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Pay for Uber with Bitcoin (bitcoinbuilder.com)
59 points by jschwartz11 3 hours ago | 30 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.

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


> 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?

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

-----


You must not be familiar with Dreamhost

> 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.

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

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. :)


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 :)

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).

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

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


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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

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.



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