[CardCoins]

Hey Bitcointalk!

We'd like to share our service offering with your community. We've been live for almost two years now, and have built a website that we think a lot of you will find useful. You'll be seeing a lot more of us around here, we'd love to get to know you all and answer any questions you may have. Here's our homepage:

https://cardcoins.co

As a company, our main goal is to help cash-preferred customers buy Bitcoin with the least amount of friction possible. We know how annoying it can be to use Bitcoin ATMs that have long lines, full cash boxes, unclear store hours and dirty touch screens. What we've done is build our offering around the distribution of "open loop" gift cards that are branded with the Visa, Mastercard and American Express logos.

We estimate that these gift cards can be purchased with cash at over 100,000 stores in the U.S. We have a handy map you can use to find 60,000 of them: https://maps.cardcoins.co. You can find them in pharmacies, supermarkets, gas stations, big-box retailers and other locations you likely frequent on a daily basis!

If you'd like to learn a little bit about how order process works, you can check out this blog post: https://blog.cardcoins.co/how-to-buy-bitcoin-with-cardcoins

In summary, all you need is the gift card, its packaging, the receipt, a pen and a phone number to get started. No clunky sign ups and annoying email confirmation processes.

Here are some useful links to get started:
Our FAQ: https://www.cardcoins.co/?faq
Daily transaction limits: https://www.cardcoins.co/?limitscompliance

Our blog has some great content as well, for example this post details our company philosophy and why we think Bitcoin and gift cards work very well together:
https://blog.cardcoins.co/gift-cards-and-bitcoin

We've also been featured in some popular publications you may be familiar with. We're big supporters of open source software development and directly participate in the funding of a Bitcoin Core developer, hebasto.

https://www.coindesk.com/startup-cardcoins-bitcoin-core-developer
https://www.yahoo.com/news/startups-cardcoins-payvant-issue-one-214908626.html

Hebasto has done some great work in the past 6 months, you can follow his commit history here:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=hebasto

That's all the info we have to share for now, looking forward to hearing from the Bitcointalk community!

[The Cryptovator]

How you calculate BTC price? It seems the current BTC price on your website is $14028.00 where Bitcoin trading now at $11,684.30 other exchanges. Still your website under development? Or from where you had use API to get Bitcoin price. It would confuse buyers/sellers. If its bug then hopes it will be fixed.

[TryNinja]

How you calculate BTC price? It seems the current BTC price on your website is $14028.00 where Bitcoin trading now at $11,684.30 other exchanges.

Their fees are included in the price:

CardCoins charges a fee which is added on to the market price. The CardCoins price is visible on our website at all times.

$11.590 vs $13.904 or around 20% is a big difference in price. Still a bit better than most Bitcoin ATMs though.

[CardCoins]

How you calculate BTC price? It seems the current BTC price on your website is $14028.00 where Bitcoin trading now at $11,684.30 other exchanges.

Their fees are included in the price:

CardCoins charges a fee which is added on to the market price. The CardCoins price is visible on our website at all times.

$11.590 vs $13.904 or around 20% is a big difference in price. Still a bit better than most Bitcoin ATMs though.

Exactly right! Our fees are baked into the price. We cover the Bitcoin network fee as well, which can get quite high at times. Ultimately our fees are dynamic, the markup you see now is the very high end. Our goal is to be around or even below the most competitive cash offerings in the space (8-12%).

Outside of major metropolitan areas, Bitcoin ATM fees can be quite high (we've seen upwards of 30% and more)!

[CardCoins]

There is an Easter Egg somewhere in the OP, let's see who finds it first

[TryNinja]

Exactly right! Our fees are baked into the price. We cover the Bitcoin network fee as well, which can get quite high at times. Ultimately our fees are dynamic, the markup you see now is the very high end. Our goal is to be around or even below the most competitive cash offerings in the space (8-12%).

As a suggestion, I think it would be much better if you disclosed how much of the price comes from the fees and your service cost. Fees are really high right now, so I understand that. But it would be great if the user could also see all of this in a detailed way.

