6 ms·

Try Bitcoin

73 points by bernatfp 13y ago

Baliw 13y ago
Very nicely done! This is a great project to help raise the awareness of Bitcoin. I'll definitely be passing this around.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
daurnimator 13y ago
Can you add other charities? e.g. EFF?
- fchollet 13y ago
  I second this, I would love to see EFF in the list.
- hngiszmo 13y ago
  As there is no payment done in that step anyway, they should rather make clear it's just a demo.
httpteapot 13y ago
I got a `Uncaught ReferenceError: twttr is not defined`
elisee 13y ago
This is slick, well done! I got a 500 Internal Server Error when I clicked to sign up for Coinbase though (http://trybtc.com/ajax/coinbaseregister http://trybtc.com/ajax/coinbaseregister). My account still got created and I managed to get it back by requesting a password reset from Coinbase.
- mjrials 13y ago
  Hey, thanks! We're working to fix this issue right now.
  - tych0 13y ago
    This is beautiful. Thanks for creating it :-)
drivebyacct2 13y ago
Donated, 100 more people can try!
TamDenholm 13y ago
I think the hardest part of "trying bitcoin" is quite simply converting any native currency into bitcoin. The last time i looked into it from a GBP perspective, it was a major pain in the butt. If i could buy bitcoin with my CC online like i can pay for anything else with my CC online, then there'd be a lower barrier of entry.
- RossM 13y ago
  Had the same experience (also UK). At some point, there was a service to exchange to BTC via Barclays Pingit [0] - it wasn't working when I tried a while ago but seems open now. [0]: https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-pingit https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-pingit
- jedunnigan 13y ago
  The difficulty with that is the reversibility of CC payments. A user could buy coins using their CC, then go to the CC provider claim they were scammed and get not only the coins they bought but also their original payment. This is why you should not buy BTC with services like PayPal. There are a number of services that will be opening their doors in the coming months that will lower the barriers to fiat <--> btc conversion.
  - JoshTriplett 13y ago
    > This is why you should not buy BTC with services like PayPal. Sell, not buy. There's no obvious risk to buying BTC with PayPal, if anyone is foolish enough to sell them that way.
    - jedunnigan 13y ago
      You are right, I mixed that up. Thanks.
- runeks 13y ago
  The general problem with buying bitcoins with credit cards is the fungibility of the good you're buying. In other words, bitcoins are so fungible that buying them with credit cards becomes a problem. When buying anything else with bitcoin, it's generally hard to resell the item, and make your money back. With the amount of credit card fraud, buying bitcoins with a stolen credit card would mean sites offering this service would have too many chargebacks, and they would have to charge a 5% fee on top of the 3% VISA already takes. Few people are going to want to pay an 8% markup on money. Money has a very definite price, they're not like other goods. You can see that you're paying a hefty markup, and people don't like that. Bitstamp allows you to buy bitcoins by wiring money to them: https://www.bitstamp.net/help/how-to-buy/ https://www.bitstamp.net/help/how-to-buy/ It might be me, but I really don't see why wiring money is so hard. I just log into my online banking site and set it up, takes a couple of minutes.
MaxGabriel 13y ago
This was an amazing experience, great work! I especially like the Ocelot :) One issue is that the sign up and claim link to register with Coinbase seems to be be stuck, or else is taking over a minute. (Edit: still got the email from Coinbase) How have reactions been from people who aren't already familiar with Bitcoin?
- mjrials 13y ago
  We're still working to fix the strange Coinbase register bug... it's related to the fact that the site currently doesn't force HTTPS (when it should). If you load using HTTPS it works fine. Reactions from newcomers are almost all positive. They like the interactivity, graphics, and ease of use. Theres plenty of negative feedback from BTC pros when it comes to how we oversimplify technical details (these are all intentional), but I believe this is essential to onboarding people who aren't familiar with BTC.
barefoot 13y ago
Beautiful. The third screen appeared to be breaking on my computer though. Clicked the next (right arrow) button once and the numbered information boxes disappeared with some flickering without any further information displaying. Needed to press button again to progress to next screen. Noticed similar problems when clicking through a few times (ex: "This is your wallet's Bitcoin address" shown below with no address displayed) I'm using Safari 6.0. If anyone can remember one of those services that captures machine information I'd be happy to use one and post that here.
drx 13y ago
Babou the ocelot was swiped from Archer the TV series: http://archer.wikia.com/wiki/Babou http://archer.wikia.com/wiki/Babou
- vault_ 13y ago
  Which was swiped from the actual life of Salvador Dalí: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_dali#Politics_and_personality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_dali#Politics_and_pers... ;)
reustle 13y ago
