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Topic: CoinPal beta - Buying bitcoins with PayPal - page 14. (Read 170543 times)

vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
Ugh. That stinks. How bad was it?

I probably won't know the full extent for another couple weeks.  It's bad enough that I need to make some reasonable changes, but not bad enough to quit yet Smiley

Quote
Remember my idea about using a physical letter to a physical address? All you need is to hook into a service like L-Mail and send the buyer a verification code to their mailing address, and you can have strong proof that the account isn't stolen.

I also think you should automate your SMS verification so you can run that before a new buyer places their first order.

Thank you for the ongoing suggestions. I've been testing both of these techniques for the last couple months.  I don't yet have enough data to expand them to all purchases yet.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1031
Rational Exuberance
I had another wave of fraudulent orders last night.  CoinPal is down for maintenance until I can make some more anti-fraud adjustments.  Hopefully I'll be able to reopen later tonight.

Ugh. That stinks. How bad was it?

Remember my idea about using a physical letter to a physical address? All you need is to hook into a service like L-Mail and send the buyer a verification code to their mailing address, and you can have strong proof that the account isn't stolen.

I also think you should automate your SMS verification so you can run that before a new buyer places their first order.
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
I had another wave of fraudulent orders last night.  CoinPal is down for maintenance until I can make some more anti-fraud adjustments.  Hopefully I'll be able to reopen later tonight.

CoinCard is still operating as normal
sr. member
Activity: 294
Merit: 273
CoinPal now offers increased purchase limits for buyers with good OTC ratings (ranging from 10 to 120 BTC per week).  More details are available at the bottom of the purchase limits page.  Of course, people can still use CoinPal without knowing anything about PGP or OTC.
This is great!  For newcomers to the OTC web of trust, would it be possible to earn a few trust points through repeated purchasing?  I know I've used CoinPal relatively often since its inception, so as my initial purchases pass the maximum time for chargebacks that ought to be worth a point or two, no?

Definitely.  Eventually, this will be automated.  Until then, link your GPG account to your CoinPal account (as mentioned above).  Then PM me on IRC asking that I rate you for CoinPal orders
Cool, will do.
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
CoinPal now offers increased purchase limits for buyers with good OTC ratings (ranging from 10 to 120 BTC per week).  More details are available at the bottom of the purchase limits page.  Of course, people can still use CoinPal without knowing anything about PGP or OTC.
This is great!  For newcomers to the OTC web of trust, would it be possible to earn a few trust points through repeated purchasing?  I know I've used CoinPal relatively often since its inception, so as my initial purchases pass the maximum time for chargebacks that ought to be worth a point or two, no?

Definitely.  Eventually, this will be automated.  Until then, link your GPG account to your CoinPal account (as mentioned above).  Then PM me on IRC asking that I rate you for CoinPal orders
sr. member
Activity: 294
Merit: 273
CoinPal now offers increased purchase limits for buyers with good OTC ratings (ranging from 10 to 120 BTC per week).  More details are available at the bottom of the purchase limits page.  Of course, people can still use CoinPal without knowing anything about PGP or OTC.
This is great!  For newcomers to the OTC web of trust, would it be possible to earn a few trust points through repeated purchasing?  I know I've used CoinPal relatively often since its inception, so as my initial purchases pass the maximum time for chargebacks that ought to be worth a point or two, no?
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
PayPal reduced my fees again.  I'm passing on those savings, so customers should save about $0.10 in fees on a typical order.  This is probably the last fee reduction PayPal will give me for a while.  I'm still considering ways to reduce the 3% fee that I keep for myself.  Unfortunately, fraud rates have eaten most of that 3% so far.  Hopefully as I improve fraud detection mechanisms, I'll be able to do it.

I've also recalculated the fee range that I show on the Prices page.  Because of PayPal's fixed $0.30 processing fee per order, it's possible for some small orders paid with non-US PayPal accounts to reach  a 10% effective fee.

