Broker Overview

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

Terminology

Each seller has one or more offers available, which is a combination of countries and currency. For instance, you might have an offer available called GBP / GB which means that it is available for people paying in Great British Pounds in Great Britain (which for purposes here includes North Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey).

How a seller gets chosen

If you are the seller that fits the following criteria, the buyer 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 price cheaper than anyone else.

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

Trade timeline

  1. The buyer initiates a trade.
  2. The buyer sees your payment details.
  3. The buyer makes payment using online banking.
  4. The buyer clicks I have sent payment.
  5. If the seller 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 seller is trading automatically:
    1. The seller'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 seller is trading manually:
    1. The seller checks his/her bank account at regular periods within the two hour window.
    2. The seller sees a payment that matches the amount and reference and does not look suspicious.
    3. The seller goes to the seller trade page and runs the PHP command just above the Force complete box.
    4. The seller copies and pastes the output into the text box.
    5. The seller 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.

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.