Broker Overview

From Bittylicious
Revision as of 10:27, 24 November 2015 by Cocodude (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Once you are authorised as a broker, you should have access to the Seller button in the navigation panel.

Terminology

Each broker has one or more offers available, which is a combination of the following:

  • Country
  • Currency
  • Virtual currency (e.g. BTC)
  • Payment method
  • Direction (selling or buying)

For instance, you might have an offer available called GBP→BTC / GB / BANK which means that it is available for people buying BTC in Great British Pounds in Great Britain (which for purposes here includes Northern Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey) via UK bank transfer.

How a broker gets chosen

If you are the broker that fits the following criteria, the user will be given your payment details and the trade will be yours to complete:

  • The country matches your offer country.
  • The currency matches your offer currency.
  • You have this amount of Bitcoins available (taking away any coins in escrow).
  • You are offering coins at a more competitive price than anyone else.

Note that if two or more sellers are offering coins at an equally competitive price, Bittylicious chooses one of these brokers at random.

User purchase timeline

  1. The user initiates a trade. The trade starts in the ACCEPTED state.
  2. The user sees your payment details.
  3. The user makes payment using online banking.
  4. The user clicks I have sent payment. The trade progresses to the PAID state.
  5. If the broker has Send email on payment? set to Yes in your profile, he/she will be sent an email saying that payment has been completed.
  6. If the broker is trading automatically:
    1. The broker's bank software logs into the bank account at regular intervals.
    2. If a matching transaction (price and reference) is found, the software notifies Bittylicious.
  7. If the broker is trading manually:
    1. The broker checks his/her bank account at regular periods within the two hour window.
    2. The broker sees a payment that matches the amount and reference and does not look suspicious.
    3. The broker goes to the seller trade page and runs the PHP command just under the Account name this came from box. This command begins php sign.php. Do not, under any circumstances, paste your private key in here.
    4. The broker copies and pastes the output into the text box. This will always end in a =. If you are copy and pasting from Windows, ensure that you are not pasting additional new line or space characters.
    5. The broker enters the bank account name the payment appeared to come from (see the section below).
    6. The broker clicks Force complete.
  8. The trade changes to a COMPLETING stage.
  9. After 3-30 seconds, the trade changes to a RECEIVED state, or an ERROR state if an error occurred.

Account name this came from

The details that should be filled in this box vary by payment method. In all cases though, it should be identifying information identifying the sender's account. For most payment methods, thus should be an account name the payment came from, with the following exceptions:

  • Natwest/RBS PYC: Sender's phone number

Why do I need to sign trades?

Bittylicious's signing process (using sign.php) might seem a bit cumbersome but it serves some very useful purposes:

  • The Bittylicious web site and server itself cannot authorise trades. This means that should it ever be compromised, Bitcoins should not be lost.
  • It can be proven that you have authorised Bitcoins to be sent because only you hold the private key.
  • Signing can be done in an automated manner by the automatic login clients, so you just need to ensure that these are secure.
  • Reply attacks should be harder to perform because of the update ID field in sign.php - this means that the same trade cannot be signed twice and accepted by the Bitcoin sending server.