WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 10235347

Pay for Uber with Bitcoin

103 points| jschwartz11 | 10 years ago |bitcoinbuilder.com | reply

53 comments

order
[+] Animats|10 years ago|reply
Anonymous business. No street address. Not in Dun and Bradstreet. "Private registration" domain. And they want you to deposit money with them. Yeah, right.
[+] shazow|10 years ago|reply
> 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/

[+] vonklaus|10 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] CameronBanga|10 years ago|reply
I wouldn't use D&B as a metric of if a business is good or bad.
[+] jron|10 years ago|reply
Bitcoin Builder started out as a way to trade against MtGox's internal ledger when they halted withdraws. Users could effectively bet on MtGox's future by using privately held bitcoins to trade with users wanting to sell their "Gox coins" at a fraction of the market price. Anyone that sold their Gox coins for less than 100% market value made out far better than those that didn't. It was a wild idea that basically created a functional market for the greedy and the desperate. I'm sure millions flowed though the site during its short lived existence.

Congrats on the new idea, Josh.

[+] jerguismi|10 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] ljk|10 years ago|reply
is there a reason why uber would want to ban it?
[+] bosdev|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] jerguismi|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] athenot|10 years ago|reply
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. :)

[+] noobie|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] aianus|10 years ago|reply
Why would they prefer to pay with cash if they had a credit card?
[+] nnx|10 years ago|reply
Really nice workaround until Uber accepts Bitcoin itself.

My only concern:

Does your rides and personal information (eg. name and phone number) become available to Bitcoin Builder through the Uber Business backend?

[+] fpgaminer|10 years ago|reply
Good point. According to Uber's website:

> Your company will see trip information about rides that were charged to their Uber for Business account, including pickup location and destination, product type, time of day, and duration.

[+] djhn|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] bduerst|10 years ago|reply
I guess don't get the problem that this is solving. Isn't Uber rolling out a cash option?
[+] zhoujianfu|10 years ago|reply
I think that was only for a few cities in India?

This works everywhere uber works. Today!

[+] fpgaminer|10 years ago|reply
I don't see a mention of how much the service costs; what fees they charge. Perhaps that becomes transparent after creating account, but it's probably important information to have immediately available.
[+] zhoujianfu|10 years ago|reply
Ah, that's because there are no fees!

But, we should probably make that clear!

[+] ShotgunSnipist|10 years ago|reply
This website is really ugly. I wish they had put some time into at least making it look nice.
[+] yjgyhj|10 years ago|reply
That is super cool, and has the coolest website for it.
[+] nnx|10 years ago|reply

[deleted]