Topic: Bitcoin Credit Union - page 3. (Read 9419 times)

I'm the author of the CU History piece, and am excited to see folks are making a go of this! One suggest I'd have is that, rather than setting an interest rate up front, it might make more sense to simply distribute the surplus earnings after expenses at the end of each month/quarter/year pro-rated by how much is deposited. Thus, the organization will operate on a not-for-profit basis for its members.

Something else that's important to consider is the balance between net-borrowers and net-creditors - in a credit union, you have to be a member to borrow, and its good practice to evenly distribute the surplus between reducing or rebating the interest paid on loans and the dividend paid to savers.

In any case, I'm curious to see how this project shakes out . Good going so far!

Your site took about 8 hours to send the registration e-mail...

I am still to figure if it work or not.

Btw: Domain name speculators are annoying. Specially when they act as squatters and end forcing more domain speculation (ie: some years ago, I usually bought only a single domain for a site I wanted... After I noticed that after buying that domain, all possibly related domains got bought too and used against me, I now get forced to buy domains in huge batches only to protect myself... And sometimes that still do not work, someone bought the .com domain with the name of my father company before he could buy, and now wants 2 times the value of the whole company to hand the domain back O.o And the site is not even for profit, it is purely informative, a collection of technical sheets...)

Luckily, I have already acquired the name I wanted. BEHOLD, bitcoincu.org

Nice try though...

hehe. Anyway, I'm sure there are better names for a credit union than bitcoin credit union...
First Coin of the Bittans!
or something....

Just speculating as any capitalist ought      Wasn't trying to be "helpful" per se, but if someone does start a credit union I'll be happy to invest in the project.

psh :p right, buy up a domain to sell it... very helpful.

I think a number of these credit unions will be created over the next year, primarily enabling venture capital to go to new bitcoin startups. If trust can be earned by members then these resource pools will be wildly successful.

And that's why I bought BitcoinCreditUnion.com... happy to sell it for the right amount of Btc =)

I have signed up but have not yet received the confirmation email (not in junk).

Also, I don't know if you have seen this but there is a guy out there who knows CU intimately and has written about bitcoin:

http://cuhistory.blogspot.com/2011/04/bitcoin-natural-experiment-for-credit.html

i like this idea.. ive always had a place in my heart for credit unions... they helped me through school   
i do hope you can find a way to make this a viable CU.

you should open this on testnet, thats what it's there for ..... testing

I registered... waiting for approval.  Might I suggest sending an email when the user is approved?

Thanks for the suggestions, I will see what I can do. In the meantime I have opened registrations, please register so we can look for any bugs that have been hiding from me. Once you register you will have to wait for your account to be activated, even though it says verification email sent, it wont send anything. I will manually activate accounts on a first come first serve basis until I have enough for testing.

Please don't deposit too much.

The next thing I will be working on is dividends. Stand by...

just found bitbills  this could work.

add an OperationFabulous banner to help the intrest rates

Good idea

Had this thought, could work out nice for the credit union and the bitcoin community

Make a bitcoin gift card to be sold in Brick n Mortar stores.  Similar to the Visa prepaid cards or green dot, that are sold for $5 plus the value of the card.

This could help it get some exposure, People would see it and at least wonder what is is, then BTC will start to get some recognition.

Getting very computer literate people to use BTC is hard enough, especially now that PayPal has shut down CoinPal.  Getting the common folk to use it is an even greater challenge, many of them still don't know what PP is.

Not sure how much the stores get out of the $5, but the rest would goto the Credit Union for Servers, Coders (high volume trading?), and into the interest rates.

Hope to see a pool set up with a large prize to be won for getting this setup.

I think its only the Credit card type gift cards that require an ID (when you open the thing up you get a fed law requires... of course theres ways around it, but usually the card is less useable), going against some of the intents of bitcoin.  I think the iTunes and Facebook "credits", gift cards don't require ID and have a set price.  Might need to use carrots.

Probably need to get some mom n pop type stores, and hopefully someday into larger chains/franchises. Anyone know a mom n pop shop in a geographic area with a high concentrations of BTC users?  I would think some of the already established users would go buy some just to support the store for starting to take them.

Would be nice to have the store be able to load any amount the customer wants and have the cost based on MTGox.  Probably need to just sell a set value like $20 USD worth of BTC (+$5 fee for total of $25) and then when you sign in you get the current exchange rate, around 5 BTC at todays rate.

Would be nice to get the gift card fee down to $2 (maybe, yes thats high for $20, but good if your putting $500 in, not sure where all the fees go on those cards) to keep with the low transaction fee standards of BTC.

I could see this causing a rapid increase in value of BTC if someplace like 7/11 started carrying the gift card, especially if they would start accepting, to the point where the decimal would need to be moved.

Anyone know someone in a position to make this happen.

This is a great idea! It was only a little bit of time before someone made a credit union for Bitcoin...

Good luck to you!

Oh, and I second the SSL requrement - Startcom's interface is a headache sometimes, but it's well worth it - a free SSL cert that works in all modern browsers (except maybe Opera)? Yes please.

Sentry, will you open source the code?

this is a great idea, in that it sets up a banking alternative to ewallet that users can trust, by participating in it's running.

Interesting

I wish to participate in that, if you iron out the already pointed issues.

Hi, you can allow members to chose who they trust by using ripplepay. Only someone you trust could default on your loan, you would only owe to people who trust you.
It's free software, so you can modify it at your will. RainDroplet (a fork) uses it for credits.

http://ripple-project.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ripple/

https://raindroplet.info/

http://gitorious.org/raindroplet

I hope this is useful for you.

Good luck.