I just ran through the demo and everything was great. Although, I believe I just dumped 400 uBTC into a black hole (was given 500, donated 100, didn't bother saving the wallet #). I'm sure a lot of people will do exactly the same. You might want to not give out the 500 uBTC so easily / fast, I doubt much of that will ever be used. Another solution is to update the donate screen to be donating all 500 of it, that way it's completely used up by the end of the demo.
- jhasse 13y ago
  The wallet is temporary and wasn't really created (if I understood it correctly).
- runeks 13y ago
  If they can send money to Red Cross from your address they have the private key anyway, so nothing is lost.
- hngiszmo 13y ago
  There is not donation happening in that step and the receiving addresses are not from any charities neither. The charities might want to take legal action against being used in this way.
  - ramanujan 13y ago
    You are insane. No charity will accept an amount of 500 uBTC. They're probably batching the donations and then sending them in bulk.
a3voices 13y ago
Someone needs to make a "Try Litecoin" now.
micah63 13y ago
I'm new to the concept of Bitcoin and the part I have the hardest time with is how do I get out? If I have Bitcoins and want to turn it back into Canadian money, how does that work? Or does it work at all? Am I locked in? Can I only buy tech items on a couple websites that support it?
- andrewmunsell 13y ago
  There are a couple exchanges that will cash out your Bitcoins to another currency-- CoinBase being one of them. Sometimes you'll need to go through some hoops to verify your identity, and you'll likely end up getting a bank transfer (as opposed to PayPal, etc).
- jadeddrag 13y ago
  There is also the option of localbitcoins.com to sell to people anonymously (but in person). Or you can use the bitcoin-otc irc channel.
javindo 13y ago
Hate to be the pessimist but surely this is easily abusable? From the way you described the process of sending money from a wallet to another, there is likely some way of using a botnet or something of the sort to run through your site, create a wallet, send to a central wallet, repeat thousands of times?
xanderstrike 13y ago
AKA Give us your facebook login in exchange for telling you about BTC. No thanks.
hngiszmo 13y ago
Sneaky advertisement. I'm just curious and before I realize it, I gave them my facebook ID and spammed my friends. Could work. I mean I won't spam my friends but hey, facebook is evil, so why not make the facebook-experience for everybody just a little worse and nag them with something actually cool.
hngiszmo 13y ago
Uhm, pardon? They "recommend" coinbase to claim the 500µBTC in my wallet but don't let me give them just any other receiving address? So for me the 2nd screen where they say they give me 500µBTC is a lie and they are scammers.
hngiszmo 13y ago
WTF?? Ok, so they forced me to go to coinbase to claim my money which according to other posts here does not work. So I started over again and checked the charity addresses they show which are actually not related to any charity neither do they get any donations in the progress. I would say this is fishyfish.
grigio 13y ago
the drag and drop doesn't work on touch devices..
gojomo 13y ago
(4) A wallet is a computer file which holds Bitcoins. Bitcoins are sent between wallets; each wallet is represented by a Bitcoin address. The simplifications in this explanation are ultimately damaging. A real wallet does "hold" cash, but a Bitcoin "wallet" only holds keys & relevant history information. (It would make as much or more sense to say the balance is actually "held" by the globally replicated network.) A "Bitcoin wallet" is not just (or even mainly) a "file", but the active software which gives you the power to spend your balances. It is atypical (and against best practice) for a "Bitcoin wallet" to be represented by a (single, distinct) Bitcoin address. Confusion over these points have cost a lot of early adopters a lot of Bitcoins, to theft or complete destruction. (Personally I think the very term "wallet" should be discarded, because the notions of 'physical containment' and reification-in-a-single-place that creates are counterproductive. Perhaps it's too late to fix that, though.)
mjrials 13y ago
Hey everyone, we're currently experiencing a security breach which has resulted in us temporarily freezing Bitcoin transactions. Because of this, claiming your wallet at the end will not work. We hope to have this fixed in the next hour. Thank you all for your patience.
improv32 13y ago
It's giving me weird upside down text. http://i.imgur.com/ikTne52.png http://i.imgur.com/ikTne52.png Arch Linux, Chromium 29.0.1547.62 (219432)
Devlin_Donnelly 13y ago
I recieved this error when trying to sign up for coinbase and transfer my uBTC there: You don't have that much - please visit the Buy/Sell page to add more funds to your account.. Any Suggestions?
JoshTriplett 13y ago
As far as I can tell, there's no way to claim the remaining bitcoins at the end of this without creating a new coinbase account, even if you already have one. Given that coinbase pays for referrals, that makes sense, but it nonetheless seems tacky.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ewoodrich 13y ago
drivebyacct2, if you read this, you have been hellbanned for at least the last month. I don't know why you were banned, and I can take downvotes for irrelevance to the article, but I feel I should let a 3+ yr user with over 10,000 karma that they're posting to the aether. (I wish there was a better way to do this).

