pay out with bitcoin #310
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I am from Germany and have just discovered gittip today. I would love to hear what is necessary only for this payouts part and see if and how I could contribute to help it happen. |
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+1 on bitcoin from Germany ;) |
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+0 if and only if it can be insured that gittip will not be used as a $ -> BTC laundering service, -1 if that guarantee cannot be made. A better solution is to allow people to accept payouts in dollars or the local currency of their choice, and they can use that money to purchase bitcoin on their own if they are so inclined. |
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For Bitcoin supporters, Forbes wrote an article requesting Bitcoin as a payout method by Balanced. We'd love your feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4832780 |
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@matin Wish I could, HN is dropping my connections. :-/ |
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The people I most need to pay right now generally don't want to take bitcoin (@mitsuhiko, @jezdez, etc.). Can we provide a user experience for them that doesn't involve them knowing about bitcoin? |
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@mitsuhiko why don't you want bitcoin? |
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Folks, Bitcoin is both a currency and a payment network. While at the moment, people sending or receiving Bitcoin will necessarily need to be willing to accept or pay with Bitcoin (the currency), this is not a situation that will persist indefinitely. Software is under development that would, for example, let someone have a wallet that appears in all respects to have a USD (or any other currency) balance and instantly convert that balance to Bitcoin, send it over the Bitcoin network, and then automatically convert to any preferred currency on the recipient's end. It may take a couple years for what I just described to fully mature, but you can begin building the software support for managing Bitcoin payouts to many recipients in the context of a marketplace right now...today. Just grab the code and start working with it. |
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https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin ...this is commonly referred to as the "Satoshi client"...it's the original client and is both a node on the bitcoin network and a wallet... bitcoin.org has some links to a wiki describing various technical aspects of the protocol and implementation...and you can interface with the satoshi client via JSON RPC (so, for example, you can send a payment with a JSON RPC call...you could write the bulk of your software for managing payouts in your favorite language, using JSON RPC to interact with the bitcoin network) |
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@colindean and I confabed on this tonight. The nut is converting USD to bitcoin in a completely automated way. @bitpay @gasteve @BrianArmstrong Anything like this in the works? |
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Yes, there is something like that in the works (multiple companies are working on it in slightly different ways). If you focus on just processing bitcoin payments, you'll be in good shape as you will be able to easily plug into any of a number of solutions to this exchange problem. |
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Talk to @lvh tomorrow re: this. |
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+1 from @ELLIOTTCABLE via Twitter. |
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+1 from me. |
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Is this finally moving? Can I withdraw it from my own todo list? :P |
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@tito has requested a payout via a non-PayPal method, preferably bitcoin. I've signed up for an account at Coinbase and am waiting for deposit verification of my bank account (two days?). After that I plan to do a test payout to myself to understand the flow, and if it works I hope to pay out to @tito using Coinbase. If that all works well then we'll be able to say we offer bitcoin as a manual payout method in addition to PayPal. |
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Yikes! |
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Here's the flow for this: 1. Buy bitcoin. Twiddle the amount in BTC so that the total is the total amount to pay out to the user. As with other payout methods (Balanced, PayPal), the user is responsible for fees. 2. Cross fingers and wait. According to the "How much bitcoin will I receive?" dialog above, which is linked from "read more" on the buy bitcoin page, the actual exchange rate is determined several days out (I'm seeing five days here, Saturday to Thursday). That makes this highly speculative. According to the chart they present, a bitcoin buy of $100 on April 30 that didn't go through until May 4 would have resulted in 1.090 bitcoin instead of 0.719 bitcoin. You're buying a futures (forward?), in other words. |
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And when trying to buy 0.10 BTC: |
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Anyway, once the bitcoin lands in my Coinbase account, I would then ... 3. Send bitcoin. This dialog requires that you have the bitcoin in your account before you can send it. We'd also have to twiddle the amount so that the recipient pays the fee. |
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Unfortunately, Coinbase runs out of its daily stock pretty regularly. Colin Dean On Saturday, May 4, 2013 at 7:47 AM, Chad Whitacre wrote:
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Step 1 complete! Now we cross our fingers and wait. :-) Fiddling with the amount to hit the right total USD amount (fees included) was a pain. The exchange rate kept updating out from under me, and Coinbase went down for 10 minutes as well. Not exactly streamlined. |
This makes it sound like I'm not buying a forward, and I'll get the amount specified on Thursday. We shall see ... |
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Some commentary on what you've got so far:
