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Coin Forest Wants to the Be the Groupon for Bitcoin
Group Deals with Bitcoin on Coin Forest
It seems like every week there are new companies springing up that are taking proven business models and applying Bitcoin. Bitcoin has several advantages to these businesses: instant transactions, very low fees, and fully digital.
We sat down with the co-founder John Mardlin and Business Development Manager Brandon Gains of Coin Forest, a group-buying site that specializes in deals for Bitcoin, to learn more about their new business.
On Bitcoin: What is Coin Forest and how did you get started?
Brandon Gains: Coin Forest is a Bitcoin-only business that offers special group-buying discounts to the bitcoin community. Coin Forest is a boot-strapped startup out of Victoria, British Columbia.
John Mardlin: Coin Forest is like Groupon for Bitcoiners. Though the main difference is that we care about our community, and our primary motive isn’t profit.
I got started just by finding out about Bitcoin from an acquaintance while I was visiting San Francisco. It wasn’t the best timing really, I put about $1k into BTC at $140 in early April. We know what happened after that.
I got to thinking about how little the price of Bitcoin is really tied to it’s utility as a means of exchanging real goods and services. I also got to thinking about how effective of a differentiator the currency could be.
At the same time, I was working at PMRobot.com, a project management tool in a really crowded market. The whole SaaS space is so crowded, I thought there might be some opportunity for a group buying site focusing on B2B SaaS.
At some point, all those disjoint thoughts just kind of coalesced into the idea that looks a lot like what Coin Forest is right now.
On Bitcoin: Why the focus on Bitcoin?
John Mardlin: Bitcoin is the whole point! My dream was never to run a daily deals website, but I am very motivated to help expand the reach of the bitcoin economy, and I think this is the perfect model to do it. I wrote about why that is here: http://blog.coinforest.
This quote is the first time someone has really effectively put my vision into their own words: http://www.reddit.com/
Brandon Gains: We want to grow the bitcoin economy. Many people have heard about bitcoin but don’t see a reason to buy it unless they are investing. By providing short-term discounts we can create a temporary situation where the only way to get a certain item at a certain price is with bitcoin. We want to be the reason many people get their first bitcoin.
On Bitcoin: Who do you think should use your site?
Brandon Gains: We think our site’s deals will be targeted towards anyone interested in buying: bitcoin related goods/services, 3D printing services, equipment for makers, online education, tools and services for building software, and services for startups/online businesses.
John Mardlin: We want to provide products that will appeal to any bitcoiners, not all of the time, but at least some of the time. As we progress, we’ll discover what people are the most interested in.
Aside from helping people get deals though, we really want to be the place that people go when they want to use bitcoin to buy a particular companies products. My dream is that we can get enough people together, pledging to purchase a major companies product if they begin to accept bitcoin. This would likely be someone like github, or 23andMe, shapeways, autodesk, atlassian, adafruit…. any tech savvy company that’s shown itself to be a leading innovator.
On Bitcoin: How fast can you scale, considering there are only 11 million Bitcoin in distribution? Whats your long-term view?
John Mardlin: You might look at it like that… or you might see it as one of very few companies providing a service to an economy worth 1 billion dollars. We don’t expect to bump up against the limits of the bitcoin economy, we expect to grow by helping it grow.
Brandon Gains: We feel that bitcoin has started a global movement towards a decentralized economy and we believe that cryptocurrencies are the future of global currency; even if bitcoin falters in a few years there are several promising alt-currencies there to take it’s place. We feel that we can scale up the company quickly once we prove the success of our first deals. We will be able to attract bigger and bigger companies to start accepting bitcoin-only deals.
MasterCoin Proposal to Make Bitcoin More Stable and Secure
Complete MasterCoin Specification Released
J.R. Willett, aka dacoinminster, is a Seattle-based software engineer and Bitcoin expert. Like many in the Bitcoin community, he sees a future where Bitcoin is adopted by the mainstream for a wide variety of purposes. To achieve that goal, Willett believes that there’s more work to be done around the Bitcoin protocol.
