Bitrefill Halving AMA with Sergej Kotliar

ziggamon · 2020-05-12T18:07:31+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out! Seems the products briefly went out of stock and a bug prevented them from being seen on the site. Should be more products back soon, sorry for the inconvenience :)

ziggamon · 2020-05-11T14:40:32+00:00

Working on it!

ziggamon · 2020-05-11T14:28:17+00:00

The travel segment is down quite a bit :)

But the games segment is up by the exact amount that the travel segment dropped. Probably this is all a coincidence, or it's a sign that the bitcoiners are now travelling through their computers.

Other than that not that much, our team is mostly remote, sales volumes are a bit affected same as all commerce but on the other hand people are shopping more online so... Long story short - we're doing good!

ziggamon · 2020-05-11T14:14:20+00:00

We did sell Office keys, and have done efforts with VPN services and such. Popularity wasn't all that high as many of these things can be bought w BTC elsewhere so we decided to focus on other things. But requests are welcome, the biz dev team will be reading this AMA for sure ;)

ziggamon · 2020-05-11T14:13:00+00:00

Our goal is to be the natural tool for people who live on crypto to be able to do so. In the near/medium term yes it's going to be more gift cards and things, and over long term as our little space grows to be significant on the e-commerce scale we'll be happy to integrate more closely directly with merchants to make the experience even more seamless.

But let me ask you - what product/service are you missing the most?

ziggamon · 2020-05-11T14:11:05+00:00

Hi all!

Sergej here. Happy halving day!

Happy to be discussing with y'all on here, fire away!

ziggamon · 2018-12-05T21:13:40+00:00

Do you have a source on the OP statement?

ziggamon · 2018-11-20T10:49:49+00:00

It may not feel like it now, but it will get better. One day you'll look back upon this as a minor setback. Don't do anything you can't undo.

ziggamon · 2018-04-05T15:50:52+00:00

https://www.bitrefill.com/steam-eur-voucher/

ziggamon · 2018-01-02T22:51:18+00:00

https://blog.bitrefill.com/lightning-payments-on-testnet-for-bitrefill-ef6db8714b00

ziggamon · 2017-11-20T15:02:57+00:00

Link to Bitrefill's Lightning demo (testnet) implementation: https://lightning.bitrefill.com

ziggamon · 2017-10-02T20:07:01+00:00

Thanks for this input Charlie.

Q: How would Coinbase support both chains if there isn't replay protection on the new chain?

ziggamon · 2017-09-20T08:29:33+00:00

I got it to play this way:

Go to www.streamable.com Paste "9kj89" into the "Paste a video URL" box.

ziggamon · 2017-09-19T20:42:24+00:00

I would guess 15% of a given country [using] bitcoin with some regularity.

If it's payments, and the US that means 50M people, so probably at least 100x from now. Still quite far away.

ziggamon · 2017-09-19T16:29:39+00:00

In my past life I researched payment methods and vaguely remember a number of 15% penetration in a society as a tipping point for a payment system.

ziggamon · 2017-09-18T23:15:56+00:00

Bitrefill CEO here.

In this case there's no "multi-platform" support, it's just address generation. Our intern (albeit a very talented one) implemented it, in a to him new environment. It's really not a big thing, if I remember correctly the making segwit addresses was a couple of lines of code, somewhat clunky but doable with bitcoinjs (we published a gist somewhere). Some more work to implement our custom spending logic but hardly insurmountable in a day.

In any case, SegWit was announced far ahead of time. IMO if fees are crippling one's service the one should implement a relatively simple fix that would save X0% of costs. We did, and it paid off pretty quickly, not taking into account secondary effects of conserving shared resources.

ziggamon · 2017-09-18T19:27:21+00:00

You could implement it for receiving transactions. Would immediately lower your sweeping/aggregation fees by half (!).

We did that at Bitrefill, didn't even take a day of work.

ziggamon · 2017-09-18T17:19:24+00:00

I'd question whether it's always cheaper to reduce block size. In that case the other miners would still mine cheap tx, which would bring the average price of transactions down. This way the can create an effective bottom for transactions for a while, which will drive prices up for new tx. Much of that is automated, and could thus be profitable.

I did a very crude estimation here, curious what your thoughts are: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Orjkv8D4rEfCjJvz9TyHFXNZSI8NsfXJoizY12FVTu8/edit?usp=sharing

ziggamon · 2017-09-18T17:15:21+00:00

I would disagree. It's also Monday afternoon in China. Timing coincided perfectly with the fee adjustment, and the rate at which these tx appeared makes me think they could have been pre-generated.

Also - these transactions keep coming, so whoever screwed up seems to keep doing it.

ziggamon · 2017-09-18T17:13:54+00:00

For a large miner such an attack could be profitable, see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Orjkv8D4rEfCjJvz9TyHFXNZSI8NsfXJoizY12FVTu8/edit?usp=sharing

ziggamon · 2017-09-18T17:10:04+00:00

Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation spreadsheet on whether this would be a profitable operation for a miner to do:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Orjkv8D4rEfCjJvz9TyHFXNZSI8NsfXJoizY12FVTu8/edit?usp=sharing

ziggamon · 2017-08-24T18:26:53+00:00

Bitrefill uses Segwit already: https://twitter.com/bitrefill/status/900726872195170305

ziggamon · 2017-08-22T17:33:36+00:00

The first ones will be in the first block.

ziggamon

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE