Topic: [ANN] LocalBitcoins.com - a location-based bitcoin to cash marketplace - page 33. (Read 126104 times)

How about at least purging old ads once in a while? I still see the ads that I responded to with no reply more than 3 months ago. It almost feels like some kind of twilight zone. Several ads for my region, but my messages are always is just being ignored, and now I've pretty much given up. Most of them have text that seem too localized to be fake, so I'm not sure if it's just because nobody wants to trade with me.

I haven't been following the discussion here so maybe I missed some talk about this, but is there now no way to tell who left you what feedback? This isn't really a big issue, but I don't see why you would remove that.

Great site! Thanks!

Btw just to add, we have no problems people not using our transaction/escrow feature. I think our business strategy as "freemium" - free to use site, but there are additional features which cost money.

The trust issues are understandable. However I would like to say that we are not in any way anonymous, but a registered company in Finland (and I'm pretty public figure myself as the head of the company).

There is 1% fee from the advertiser side on succesfull trades. The contacter side is feeless.

As far as I remember the escrow works without fees, so where does it cost a scammer to fake transactions?

To be honest I don't totally trust lb to not loose my bitcoins so I traded more than 150BTC with people I met there without using the escrow. I now have a list of people that I can contact for future trades without even touching lb. I know I might damage lb or my own profile on lb by not acting as planned but loosing 100BTC is not an option. I only do in person trades and it always works like that:
We meet, we chat, we go to a cafe, we show cash, we send the bitcoins and after the first or second confirmation pass the cash. If the business gets more hectic some day and chatting 20minutes with some stranger about bitcoin becomes annoying, and lb is in business much longer, I guess your escrow (or any other well known green address) will help streamline the process.

lb for me is a listing of potential scammers that I have to be very very careful with when doing a trade. The escrow as the only thing that adds value to the actual transaction is of no value to me. Any green address would do as I do in person trades and these work by sending the bitcoins first anyway.
If you want to add value to using lb, you could take deposits. Merchants could be listed also by the deposit they put into lb. This deposit would get a 2 weeks delay when withdrawing it, so a merchant scamming others would risk his deposit in case these others can proof to you that they were scammed. Sadly this requires trusting you to not run with the money but multisig can help. The funds will be released as soon as both your and my sig confirm the return of the funds. If you refuse to sign (usually for 2 weeks but on dispute this can be extended indefinitely), these bitcoins essentially get destroyed. I would favor this over you holding the bitcoins putting you into the position of holding many many bitcoins to potentially "loose" although this way the victim can not be paid with such funds.

Not really on localbitcoins.com. Only the trades which have used the localbitcoins transaction/escrow feature can gain reputation/feedback. Also we keep now also track of the trading volume of inviduals, and this is shown on the public profile (not exactly for privacy reasons, but if it is under 25 BTC, 25-150 or above 150 BTC).

On the other hand we have gotten lots of feedback that leaving feedback without using the escrow/transaction should be possible. On the other hand, all kind of one-time accounts, crappy ads, etc are a problem already. If we allow leaving feedback without any kind of confirmation that a trade has actually occurred, it would probably turn the system even more worse.

I'm familiar with the same problem as theymos - this is why I changed my trading policy. I used to go to meetings all over the town, now I only go to meetings near my workplace on daytime (cafes within few minutes walking). It works somewhat ok because my work place is pretty near the center of Helsinki.

I don't really have any good solution for this yet figured out.

Even trades and ratings are free to fake.

I feel like a handful of people could basically ruin the entire site by constantly creating new accounts and offering to buy/sell Bitcoins but then not showing up to trades. This attack doesn't cost anything other than a bit of time. LocalBitcoins would then be very difficult to start using because no one would ever trust users without previous trades. Is there anything in place now or planned to prevent this?

Ok, but how one ad (or user) get higher priority in the listing then other? Who get on the top?
I though that depends of number or confirmed trades, but seems not only. What is the algorithm?

Distance from the location either determined by IP address or entered by the user. Also can be directly some URL:

https://localbitcoins.com/country/ for example:
https://localbitcoins.com/country/US
https://localbitcoins.com/country/DE etc

https://localbitcoins.com/location// for example:
https://localbitcoins.com/location/US/New%20York/
https://localbitcoins.com/location/DE/Berlin/
https://localbitcoins.com/location/DE/Graefestrasse%2077,%20Berlin/ <- Room 77!

Or by zipcode:
https://localbitcoins.com/zipcode/FI/00100/

How do you sort ads in the list?

Finally updated the 2-factor authentication to production. Works with google authenticator.

Also updated the wallet - now it auto-generates new bitcoin addresses, for privacy.


On the other hand buyers are frustrated with unresponsive sellers. Either way, the feature is still under development and we'll see what the final model will be.

I think not many sellers wants to hold coins on LB without offers from buyers.
I would better fund the transaction when I have offer and use escrow.

It is available, we haven't just advertised it much yet. Only for sellers, and works currently in a way where you have to have bitcoins in your wallet before you can sell them, which doesn't suit everybody.

But we will first implement the 2-factor auth using google authenticator, after that we will start to fine-tune the escrow feature.

My suggestion for selling:
mtgoxUSD_ask * 0.54 + mtgoxUSD_high * 0.50

or Buying:
mtgoxUSD_bid * 0.45 + mtgoxUSD_low * 0.50

Same for Euro:
(mtgoxUSD_ask * 0.54 + mtgoxUSD_high * 0.50 ) * EUR_24h / USD_24h
(mtgoxUSD_bid * 0.45 + mtgoxUSD_low * 0.50 ) * EUR_24h / USD_24h

You can play a little bit with the positions after the decimal point. Since mtgoxUSD_high and mtgoxUSD_low are reset at midnight (I believe), there is a small singularity. Works well for me since months.

Escrow for UK bank transfers still not available?

Hi there:

1. Small typo: Allow contact-conly requests at this page.

2. Sending and receiving mails through the mailsystem provided gives some problems with special characters, like in below quote:


3. Might have been mentioned in one of the previous pages> Need two-factor authentification, preferable the Google Authenticator

That doesn't work, the equation equals exchange rate.

The equation improvement actually be pretty cumbersome change, since we should modify many different things in the site if the equation worked that way. Now we display exchange rate everywhere, but if exchange rate varies per amount, it becomes harder to compare.

Now we just recommend adding different advertisements on some scale (for example 5-50 USD rate mtgoxUSD*1.1, 50-500 rate mtgoxUSD*1.05)

Our current focus is 2-factor authentication.

Just got my first SMS notification of an active contact this morning. Sweet.


Would 3+mtgoxusd_close*1.05 or mtgoxusd_close*1.05+3 do it (leave commission field blank)?

I did my first successful trade on LocalBitcoins. It went pretty well.

Suggestions:
- I have a very cheap cell phone that doesn't support SMS very well. I'd like to have the option of calling some number and entering a numeric code to release the funds.
- For pricing, I would like to be able to have a fixed extra fee per transaction. So my fee would be "5% above the MtGox price per BTC plus $3" or something like that.