73 points by bernatfp 13y ago

Baliw 13y ago

Very nicely done! This is a great project to help raise the awareness of Bitcoin. I'll definitely be passing this around.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

daurnimator 13y ago

Can you add other charities? e.g. EFF?

fchollet 13y ago
I second this, I would love to see EFF in the list.
hngiszmo 13y ago
As there is no payment done in that step anyway, they should rather make clear it's just a demo.

httpteapot 13y ago

I got a `Uncaught ReferenceError: twttr is not defined`

elisee 13y ago

This is slick, well done! I got a 500 Internal Server Error when I clicked to sign up for Coinbase though (http://trybtc.com/ajax/coinbaseregister http://trybtc.com/ajax/coinbaseregister). My account still got created and I managed to get it back by requesting a password reset from Coinbase.

mjrials 13y ago
Hey, thanks! We're working to fix this issue right now.
- tych0 13y ago
  This is beautiful. Thanks for creating it :-)

drivebyacct2 13y ago

Donated, 100 more people can try!

TamDenholm 13y ago

I think the hardest part of "trying bitcoin" is quite simply converting any native currency into bitcoin. The last time i looked into it from a GBP perspective, it was a major pain in the butt. If i could buy bitcoin with my CC online like i can pay for anything else with my CC online, then there'd be a lower barrier of entry.

RossM 13y ago
Had the same experience (also UK). At some point, there was a service to exchange to BTC via Barclays Pingit [0] - it wasn't working when I tried a while ago but seems open now. [0]: https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-pingit https://blockchain.info/wallet/deposit-pingit
jedunnigan 13y ago
The difficulty with that is the reversibility of CC payments. A user could buy coins using their CC, then go to the CC provider claim they were scammed and get not only the coins they bought but also their original payment. This is why you should not buy BTC with services like PayPal. There are a number of services that will be opening their doors in the coming months that will lower the barriers to fiat <--> btc conversion.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  > This is why you should not buy BTC with services like PayPal. Sell, not buy. There's no obvious risk to buying BTC with PayPal, if anyone is foolish enough to sell them that way.
  - jedunnigan 13y ago
    You are right, I mixed that up. Thanks.
runeks 13y ago
The general problem with buying bitcoins with credit cards is the fungibility of the good you're buying. In other words, bitcoins are so fungible that buying them with credit cards becomes a problem. When buying anything else with bitcoin, it's generally hard to resell the item, and make your money back. With the amount of credit card fraud, buying bitcoins with a stolen credit card would mean sites offering this service would have too many chargebacks, and they would have to charge a 5% fee on top of the 3% VISA already takes. Few people are going to want to pay an 8% markup on money. Money has a very definite price, they're not like other goods. You can see that you're paying a hefty markup, and people don't like that. Bitstamp allows you to buy bitcoins by wiring money to them: https://www.bitstamp.net/help/how-to-buy/ https://www.bitstamp.net/help/how-to-buy/ It might be me, but I really don't see why wiring money is so hard. I just log into my online banking site and set it up, takes a couple of minutes.

MaxGabriel 13y ago

This was an amazing experience, great work! I especially like the Ocelot :) One issue is that the sign up and claim link to register with Coinbase seems to be be stuck, or else is taking over a minute. (Edit: still got the email from Coinbase) How have reactions been from people who aren't already familiar with Bitcoin?

mjrials 13y ago
We're still working to fix the strange Coinbase register bug... it's related to the fact that the site currently doesn't force HTTPS (when it should). If you load using HTTPS it works fine. Reactions from newcomers are almost all positive. They like the interactivity, graphics, and ease of use. Theres plenty of negative feedback from BTC pros when it comes to how we oversimplify technical details (these are all intentional), but I believe this is essential to onboarding people who aren't familiar with BTC.

barefoot 13y ago

Beautiful. The third screen appeared to be breaking on my computer though. Clicked the next (right arrow) button once and the numbered information boxes disappeared with some flickering without any further information displaying. Needed to press button again to progress to next screen. Noticed similar problems when clicking through a few times (ex: "This is your wallet's Bitcoin address" shown below with no address displayed) I'm using Safari 6.0. If anyone can remember one of those services that captures machine information I'd be happy to use one and post that here.

drx 13y ago

Babou the ocelot was swiped from Archer the TV series: http://archer.wikia.com/wiki/Babou http://archer.wikia.com/wiki/Babou

vault_ 13y ago
Which was swiped from the actual life of Salvador Dalí: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_dali#Politics_and_personality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_dali#Politics_and_pers... ;)

reustle 13y ago

I just ran through the demo and everything was great. Although, I believe I just dumped 400 uBTC into a black hole (was given 500, donated 100, didn't bother saving the wallet #). I'm sure a lot of people will do exactly the same. You might want to not give out the 500 uBTC so easily / fast, I doubt much of that will ever be used. Another solution is to update the donate screen to be donating all 500 of it, that way it's completely used up by the end of the demo.

