Topic: A possible answer to the "How do I get bitcoins" question. (Read 722 times)

I hope you don't mind but I've put your comments in another person-form and added them as "additional notes" to the page paypal -> bitcoin. I can do server side coding all day long but I am at a bit of a loss when it comes to do javascript, so I'll be adding the "ignore this route" functions later.

Hi,

The intention is to "get it working" well enough first and then focus on getting all the details right. What I'm trying to do is a step -> step method of getting from A to B which imposes the least %age of fees ( there is a notional BTC amount used currently for the calcs but I will be changing that so you can put in an estimate which is needed for non percentage based fees. The results will be in at least 2 sections - the first section is just A->B via website X rough fee and the lower section will be notes etc etc giving a bit more detail.

It's all data / graph driven so I'll be trying to get an modification page up to it soon. Thanks for the feedback and testing, I'll add that to the database shortly.

There will probably be a lot of people checking the from-paypal-to-my-wallet way so I just tried that.

What you offer there is VirWox, which isn't bad or wrong, but a little more complicated and also (and even more important) a little more expensive than what the overview shows me.

First thing is, that on VirWox you can only buy or sell Integer amounts of BTC, so when your paypal-customers buy SLL to trade them for BTC they'll end up with some SLL left that they can not use, which adds up to the estimated fees.
That's obviously worth mentioning and also makes it hard to calculate the overall costs involved.

On the last step (VirWox-wallet to home-wallet) it tells me that a ".. btc to btc account generally incurs a fee of 0.0005 BTC..", which doesn't really matter here, because it is no general btc to btc account transfer.
Withdrawal of BTC (any amount) from VirWox comes with a 0.02BTC fee (and might take anything from 2-72hrs).

Not complaining, I like the idea of a quick overview of how and where and what do I get,
you just should know and maybe add some info about it so your users know too.

I've updated some of the graph with feedback so far. All suggestions gratefully received.

I've written a web app which, although it looks pretty basic, uses some graph theory and shortest path algorithms to try and answer the question of "how do I get bitcoins" and for the "best" price (ie least lost due to charges, fees etc etc). It uses a modified version of the djikstra's algorithm to find the "shortest path" between what you have and what you want (and shortest path == lowest cost).

The version I've put up at the moment answers this very basically but what I intend to do is hook in "live prices" from any various exchange merchants (push or pull api) so that you can get a good idea of how many bitcoins you'll end up with - and how long it will take.

I've only got a few merchants up so far for this version but if you can send me

1) What your transferring from (ie cash, what currency the cash is,  bank account based where? etc etc)
2) The website you are promoting
3) A few lines about how the transfer will take place
4) The time it takes

Then I'll add you to the database. It would be even better if you could supply an API which would provide the current best bid/offer you have. I won't be polling more often than once an hour.

Any designers out there who want to give a hand, that'd be great too.

Here's the demo url before I get a domain name sorted.

http://bcfxer.appspot.com/

The plan is to make cash via donations (!) and referral fees - but this won't affect the algorithm. Also, I have coded a "exclude this from the path" option (if you don't like the particular recommendation) but that hasn't made it into the GUI just yet. Oh and I tried to make the dropdowns the "typeahead autocomplete" type but my javascript isn't quite up to scratch yet.