Pay for Uber with Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Pay for Uber with Bitcoin

bitcoinbuilder.com

103 pointsjschwartz1153 comments

Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain. And they want you to deposit money with them. Yeah, right.

> Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain.

This will be more and more common and isn't a bad thing. None of those provide any real safeguards and frankly, private domain registration is pretty common. I wouldn't dump > a half weeks paycheck in there, but measuring risk and reputation will no longer be a simple BBB or Dun and Bradstreet lookup.

"None of those provide any real safeguards". Don't you feel like this is an overstatement? Like if Microsoft commits a fraud I can sue Microsoft. Like yes it's possible that in the future these safeguards wont' be available, but having real legal entities with known individuals you can have a trust based relationship in society is of tremendous value. Knowing that your counter-party in a transaction has repetitional risk is definitely beneficial.

... and frankly, at least in a country with a stable legal system, it's a slight bit of comfort to know that if all else fails (hopefully it never reaches that point of course), the police can go and arrest somebody that caused us harm, and/or seize their assets.

I agree. I'm curious, however, to know what the D&B replacement will be for these types of operations in the future.

I believe CoinsSource provided a trust index for altcoin developers at one point [0], and it looks like Bitrated has a web-of-trust-based system for bitcoin-denominated transactions [1].

[0] https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/cryptocurrency-trust-index-d...

[1] https://www.bitrated.com/

Block chain and gpg keys. Confirmed transactions and feedback most likely.

> Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain. And they want you to deposit money with them. Yeah, right.

https://bitcoinbuilder.com/ full name of the founder is at the bottom of the page, Josh Jones (founder of Dreamhost).

You can look up the company "BITCOIN BUILDER, INC." here: http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/

Wow! An apartment half a block from the beach in Santa Monica! Wonder how this Bitcoin business makes enough money for that?

You must not be familiar with Dreamhost

Didn't he also buy up a lot of Gox's bitcoins at a steep discount once withdrawals became impossible? Essentially betting they'd eventually be worth something rather than nothing. I wonder if that's settled out, and if so how he did...

It's not settled out yet, and he's also wondering how he did...

Owning a website does not mean it funds 100% of your life or makes any money at all for that matter.

I wouldn't use D&B as a metric of if a business is good or bad.

Updated the footer.. 604 Arizona Ave, Santa Monica CA 90403. And here's my linked in page:

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/josh-jones/3/91a/44a

I think this is genius. One of the best products I've seen recently, if not THE best. Definitely, the best Bitcoin-related idea. I guess companies like Circle, Coinbase, Chain, 21 co, etc. are cool in their own right. But I don't see how any of them will help Bitcoin breakout and become more accepted. I think relatable products like yours are gonna be more beneficial to the protocol.

I, Josh Jones, 100% agree with everything in this comment.

Bitcoin Builder started out as a way to trade against MtGox's internal ledger when they halted withdraws. Users could effectively bet on MtGox's future by using privately held bitcoins to trade with users wanting to sell their "Gox coins" at a fraction of the market price. Anyone that sold their Gox coins for less than 100% market value made out far better than those that didn't. It was a wild idea that basically created a functional market for the greedy and the desperate. I'm sure millions flowed though the site during its short lived existence.

Congrats on the new idea, Josh.

Thanks jron!

Awesome, and works very smoothly. I really hope that uber won't ban it. Or even better, I really hope that uber would implement a system where you would be able to convert bitcoins directly to uber credit :)

is there a reason why uber would want to ban it?

Regulation, KYC/AML laws. Brand/image reasons. I don't know.

KYC/AML law only apply to financial institutions.

That's not true. If you're, say, a car dealership and Walter White comes in with $50,000 cash looking to buy a car, you are required to file a Currency Transaction Report with the federal government.

Sorry, you are totally right, I was meaning to write a longer comment mentioning the exceptions outside of the financial world.

I can think of two cases.

- the first time there was a confusing instance of chargeback/dispute resolution.. it's easier to say "this is a TOS violation" than to "figure it out"

- if the total amount coming from this account makes different taxes/regulations apply that aren't beneficial to uber

good points, thanks!

Just FYI, Uber removed bitcoinbuilders account couple of days ago. So, it was too good to be true...

Uber uses Braintree for payment processing[1]. Braintree already has integration with Coinbase[2]. I assume that bitcoin transfers being push (instead of pull like credit cards) is the reason they haven't activated it.

1. https://www.braintreepayments.com/case-studies/uber

2. https://www.braintreepayments.com/features/coinbase

Uber already has "uber credit" system, for example promotions where you get $10 in your uber account. They could very trivially just add option, where you could add uber credit to your account with bitcoin (or any other push-only payment method, for example cash via coupons).

Yeah but that goes against their "press a button for a taxi" philosophy.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe you can make pulls from coinable wallets provided you have enough money in there.

I wonder what happens if you try to charge them for a ride which costs more than you have in your account. They require a $25 balance, but you can certainly go on much more expensive rides.

The bitcoinbuilder option will automatically disappear, when your balance goes below certain amount. I would guess they would ban accounts which do that permanently. Anyway, there probably are lots of users who are very happy to use this system fairly, such as me.

Awesome service! I've already used this for four rides: https://i.gyazo.com/b6ba0bd02566eb7eb54781411b322bbd.png

It's Uber for Bitcoin! Oops, I mean Bitcoin for Uber! Wait no, it's like Paypal for Bitcoin for Uber...

These analogies are really messing with me. :)

This will work greatly in India, most of my Indian friends say that most Indians don't have credit cards/prefer to pay with cash.

Doesn't Uber India have cash payments?http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/11/uber-is-testing-cash-paymen...

Yep..

http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/21/uber-gets-serious-about-cas...

And the Uber design post about how they made it work (in broad terms);

https://medium.com/uber-design/designing-the-uber-cash-exper...

How does U get their cut?

Which Uber already supports. There was a thread on this yesterday by the Uber Design team:

https://medium.com/uber-design/designing-the-uber-cash-exper...

Why would they prefer to pay with cash if they had a credit card?

Really nice workaround until Uber accepts Bitcoin itself.

My only concern:

Does your rides and personal information (eg. name and phone number) become available to Bitcoin Builder through the Uber Business backend?

Good point. According to Uber's website:

> Your company will see trip information about rides that were charged to their Uber for Business account, including pickup location and destination, product type, time of day, and duration.

Your name and phone number don't get revealed, but yeah, like Uber says, they do give us the information above. I can promise we don't do anything with it?

This is as close to a frictionless bitcoin transaction (at least in situ) as I've seen yet in the context of useful, frequent payments.

I guess don't get the problem that this is solving. Isn't Uber rolling out a cash option?

Using bitcoin to buy things. Obviously?

I think that was only for a few cities in India?

This works everywhere uber works. Today!

I don't see a mention of how much the service costs; what fees they charge. Perhaps that becomes transparent after creating account, but it's probably important information to have immediately available.

Ah, that's because there are no fees!

But, we should probably make that clear!

Used this yesterday and today here in the Philippines! This is an awesome workaround because only 3% of Filipinos have credit cards https://www.techinasia.com/is-southeast-asia-ready-for-onlin...

This website is really ugly. I wish they had put some time into at least making it look nice.

That is super cool, and has the coolest website for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com