We’ve been wanting to give merchants a simple way to sell Bitcoin for the longest time. The hackathon at Money2020 in Las Vegas was the perfect opportunity to launch it and we did. www.coinback.io (also open-sourced on github)

Why does the community  need this?

The biggest problem in the Bitcoin ecosystem is that not enough people have bitcoins.

We need an easy and a simple way for people to get bitcoins without wiring money to a remote nation or entering online credit card details and waiting a few days. Dealing with a friendly trusted face is always a plus.

Our experience has shown us that people are willing to pay a big premium to buy bitcoin in person, especially the first time. Merchants are always hungry for new profitable revenue streams as well. Coinback.io is a win for all parties and has evolved from nine months of working with retail merchants on Bitcoin adoption.

  • With coinback.io you can easily go to your favorite merchant and buy a small amount of bitcoins instantly. Merchants can acquire bitcoins by selling his products/services for bitcoin.
  • Merchants bitcoins are not tied to the current bitcoin exchange rate, but have the average of the price he has acquired them at. So when a merchant sells his bitcoins he sees what is his average price and what is the current exchange price. Moreover he can decide premium on bitcoins he is selling.
  • A merchant can send Bitcoin to a customer who has no wallet and thanks to the blockchain.info api we create him a new wallet on the fly. The merchant has made profit, a customer has just acquired bitcoin from a trusted local source, the ecosystem has grown and a new bitcoiner may have been born.

We arrived in Vegas on Halloween night to charge up the batteries with entertainment. Our baggage was lost on the way and we didn’t have any costumes and only the clothes on our back. Artur managed to smuggle a mustache costume from Rickys in his pocket and Ray put on his glasses and was “jet lagged geek”.

Next 24 hours of coding and we released the product and successfully demoed the product in front of jurys. It was a win for us because we released something we had wanted to get out for months. The eco system really needs something like coinback.io and we need it open sourced. Please translate it and localize it around the globe. The more bitcoin for everyone the better.