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OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

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Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#41

Post by jmtame »

rdl wrote: post #39
jmtame wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has the classic chicken and egg problem that you'll face when you start any type of online dating startup. Niche dating startups are even harder to start because you have an implicit filter to start off with, and the problem with all filters is they reduce the pool. If you have a small pool of users to choose from, you'll have an even smaller pool of users with other filters applied. So you can search for keywords…

It would be interesting to have a site (dating or HR or commentary) where you could have specific facts/tags in a profile and some serious checking of those specific facts. e.g. for a dating site you'd have "less than 300 pounds", "graduated from Stanford", "not married", "hivfree" for an HR site you'd have "not a CISSP", "graduated from Caltech in 2000 in CS", "US Citizen", "worked for Google 2000-2004", etc. Indivi…

This is something that needs to exist, and I'm very excited about it. We may build this at CupidWithFriends. I've thought about tags for a while now, the problem is you don't have an identity layer to actually verify whether the tags are true or not. Think LinkedIn endorsements, but for dating. Lying is a huge problem, 81% of all online dating users will lie about some aspect of themselves.

I wrote this comment before I made it to the end of what you wrote about LinkedIn endorsements. The implementation is still up for debate, but the idea is compelling at the very least. I do think that LinkedIn endorsements are worthless because I haven't yet used them, but that idea distills a person down to their core. We're basically trying to solve that problem through the single question that gets more responses than any other on our site: "describe your friend using only three words."

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#42

Post by jmtame »

rdl wrote: post #40
jmtame wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny things happen when companies get acquired. They stop acting like a startup and they start acting like large, slow companies, which is unfortunate. That blog was single-handedly what drove their traffic more than anything. Everyone I talk to said they found out about OkCupid through that blog. OkCupid knows this. The founders said they almost quit and that blog was their saving grace. Is it any coincidence that…

The quizzes, posted on livejournal, were what actually drove their early users. The blog came way later. Quizzes are non-dating/non-sexual, back in the early 2000s where among I honestly had no idea OKC was actually a dating site until I'd had an account for a year or two. I just had it to answer quizzes.

Very interesting. I recall watching an interview with Sam Yagan and he said they were about to give up, but that blog was the one thing that saved the company. The guy writing the blogs had a math background, and it worked tremendously well.

I wish I had that link, but I'll have to look it up.

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#43

Post by rmc »

slapresta wrote: post #38
rmc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bitcoin volume increase, miners will probably start charging transaction fees themselves. So that'll increase.

That's not how Bitcoin works. Miners can't charge me anything. They can choose to not process my transaction if it doesn't have enough fees for them.

Sure, it's all optional. But if all the miners are charging a small amount, and you face a choice between "wait a week for the transaction to complete" or "pay 1%", then BitCoin essentially has fees.

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#44

Post by rdl »

jmtame wrote: post #42
rdl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quizzes, posted on livejournal, were what actually drove their early users. The blog came way later. Quizzes are non-dating/non-sexual, back in the early 2000s where among I honestly had no idea OKC was actually a dating site until I'd had an account for a year or two. I just had it to answer quizzes.

Very interesting. I recall watching an interview with Sam Yagan and he said they were about to give up, but that blog was the one thing that saved the company. The guy writing the blogs had a math background, and it worked tremendously well. I wish I had that link, but I'll have to look it up.

I think quizzes/etc. on LJ got them early users, but then there was a big decline in LJ around the time MySpace got popular (2005-2006?), which probably hurt OKC. FB becoming popular essentially killed it. The blog, IIRC, was around that time -- so for a while the "dating" site had a bunch of accounts of people who were originally there for quizzes, many of whom were no longer active.

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#45

Post by tachion »

wladimir wrote: post #25
krichman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was funny, but downvoted because it was also rude and unproductive. I wish we could talk about Bitcoin without saying either 1. that its expected value is negative infinity dollars and pyramid tulip 2. that its expected value is infinity dollars and oppression fiat. I think both sides are well aware of the counter arguments. But even though that will never happen, I think we can stop short of allowing…

Yes. You'd expect a community such as hacker news to be above the usual nerd-shaming.

You'd expect that from any community, but unfortunately, as much as you'd expect that, that much its not the case, regardless of the community type. Simply put, people are everywhere.