[CardCoins]

Exactly right! Our fees are baked into the price. We cover the Bitcoin network fee as well, which can get quite high at times. Ultimately our fees are dynamic, the markup you see now is the very high end. Our goal is to be around or even below the most competitive cash offerings in the space (8-12%).

As a suggestion, I think it would be much better if you disclosed how much of the price comes from the fees and your service cost. Fees are really high right now, so I understand that. But it would be great if the user could also see all of this in a detailed way.

That's an interesting suggestion! Miner fees are entirely variable, sometimes they are low, sometimes they are high. There is no way to know how much the network fee will cost until we send the transaction. But that is not something the user needs to worry about, as their rate is locked-in once the user has completed the Card Authorization step of the order process. They will get the same amount of Bitcoin regardless of the miner fee. We take on any risk associated with fee spikes, not the user.

Ultimately the time at which we broadcast the transaction is dependent on when the user uploads their images, which may not be right away. Once the images are complete we broadcast the transaction in a few minutes. That said, when your order is complete you will be able to view the transaction in the network and observe what miner fee we did pay.

 

[SFR10]

What information is required to complete an order?

We need a valid US phone number, cryptocurrency address and images of the card, packaging and the receipts you received when the card was purchased and activated. You will be required to write handwritten notes on the front and back of the purchase receipt. The first time your volume exceeds $1000 in the calendar week you will be required to provide an image of your government issued ID next to your gift card.

Why is there no login?

CardCoins uses an accountless order model. You will be given a custom URL so you can see the status of your order.

Not sure if it's me or the following highlighted parts in red contradicts each other...

• Apart from customer's phone numbers ^{[some might use multiple numbers as a workaround]}, is there any other way to track their activity when it comes to multiple small orders that might exceed "daily/weekly limits"?

[CardCoins]

What information is required to complete an order?

We need a valid US phone number, cryptocurrency address and images of the card, packaging and the receipts you received when the card was purchased and activated. You will be required to write handwritten notes on the front and back of the purchase receipt. The first time your volume exceeds $1000 in the calendar week you will be required to provide an image of your government issued ID next to your gift card.

Why is there no login?

CardCoins uses an accountless order model. You will be given a custom URL so you can see the status of your order.

Not sure if it's me or the following highlighted parts in red contradicts each other...

• Apart from customer's phone numbers ^{[some might use multiple numbers as a workaround]}, is there any other way to track their activity when it comes to multiple small orders that might exceed "daily/weekly limits"?

Good question! When we say we don't have accounts, we mean just that--our system does not require registration of an email address or setting of a password to get started. In fact those concepts do not exist in our system at all! You just click start an order, receive a 4 digit code and your on your way. There is nowhere to sign in, all the user needs is their Order ID to find their submission: https://cardcoins.co/order/ORDERID

We are however a registered MSB with FinCEN so we do need to track your volume limits, which we do internally in our database with the user's phone number. This allows us to ask for additional information when we need it, but not every time. While you may attempt to bypass our limits, we do monitor for suspicious activity and will take action according to our compliance program and procedures if discovered.

[CardCoins]

I see no one has discovered the easter egg. Hint: it's in the How To blog post!

Winner takes all.

[welovedcrypto]

CardCoins is available only in USA? I read 60,000 locations and thought you were covering most of countries.
Do you have any plan to expand your service out of US? Countries like India or Singapore? Price of each Bitcoin is 14267 USD is not high?

[sujonali1819]

Price of each Bitcoin is 14267 USD is not high?

Just scroll up. You can see this already described that all the fees are included in this price. For that we are seeing the price is too high. Yes, I also think the fee is really high though.
Btw waiting to see start supporting more countries in the future.

[CardCoins]

We're always looking to add more locations. We are working on getting full coverage in the U.S. first and then will consider adding additional countries.

As mentioned our price is dynamic, expect it to come down