I'm planning to sell Bitcoins for Dwolla starting sometime this summer.  The fees will be substantially lower since they only charge $0.25 per transaction.  Of course, this will only help US customers.
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
CoinPal now offers increased purchase limits for buyers with good OTC ratings (ranging from 10 to 120 BTC per week).  More details are available at the bottom of the purchase limits page.  Of course, people can still use CoinPal without knowing anything about PGP or OTC.
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1091
Did you get a core dump? It might be useful. There must be a memory corruption or race in there. Maybe time t break out Valgrind.

Unfortunately c3f140033c531e9c5eae920c16fe2ecc80faa1a2 in bitcoin.git catches SIGSEGV, which means no more core dumps :/
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
Sorry, I should have said "hung" rather than "crashed".  The daemon process was still alive and the debug log showed it was still involved in peer exchange, but it wouldn't respond to RPC calls.  This has happened enough, I'll post what I know in the developer channel.
dsg
jr. member
Activity: 37
Merit: 2
Did you get a core dump? It might be useful. There must be a memory corruption or race in there. Maybe time t break out Valgrind.

Not sure it'd be wise to post bitcoin coredumps online publicly, as it seems likely there might be private keys in them. This may not be obvious to everyone.
legendary
Activity: 1526
Merit: 1129
Did you get a core dump? It might be useful. There must be a memory corruption or race in there. Maybe time t break out Valgrind.
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
bitcoind crashed last night.  I've restarted it and the site is taking orders again.  If you placed an order before the crash and didn't get your coins, hang tight.  I'll send them shortly.  Sorry for the trouble
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
CoinPal was down for a couple hours while I upgraded the server.  It's back now
member
Activity: 102
Merit: 10
PayPal approved me for one of their merchant rates.  I've passed the full savings through to buyers by decreasing CoinPal fees 0.4 percentage points.

I've also finished some analysis on past fraud rates and patterns.  As a result, I've increased purchase limits for customers 14 and 45 days after their first successful order.  This is a calculated risk and I may reverse this decision as more data comes in.  You can read details about the new limits.


Good deal! You can count on my orders increasing by around 0.4%   Grin
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
PayPal approved me for one of their merchant rates.  I've passed the full savings through to buyers by decreasing CoinPal fees 0.4 percentage points.

I've also finished some analysis on past fraud rates and patterns.  As a result, I've increased purchase limits for customers 14 and 45 days after their first successful order.  This is a calculated risk and I may reverse this decision as more data comes in.  You can read details about the new limits.
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
Good work on CoinCard. I have been wondering for awhile how to get coins out of the Bitcoin system without doing a mass trade on MtGox. I just wrote up a blog post about CoinCard (but I haven't yet tried it myself).

Thanks for the write-up.  doublec's response is spot on about Domino's gift card validity.

For anyone who tried to buy coins through CoinPal yesterday, I've restocked my inventory.  I added a bunch more coins on Saturday night, but it still wasn't enough to see us through Sunday's purchases.
legendary
Activity: 1078
Merit: 1005
The Domino's "proof of concept" was a good idea. Any idea whether Domino's gift cards work outside the United States?

They are US only, excluding Hawaii and Alaska.
newbie
Activity: 25
Merit: 7
Good work on CoinCard. I have been wondering for awhile how to get coins out of the Bitcoin system without doing a mass trade on MtGox. I just wrote up a blog post about CoinCard (but I haven't yet tried it myself).

The Domino's "proof of concept" was a good idea. Any idea whether Domino's gift cards work outside the United States? (Actually, given that last week I went to a Domino's store with one of their own vouchers and they told me it was invalid and I had to pay full price, I'm unlikely to try CoinCard on them. But I might try the PayPal approach.)
vip
Activity: 447
Merit: 258
CoinPal is open again.

I wasn't able to pinpoint the bitcoind problem, but I did upgrade to 0.3.20.01, so we'll see if that fixes it.
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