Thought: only allow as much in Bitcoin payouts, as you have had in Bitcoin donations, across the site. That way, you're never doing the clusterfuck that is Bitcoin-to-$US conversion, except in extreme circumstances where you've received substantially more Bitcoin donations than payouts, and are (yourself) in the red in terms of $US. This would be self-balancing, as people would either wait to ask for payouts until the site has enough Bitcoin, if they were dead-set on a Bitcoin payout, or they would begin to specially ask for Bitcoin payouts from their donators on their profile. I'd love to talk to you more about this, share my knowledge. Also, I'm more than happy to donate some Bitcoin to you to “play with the system,” and make more intelligent decisions regarding integration on Gittip. I'm often on IRC (Freenode), as well as iMessage, if iOS devices are your thing … hit me up on Twitter. (= |
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Side note, you absolutely will not receive the amount (in BTC) that you just bought, you'll receive however much BTC it can buy with the amount of money it just debited from your account. i.e. if you just paid $35 for Bitcoin on Coinbase, then next Thursday, when they make their buy for that day, they will give you whatever $35 is worth at the time of the buy. These are not futures. They are simply delayed buys. There is no benefit to you. You simply lose opportunity capital on the money you're throwing away for four days; whereas you could have bough it at that exact price, on Thursday, yourself, and had use of that $35 in the intervening time. Equally, you cannot base the quantity of your buy on the actual value of what you're buying; it's pure, and profitless, speculation. )'= |
Actually, bank payouts on Gittip are same-day if you're with Wells Fargo, and next-day if you're not. It's not instant, but it's not "days."
The only way we'd escrow BTC is if we implement escrows in multiple currencies, which we're talking about on the bitcoin payin issue. That might be essentially the same as your suggestion to "only allow as much in Bitcoin payouts, as you have had in Bitcoin donations."
We already have a $10 minimum for bank payouts, so having a minimum payout for BTC isn't a problem.
Okay, that was my expectation based on what I read before initiating the transaction. The confirmation message is what caused me to scratch my head and wonder.
I see, these aren't futures because I gave them the money yesterday instead of on Thursday. Thanks. And you're right, that sucks. For the next bitcoin payout experiment, it seems like getting an account on Mt. Gox would be the thing to try. |
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The deposit to Coinbase has cleared. I got the amount they said I'd get when I made the purchase on Saturday. This is unexpected. I expected the exchange rate to be determined on Thursday, but I got it at the exchange at the rate it was at on Saturday when I posted the order. That's good, actually, though the UX is confusing. |
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I thought that's how Coinbase operated in the first place. |
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I guess I got confused? Me getting confused starts above with this comment. |
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Hm. I just checked my records; I definitely didn't get paid-out the quantity I was quoted at the time they debited my bank account. (It's rather clear in my case, because there was a difference of several hundred bucks in the exchange rate at those times.) Needs further investigation? Or perhaps they've changed policies. |
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Maybe it was a temporary thing during the Couple of days following the April crash? |
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@ELLIOTTCABLE How long ago was that? |
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We've successfully completed our first bitcoin payout! :D |
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From the FAQ: "Sort of. We currently support manual payouts using Coinbase." Does this mean that the only people that can get bitcoins from a payout are the ones with a Coinbase account? If yes, then this limits it to people with a US bank account AFAIK. |
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@knocte Coinbase is beta-testing the ability to link VISA credit cards: Not sure if this means you 100% still need a primary US bank account or what... |
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Actually, why is this issue closed? Is it closed because no one stepped up to implement it or because we do not want to deal with another currency or is it considered subsumed by #1451 or? I am not asking to open it, just want to clarify where we stand. |
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But if you need a Coinbase account to be able to do a bitcoin payout, it's not really a bitcoin payout but a Coinbase payout. Can someone confirm if Coinbase is just the service doing the USD->BTC conversion and the recipient can just be a Bitcoin address instead of a Coinbase account? |
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Thanks guys. Sorry if I should've known -- I skimmed :) |
"Using Coinbase" is an implementation detail that could lead people to think they need a Coinbase account for getting the payout, which is not true because a bitcoin address is the only requirement (Coinbase is just the USD->BTC conversion service), as pointed out in gratipay#310.
Given this statement, I've proposed this PR to fix this nitpick: #1691 |
"Using Coinbase" is an implementation detail that could lead people to think they need a Coinbase account for getting the payout, which is not true because a bitcoin address is the only requirement (Coinbase is just the USD->BTC conversion service), as pointed out in gratipay#310. So we reword the sentence to avoid this confusing but still mention Coinbase as an informative detail about what rates and fees apply.
We have a (somewhat contentious) ticket for payins with bitcoin, #14. This ticket is about pay_outs_ with bitcoin, and is primarily motivated by #126, payouts outside the US.
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