jhasse 13y ago
The wallet is temporary and wasn't really created (if I understood it correctly).
runeks 13y ago
If they can send money to Red Cross from your address they have the private key anyway, so nothing is lost.
hngiszmo 13y ago
There is not donation happening in that step and the receiving addresses are not from any charities neither. The charities might want to take legal action against being used in this way.
- ramanujan 13y ago
  You are insane. No charity will accept an amount of 500 uBTC. They're probably batching the donations and then sending them in bulk.

a3voices 13y ago

Someone needs to make a "Try Litecoin" now.

micah63 13y ago

I'm new to the concept of Bitcoin and the part I have the hardest time with is how do I get out? If I have Bitcoins and want to turn it back into Canadian money, how does that work? Or does it work at all? Am I locked in? Can I only buy tech items on a couple websites that support it?

andrewmunsell 13y ago
There are a couple exchanges that will cash out your Bitcoins to another currency-- CoinBase being one of them. Sometimes you'll need to go through some hoops to verify your identity, and you'll likely end up getting a bank transfer (as opposed to PayPal, etc).
jadeddrag 13y ago
There is also the option of localbitcoins.com to sell to people anonymously (but in person). Or you can use the bitcoin-otc irc channel.

javindo 13y ago

Hate to be the pessimist but surely this is easily abusable? From the way you described the process of sending money from a wallet to another, there is likely some way of using a botnet or something of the sort to run through your site, create a wallet, send to a central wallet, repeat thousands of times?

xanderstrike 13y ago

AKA Give us your facebook login in exchange for telling you about BTC. No thanks.

hngiszmo 13y ago

Sneaky advertisement. I'm just curious and before I realize it, I gave them my facebook ID and spammed my friends. Could work. I mean I won't spam my friends but hey, facebook is evil, so why not make the facebook-experience for everybody just a little worse and nag them with something actually cool.

hngiszmo 13y ago

Uhm, pardon? They "recommend" coinbase to claim the 500µBTC in my wallet but don't let me give them just any other receiving address? So for me the 2nd screen where they say they give me 500µBTC is a lie and they are scammers.

hngiszmo 13y ago

WTF?? Ok, so they forced me to go to coinbase to claim my money which according to other posts here does not work. So I started over again and checked the charity addresses they show which are actually not related to any charity neither do they get any donations in the progress. I would say this is fishyfish.

grigio 13y ago

the drag and drop doesn't work on touch devices..

gojomo 13y ago

(4) A wallet is a computer file which holds Bitcoins. Bitcoins are sent between wallets; each wallet is represented by a Bitcoin address. The simplifications in this explanation are ultimately damaging. A real wallet does "hold" cash, but a Bitcoin "wallet" only holds keys & relevant history information. (It would make as much or more sense to say the balance is actually "held" by the globally replicated network.) A "Bitcoin wallet" is not just (or even mainly) a "file", but the active software which gives you the power to spend your balances. It is atypical (and against best practice) for a "Bitcoin wallet" to be represented by a (single, distinct) Bitcoin address. Confusion over these points have cost a lot of early adopters a lot of Bitcoins, to theft or complete destruction. (Personally I think the very term "wallet" should be discarded, because the notions of 'physical containment' and reification-in-a-single-place that creates are counterproductive. Perhaps it's too late to fix that, though.)

mjrials 13y ago

Hey everyone, we're currently experiencing a security breach which has resulted in us temporarily freezing Bitcoin transactions. Because of this, claiming your wallet at the end will not work. We hope to have this fixed in the next hour. Thank you all for your patience.

improv32 13y ago

It's giving me weird upside down text. http://i.imgur.com/ikTne52.png http://i.imgur.com/ikTne52.png Arch Linux, Chromium 29.0.1547.62 (219432)

Devlin_Donnelly 13y ago

I recieved this error when trying to sign up for coinbase and transfer my uBTC there: You don't have that much - please visit the Buy/Sell page to add more funds to your account.. Any Suggestions?

JoshTriplett 13y ago

As far as I can tell, there's no way to claim the remaining bitcoins at the end of this without creating a new coinbase account, even if you already have one. Given that coinbase pays for referrals, that makes sense, but it nonetheless seems tacky.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ewoodrich 13y ago

drivebyacct2, if you read this, you have been hellbanned for at least the last month. I don't know why you were banned, and I can take downvotes for irrelevance to the article, but I feel I should let a 3+ yr user with over 10,000 karma that they're posting to the aether. (I wish there was a better way to do this).