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Comment by deftnerd | Hacker News Reader

I sell Steam Wallet Codes (gift cards) for Bitcoin. I've done over 1500 BTC in sales in the last year and make about 5% profit, depending on the current BTC/USD exchange rate.

I started the site as an experiment to build my own payment processing system and got lucky with the right product.

I spend about 5 minutes 3 times a day restocking inventory when I get an alert on my phone that stocks are low.

I've been experimenting with 0-confirmation transactions and hope to relaunch in the coming weeks with a service that emails codes in under 60 seconds.

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So there is no arbitrage, no user to user interaction, they simply buy Steam Gift cards from you with bitcoins. So simple. Genius!

One can make a bitcoin front for pretty much anything online. Where else do you see opportunities like this?

My next site is one that lets people who use any one of 160+ mobile phone carriers pay their bills or recharge their prepaid phones with Bitcoin. I've already found a company that does most of the heavy lifting and has already secured the agreements with the right parties.

They don't have an API, but they do have a standard template I can email them to have them perform the action and they offer net-30 billing.

This will allow me to ask for people's phone numbers, select their carrier, and send me Bitcoin. Then I send the order to the fulfillment company who loads up the users phone account and I pay them at the end of the month.

I'm excited by it because everyone talks about how Bitcoin is good for the remittance market, but there needs to be a use for Bitcoin in the developing world for people to use it if they don't have access to an exchange and a bank account.

If you need any help with frontend or bavkend development, let me know. This project sounds very interesting.

That sounds really interesting - with the net-30 billing, you also have some cool opportunities to choose when to hold USD vs BTC based on the expected climate in the next 30 days

Is there any legal trickiness to trading bitcoin for goods? AFAICT, FinCEN is OK with it but I'm no lawyer.

Is the profit from exchanging from BTC to USD or a discount source of gift cards.

well done

and in a few days you'll have a dozen clone sites to deal with...

Maybe it's a clever ruse to bring more Bitcoin sites into existence.

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