After 2 years of research and discovery, Willett has released a complete specification for building a protocol layer on top of Bitcoin, similar to how HTTP runs on top of TCP/IP. He calls the new protocol MasterCoin.
The coins of the new layer have
• Additional security features to make your money much harder to steal
• Built-in support for distributed betting (no need to trust a website to coordinate bets)
• Capability to hold a stable user-defined value, such as an ounce of gold or U.S. Dollar, with no need to trust a person promising to back up that value
The name of the new protocol layer is “MasterCoin” and it is 100% message-based, meaning that it encodes all its protocol data as hidden messages in the block chain which have special meanings, such as placing a bet, or transferring MasterCoins to another address.
Once you own MasterCoins, you have the building blocks for creating GoldCoin, USDCoin, EuroCoin, and any other real-world asset. These child currencies will then be “meta stable” (holding their values as long as they remain sufficiently backed by MasterCoins held in escrow). Their target values are maintained by protocol actions which control the available supply.
Here is the complete MasterCoin specification.
Willett is inviting early adopters to purchase MasterCoins by sending Bitcoins to the Exodus Address: 1EXoDusjGwvnjZUyKkxZ4UHEf77z6A5S4P. These funds will be used for development of software implementing the MasterCoin protocol.
For more information, read or join the discussion at bitcointalk and Reddit.
Below is a video of J.R. Willett speaking on a Bitcoin expert panel in May 2013.
CC image by zcopley
Inside Bitcoins NYC Recap – Bitcoin Future is Bright, But Uncertain
Bitcoin Conference Speakers Share Mixed Views on the Future, But Optimism on Work Underway
“Bitcoin looks like Facebook today, but so did Friendster in its day.” — Brock Pierce, Managing Director of Clearstone Global
The Inside Bitcoins NYC conference dealt with a broad swath of topics from business models and profitability concerns to how Bitcoin can be an enabler of social freedoms.
And yet, much of the speaker focus and audience concern surrounded how Bitcoin can become more mainstream, how will it interact with or change the current infrastructure, and what (and who) will be the winning business model.
While there were discussions by the VC panel (Gold 2.0) and the keynote speaker, Charlie Shrem, on altcoins and other fiat currencies, the overwhelming consensus is that Bitcoin will be the dominant currency in the space.
As Brock Pierce, Managing Director of Clearstone Global, cautions “is Bitcoin Friendster, Myspace or Facebook? It looks like Facebook today, but so did Friendster in its day.”
Looking at the state of the Bitcoin community today, many of the companies are still nascent – a number of the represented firms have had recent shutdowns/relaunches or are soon to launch private betas. There continues to be a strong interest in education about legal and regulatory issues, today particular emphasized by the interest in the overview of major legal topics by Jacob S. Farber, Senior Counsel at Perkins Coie LLP.
Also represented on the post-lunch panel was James White, Director Tax Issues for the US Government Accountability Office, demonstrating how the government is taking a more active interest in the space.
Overall, the conference explored the major topics that entrepreneurs and potential financial investors are grappling with. Among the motivations discussed by Anthony Gallippi, Co-Founder and CEO of BitPay (site), is the reduction of credit card payment fraud (estimated at $100 billion per year) and ability to accept payments from a much larger international consumer base.
Stephanie Murphy, from Let’s Talk Bitcoin, and Alan Safahi, founder and CEO of ZipZap, see the value in enabling freedom of speech through transactions outside the control of governments or without third-parties recording personal information.
However, for Bitcoin to become a mainstream monetary transfer mechanism, a number of issues need to be addressed, such as the noted legal uncertainties or the evolution of the current legacy infrastructure discussed by Maria Sparagis, President of DirectPayNet.
Ultimately, the major questions of adoption, future direction and industry winners continue to be hashed out.
Authored by Michael Smouha and Ronan Murphy, Contributors to On Bitcoin
Read other articles from the conference:
- Inside Bitcoins NYC Keynote: Is Bitcoin the New Financial Order?
