Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonpaul | Hacker News Reader

The site looks great! However, what I'd really love to see in a platform is not advance trading features, but an easy way to convert USD to BTC and vice versa. I realize that this is a real challenge given the anonymity provided by the Bitcoin network and the only real instant transfer of money is through credit cards (which like to chargeback). If someone would solve this problem, you have a winner.

View on HN

That's exactly what we thought, and so we started a site to allow easy conversion of USD/BTC:

https://www.get-bitcoin.com

We've been in business for a few months now, and don't want this to sound too sales-pitchy, but our customers all love us because converting used to be such a headache. For payment methods, we don't accept credit cards (for chargeback reasons as you mentioned), but we do accept prepaid debit cards, and we have Dwolla, MoneyPak and Western Union as "instant" payment options.

This is a bit off topic, but the FAQs on your website recommend that people insure shipments of cash. As I understand it, UPS/USPS/Fedex will not insure cash or cash-like items. You should look into this so that you don't misguide your customers.

USPS will insure cash up to $5,000 for standard domestic mail, and up to $25,000 for registered mail:

http://www.snopes.com/legal/postal/sendcash.asp

Thanks for the correction. I was at the UPS store the other day and this guy wanted to insure $10,000 in cash he was mailing to his nephew. He wanted to mail the cash to keep it off the record and out of the view of the IRS. The people working there said UPS and FedEx wouldn't insure cash. But, apparently the government will.

There are no technical reasons why this easy conversion can't be done, only legal/beurocratic ones. To do that you'd need to change some laws about money laundering. That's pretty damn hard, so it's highly unlikely to happen.

The problem is actually that bitcoins are 100% not reversible and almost all other forms of payment are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com