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#46

Post by mseebach »

hkmurakami wrote: post #3

Do businesses that accept bitoins for payments typically immediately cash it out on exchanges or do they actually carry the "FX" risk? edit: since MtGox only charges a fixed %age fee for transactions, automating a conversion into USD wouldn't cost any more than doing periodic larger transactions (other than the development and maintenance cost of such a system

Generally (I can't speak for the concrete case), when a business accepts payment in different currencies, it's because they intend to hold that currency, typically because they can settle liabilities in that currency.

Pure speculation, but this could simply be a case of OKCupid wanting to support the Bitcoin ecosystem by providing a service that can be paid for directly in Bitcoin, thus raising the attractiveness of accepting Bitcoin as payment, further strengthening the system. To do this, they'll probably have to put the long-term net value of their Bitcoin holdings as zero, but they can probably afford that.

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#47

Post by goodside »

hkmurakami wrote: post #3

Do businesses that accept bitoins for payments typically immediately cash it out on exchanges or do they actually carry the "FX" risk? edit: since MtGox only charges a fixed %age fee for transactions, automating a conversion into USD wouldn't cost any more than doing periodic larger transactions (other than the development and maintenance cost of such a system

Right now, we (OkCupid) don't hold assets in BTC. It's converted immediately to USD, in which we denominate the original prices. The BTC price fluctuates with the exchange rate.

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#48

Post by sneak »

wladimir wrote: post #25
krichman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was funny, but downvoted because it was also rude and unproductive. I wish we could talk about Bitcoin without saying either 1. that its expected value is negative infinity dollars and pyramid tulip 2. that its expected value is infinity dollars and oppression fiat. I think both sides are well aware of the counter arguments. But even though that will never happen, I think we can stop short of allowing…

Yes. You'd expect a community such as hacker news to be above the usual nerd-shaming.

It's called tongue-in-cheek self-referential humor.

Naturally, you'd expect a community such as Hacker News to be below such subtlety. :D

PS: I am a fat nerd wearing a black t-shirt, love bitcoin, and have used OKCupid to get dozens of successful dates over the last 8 years.

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#49

Post by patio11 »

hkmurakami wrote: post #3

Do businesses that accept bitoins for payments typically immediately cash it out on exchanges or do they actually carry the "FX" risk? edit: since MtGox only charges a fixed %age fee for transactions, automating a conversion into USD wouldn't cost any more than doing periodic larger transactions (other than the development and maintenance cost of such a system

Do businesses that accept bitoins for payments typically immediately cash it out on exchanges or do they actually carry the "FX" risk?

People in the Bitcoin community believe that these options are mutually exclusive, but they're not. If you're doing a dual currency transaction in a period of high volatility, somebody is paying for that exchange risk. It's either the customer, the payment processor, or the merchant, or possibly two of them, but it certainly isn't no-one.

There were multiple periods today in which Bitcoin fell more than 10% in 15 minutes. If I were insane enough to sell Bingo Card Creator for Bitcoin, and then gave an elementary schoolteacher a quote for 0.42785714285714285714285714285714 BTC ($29.95 at 70 to the dollar), it's entirely possible that in the five minutes of thinking it took to process everything on the screen, the 0.42785714285714285714285714285714 BTC that I received would be worth only $27.81 at market prices. Hmm, that's funny, I just paid 7.1% in transaction fees before paying the transaction fees. (We're obviously operating in a perverse hypothetical world where elementary schoolteachers would both understand that option, have BTC available to spend, and be happy spending them, and where I would consider actually implementing this.)

It's possible that the payment processor I was working with would absorb this risk for me, because they hope to keep my business. That would be an extraordinary dangerous decision for them, because they're now running their merchant payments operation as a sideline to currency speculation. (Which I suppose makes them a perfect fit for the Bitcoin community.)

Re: OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase

#50

Post by Sidnicious »

jmtame wrote: post #31
codeulike wrote: post #28

Wait, since when did OKCupid start charging? They were free when I was on there (before the match.com takeover)

It was after their acquisition by IAC in 2011. Match.com is owned by IAC, so technically it was taken over by IAC. The CEO said multiple times they'd never charge, but plans tend to change after you get acquired.

Paying (for A-List) is entirely optional and gets you extra, nonessential features (like no ads and extra search parameters). It's been around since 2009, long before IAC bought us. Using OkCupid is still, and will stay, free.
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