- Finding Business Model Opportunities in Bitcoin – Inside Bitcoins NYC
- Building Bitcoin into the Core Architecture of the Web – Inside Bitcoins NYC
Building Bitcoin into the Core Architecture of the Web – Inside Bitcoins NYC
How to get Bitcoin into the hands of 2.4 billion people not using it today
Bitcoin has plenty of room to grow. With a market cap of roughly $1 billion USD, Bitcoin represents but a fraction of the United States’ $16.3 trillion USD money supply. Manu Sporny, founder of Digital Bazaar, is one of the people actively seeking to close the gap.
At the Inside Bitcoins NYC conference, Manu Sporny shared his answer to accelerate growth and provided a vision of adding 2.4 billion people to the Bitcoin ecosystem within the next five years.
Where might one find a market that large that can be on-boarded that quickly? To Sporny, the answer lies in the 2.4 billion people with access to the web and in the sheer global dominance of four popular web browsers: IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome.
The challenge that naturally follows is how to integrate Bitcoin into the browser. Sporny is tackling this challenge by pushing for new W3C standards for the browser that will allow for more simplified transactions over the web.
The argument is that exchanging funds over the Web is far more complicated than it needs to be. While we can exchange massive quantities of data nearly instantaneously, financial transactions are slowed due to the speed of old money, credit card numbers, waiting for block chain verifications, PCI compliance and the like.
Exploring a Bitcoin Web Payments Solution
Sporny articulated two paths to easier and faster financial transactions.
The first is PaySwarm, a currency-agnostic standard for Web Payments. PaySwarm, being commercialized through a system called Meritora, is the first open, universal standard for payments on the Web, allowing users to execute zero-click payments of USD, Euro, Bitcoins or any other currency of their choosing.
The second option described by Sporny is the WebPayment API, another standard for browser-based payments being developed by Mozilla. The API would enable one-click purchase directly from the browser.
Sporny is very bullish on Bitcoin and with the potential creation of new W3C standards that will spur Bitcoin use, it’s now “time for entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor.”
Authored by Michael Smouha and Ronan Murphy, Contributors to On Bitcoin
CC image by jurvetson
Finding Business Model Opportunities in Bitcoin – Inside Bitcoins NYC
Trends to watch and how to think about Bitcoin as a business
At the Inside Bitcoins NYC conference, Coinsetter CEO Jaron Lukasiewicz spoke to a packed crowd. His message: the current financial system is outdated and relies on critically dated infrastructure. He believes that “people involved in Bitcoin [are saying] this is not acceptable anymore.”
Exploring the current financial system he points to three to five fund transfer times under ACH payments and drawing experience from his previous startup in ticketing, companies paying over 40% of revenues out in credit card fees. Basically, in 2013, it is still exceptionally difficult to send money to a friend and this is leading to a customer revolution.
Today, he proposes, Bitcoin is the dominant virtual currency. Not simply in terms of transactions and value, but based on awareness – including awareness outside current users of the market. The first mover advantage is significant and Mr. Lukasiewicz asks us to spend time thinking about how it has the potential to become an “IP address for money.”
Coinsetter is a leveraged forex trading platform, focused on active traders. Originally he questioned the number of exchanges being set up at the moment and why there isn’t an original business model. On reflection he thinks this is actually important. The more liquidity that comes into the Bitcoin system, the better. It will draw more users; innovation and a greater focus on customers. The latter being a key concern for Mr. Lukasiewicz, there is “room for a lot more exchanges to come online, but it is important to focus on a particular customer.”
Bitcoin Companies Working with Government and Banks
Focusing on the themes that will lead to business opportunities, he has concerns about government regulation and how banks will interact with Bitcoin. One of his theories is that anonymous financial transfer systems will not be easily integrated into the current banking system. Know Your Customer concerns and regulations will be a significant hurdle, along with security for institutions with large holdings. When challenged on these points during Q&A, Mr. Lukasiewicz clarifies that he sees this as layers added on top of the current system, rather than a change to current Bitcoin protocols – apparently to the great relief of the audience.
In conclusion, he sees the best opportunities for those companies that firstly, concentrate on Bitcoin as a payments protocol, and secondly, have a strong focus on having a strong customer proposition and delivering an appealing experience.
Authored by Michael Smouha and Ronan Murphy, Contributors to On Bitcoin
