Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: club on July 20, 2012, 12:31 pm
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Not a how-to question. I’ve used them many times. Guess Im just curious what the roles of both bitinstant.com and zipzapinc are in the process of using them to get BTC. When you send a Moneygram payment, it goes to zipzap. Is zipzap the ones giving you the coins then? Or are they sending some kind of message to bitinstant, and they are the ones to give you the coins? Why do they both need to be involved? Why cant one company handle the whole deal?
For the first time, my coins arent showing up after a day, and Im not even sure which company to contact first.
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I don't know exactly how it works, but it seems each company in the chain plays its role. Who did you initiate the transaction with? For example, did you start at bitinstant.com? If so, talk to their tech support and they'll track down why the payment hasn't arrived. They generally worked flawless for me but recently had a glitch where it took much longer than usual to process.So I'm not so sure of the "instant" part of their name right now! But when it works it is a fantastic service. I wonder what has caused the recent glitches.
Back to your question: it seems like one company serves as a broker and uses the services of other companies and banks. The transaction initiates with bitinstant and then a partner company is used to move the movey (zipzap or trustcash or some company like that). That partner's role is to have the ability to take dollars in and do an electronic fund transfer to the receiving agent partner. It isn't clear to me whether the wire agent converts the cash to btc, but I don't think so. I think they then pay the funds to a company that trades cash for btc. They seem to get the btc at the high end of the bidding range which suggests to me their model is get the btc sooner rather than wait for the best asking price. If I had to take a guess, I'd guess the money changes hands at least 3 or more times. Each company adds their own value to the process. I find the fees quite reasonable.
Although lots of sellers here are selling btc for no fees beyond whatever costs you incur getting the money to them. I did a deal like that with seller and got a much better price than I get from the other cash-to-btc mechanisms. It seems the value proposition bitinstant is trying to offer is speed and ease of purchase.