Show HN: Bitroad – Sell anything online for Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bitroad – Sell anything online for Bitcoin

github.com

50 pointszachlatta39 comments

> "Safely, and anonymously"

http://bitroad.io

Better yet, put up a tor hidden service as an option. It doesn't take a lot of extra effort.

Will definitely consider this in the future. Bitroad is currently in the ultra-MVP stages. I'm excited to see where it'll go.

Is this something you intend to run longterm as an actual service, or is this just a demo from the hackathon to go along with the github repo? Was the name similarity to Silk Road intentional? When you say "sell anything," are you attempting to lure out the displaced users from that service? If so, I'd strongly advise you reconsider.

I'm not entirely sure where I'll take the project. It's currently just a proof-of-concept.

Bitroad was created for the Virtual Piggy 2013 hackathon. The prompt was to create something that solves a problem for youth. I created Bitroad to let kids without bank accounts sell stuff online (I wanted to sell stuff when I didn't have a bank account, but there was nothing out there that let me). The name similarity to the underground Silk Road is purely coincidental and will likely be changed in the future. We don't condone the transfer of illicit entities.

zachlatta, where are you based? I'd like to talk more. As a suggestion, I think you should consider clarifying that this is not another Silk Road. The name suggests that :)

I'm presently based in Los Angeles. Shoot me an email, it's in my profile.

It's currently hosted on Heroku, but will be moved to our own servers once we've ironed out a few other things. Once it's on our servers, we'll implement https.

So you're lying right now? :)

Not necessarily. Bitroad was created to allow kids without bank accounts to sell what they make online. From a parent's perspective, it's safe and anonymous - the child doesn't need to give out any personal information to use it.

Bitroad was created in under 7 hours for the Virtual Piggy 2013 hackathon (http://www.oink.com/hackathon). If you run into errors while checking out, it means that I've exceeded my daily limit with BitPay. I'd love to know what the community thinks of it!

Link to the main live site: http://bitroad.io

Will this provide similar functionality to silk road? I've been looking for silk road type software/frontend for a legal user community to sell items.

IMHO - This is a similar project, albeit with more features, and much better code coverage on the tests: https://github.com/brighton36/CoinPost

Though, I am the author, so I get that I'm a bit biased ;)

Looks neat! Apologies for the hackathon code, there will eventually be a fully rewrite done ;-)!

I've always wondered why there is no eBay for bitcoins. The problem with bitcoin is that the only way to get them is to buy them with USD. What if you could buy bitcoins with objects? Like you would do with USD on websites like eBay.

I even bought the address www.btcharbor.com but never had time to start the project.

I acquired my (very small) BTC stash via selling stuff on the eBay clone BitMit; it was starting to get traction before the site owners decided to shut down / sell (its fate is still uncertain).

There are two others, CryptoThrift and CoinGig, but their transaction volume is still relatively low. It's a gaping hole in the market right now (and that's considering that eBay itself has been begging for a disruption for years).

How did BitMit overcome the problem of trust between buyer and seller? E.g. somebody sends bitcoin to a wallet and never gets the product they wanted. Did they offer some kind of escrow service or was everything based on reputation and buyer/seller reviews?

BitMit acted as an escrow themselves. I never caught wind of any disputes, so I don't know how they were handled. And they also had reputation and reviews as well.

https://www.bitmit.net/ was the eBay for bitcoins. They're shutting down, no official reason why, though it's suspected they got hacked.

http://www.coinpost.com ! It's a thing. Check it out

I've been paid in btc in several occasions for my work as a writer and researcher.

We are creating a new marketplace for bitcoin, check it out: http://coinsierra.com/ Alpha coming real soon.

Great stuff guys, this is awesome!

Seems like you have a nice handle on the 'selling for bitcoin' space. I'd love to chat and see if we can join forces in some way (I'm the founder of SellSimple.com).

Hit me up on twitter or via my blog if interested :)

- J

Feel free to shoot me an email. It's in my profile.

Awesome, will shoot you something by tonight :)

Is it possible to use Bitcoin or a bitcoin-like system to create listings in a decentralized manner? Maybe with Namecoin?

I worry that these types of sites centralize the marketplace in one easy-to-attack location.

http://bitroad.io/listings/28

Buy it now!

I am selling "This Image", the file they told me to upload, but never shows up. http://bitroad.io/listings/32

Oh. The file that you upload is the thing you are selling.

Maybe I'm blind, but is there any way to browse a list of listings? Also just a heads up, but the background image on the landing page took about 8 seconds to load on my machine. It's beautiful, but you might want to either re-encode it with more lossy compression, or just nix it altogether.

There isn't presently a way to browse listings, although it's definitely on the feature list. The original idea for user interaction was the following:

    1. User goes to website
    2. User creates a listing
    3. User shares link to listing on other sites

It wasn't originally intended as a marketplace, but we're thinking about turning it into one. By the way, thanks for the tip regarding the image. Fixing it now.

So presently you're not proxying the transactions and collecting a commission?

We're proxying the transactions and collecting a 10% commission that goes to a Bitcoin-accepting charitable organization. The current organization we're donating to is the Bitcoin Foundation.

Under Create Listing, you can set a negative price - at least in Safari. Didn't try to actually create a listing though.

There should be validations preventing that. Please file a bug if you're able to get around them.

Will do - just seems odd from a UI point of view - that's all :)

(looking forward to seeing where this goes!)

Thanks! We definitely should add some Javascript validations too :-)

Holy animated gif batman! Maybe link to a video instead?

So, Bitcoins isn't about anonymity. I don't know why people keep being enamored about this. There are far better things to do with Bitcoins than anonymity.

I'm glad someone wrote this and open-sourced it though. There are a lot of interesting things you can do with this web app when you throw away the notion of anonymity. Thanks for writing it.

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