ONLY 1.5% oh boy. Thats only if you never actually use that $ balance... if you ever actually transfer that in or out of gox to use is the real world, that % is larger than credit cards will ever be.
Not sure I follow, can you clarify what you mean exactly? The 1.5 % are in and out, so that already includes using it for something, like let's say shopping at bitcoinstore.com . Or are you talking about turning Bridgewalker-USD into actual bills in your hand? Then yes, that will probably require an extra cash out step somewhere with additional fees. And that's a good point - I personally would consider this an interesting benchmark: Person starts with a $20 bill, turns that into Bitcoin, and a couple of weeks later pays some merchant and the merchant has X amount of USD in his pocket at the end. What is the fee for that complete cycle? If the user keeps bitcoins for the couple of weeks there is pretty much no telling what he ends up with - the market might have moved in his favor or against him. With Bridgewalker that uncertainty is taken out of the equation, for an additional 1.5 %. With fees for acquiring bitcoins and then fees the merchant is paying to convert it back, we probably can not beat credit cards at this point. But I would like to think that we can at some point, if we continue to optimize at all of these points.
jav: are you considering to release the source code at some point?
I might release the Android client as open source at some point, but the server will probably stay closed source for the foreseeable future.
Secondly - this is how to get bitcoin into anyone's hands quickly and easily. Every friend you've got: "Install Bridgewalker and I'll send you that twenty...".
My thinking exactly! :-) And regarding that: Transfers between Bridgewalker users are instantaneous and free.
I advise you to support multiple exchanges as soon as possible.
It's mostly a question of liquidity. If market spread is very large all of the time, you end up not getting the best price when moving in and out of Bitcoin which can increase that "round trip fee" quite a bit. That's why I started out with Mt.Gox USD market which is quite liquid. I would like to offer a Euro version in the near future.
What about currency conversion? What if I have two accounts with Gox; one in dollars and one in Francs, and I want to settle up with a Frenchman? Can I send my dollars to your server and have them come out as Francs on the other person's phone?
At the moment your Bridgewalker account will always be denominated in USD, you can not change that. But in theory there could be a separate Euro version of Bridgewalker (and hopefully will be at some point) and then you could definitely exchange money between the two. It would use Bitcoin as the middle man: Bridgewalker-USD -> BTC -> Bridgewalker-EUR.
And get your server/servers somewhere other than the US...
The Bridgewalker server is currently hosted in Germany.