Some background: It's an Android wallet, where you maintain a euro balance (held by Bridgewalker for you). Using those funds, bitcoins will be bought at current market price whenever you want to send any. This allows you to use Bitcoin only as a payment mechanism, without being affected by the exchange rate volatility. You fund your account via Bitcoin as well, which will be exchanged for euros at current market price and credited to your account.
So: Bitcoin as transaction mechanism, Euro as store of value.
No, you cannot use this app to buy bitcoins. So I'm afraid it does not solve one of the hardest challenges Bitcoin still faces, which is how to get any. You'll have to figure out the best/cheapest way depending on where you are.
If you happen, for example, to stand in front of a Bitcoin ATM, you can use that to turn fiat that you have in the form of cash into fiat that you have in your Bridgewalker account (by buying Bitcoin from the ATM and sending it to your Bridgewalker address), which you can then later spend wherever it says "Bitcoin accepted here".
A lot of exchanging back and forth for sure, but basically the idea of "Bitcoin only as tranfer mechanism" applied at every step. It's also just a technical prototype. In practice it might make sense to cut some of those exchange fees by having a more direct way to fund your account, at the cost of only being available in certain markets/countries. For this prototype I went with the easiest solution: only Bitcoin in, and Bitcoin out.
Quite nice to see that this is written in Haskell.
The idea of a bitcoin app that stores funds in another currency makes a lot of sense for people who primarily want to use bitcoin as an exchange mechanism without speculating on its future value.
I'm curious what service this uses to purchase bitcoins, or if it uses its own exchange; it's not comforting to see a reference to the MtGox API, but hopefully they're only used to find out the current value. (Even then, they're not a reliable metric for the true value of bitcoins, since they're not sufficiently liquid with respect to governmental currencies, but that'd still be better than actually attempting to use them as a currency exchange.)
Also fascinating that despite all the talk of Bitcoin only being used by speculators, there's demand for tools which allow it to be used purely as an exchange mechanism.
It does use Mt.Gox in the background for the actual exchange process. There is not enough volume (yet) to make an internal exchange practical, there would be too much risk at the moment, at least for my taste.
When I started on this project, Mt.Gox was pretty much the only choice, because of the large market share (> 80% at the time) and the necessary volume and small enough market spread. Their withdrawal delays are annoying, that's true. It does not affect me directly, since it's only Bitcoin in and Bitcoin out for me, where so far Mt.Gox had pretty much never delays. But it does distort the market price, which means you get a great rate when you fund your Bridgewalker account (because BTC is overvalued on Mt.Gox) and get a bad rate when you spend it (again, because BTC is overvalued on Mt.Gox) - so in the end it kind of zeroes out for you as a user, but it's still confusing for the user, why you have this offset.
There aren't many alternatives though. Bitstamp could be one, but I'm worried that they still might run into regulatory issues down the line. Also none of the other exchanges offer real-time streaming updates about changes to the order book, like Mt.Gox does, which is very useful to keep track of the market. Kraken could be an interesting alternative to Mt.Gox, since they seem to run a solid operation. If they add such a streaming API with real-time updates about the order book and maybe get some more volume, then I would consider switching the backend over.
Or someone else does it first - it's open source now, after all! ;-)
Or maybe you could hedge the whole thing just with some financial swap construction, but I haven't looked into that too much and it's not my area of expertise. I would be interested to find out how much something like that would cost in terms of overhead/fees and who would be a partner to provide such financial services for Bitcoin. If you have some input regarding this, feel free to contact me - my email address is on the Bridgewalker website.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 28.2 ms ] threadSo: Bitcoin as transaction mechanism, Euro as store of value.
If you happen, for example, to stand in front of a Bitcoin ATM, you can use that to turn fiat that you have in the form of cash into fiat that you have in your Bridgewalker account (by buying Bitcoin from the ATM and sending it to your Bridgewalker address), which you can then later spend wherever it says "Bitcoin accepted here".
A lot of exchanging back and forth for sure, but basically the idea of "Bitcoin only as tranfer mechanism" applied at every step. It's also just a technical prototype. In practice it might make sense to cut some of those exchange fees by having a more direct way to fund your account, at the cost of only being available in certain markets/countries. For this prototype I went with the easiest solution: only Bitcoin in, and Bitcoin out.
The idea of a bitcoin app that stores funds in another currency makes a lot of sense for people who primarily want to use bitcoin as an exchange mechanism without speculating on its future value.
I'm curious what service this uses to purchase bitcoins, or if it uses its own exchange; it's not comforting to see a reference to the MtGox API, but hopefully they're only used to find out the current value. (Even then, they're not a reliable metric for the true value of bitcoins, since they're not sufficiently liquid with respect to governmental currencies, but that'd still be better than actually attempting to use them as a currency exchange.)
When I started on this project, Mt.Gox was pretty much the only choice, because of the large market share (> 80% at the time) and the necessary volume and small enough market spread. Their withdrawal delays are annoying, that's true. It does not affect me directly, since it's only Bitcoin in and Bitcoin out for me, where so far Mt.Gox had pretty much never delays. But it does distort the market price, which means you get a great rate when you fund your Bridgewalker account (because BTC is overvalued on Mt.Gox) and get a bad rate when you spend it (again, because BTC is overvalued on Mt.Gox) - so in the end it kind of zeroes out for you as a user, but it's still confusing for the user, why you have this offset.
There aren't many alternatives though. Bitstamp could be one, but I'm worried that they still might run into regulatory issues down the line. Also none of the other exchanges offer real-time streaming updates about changes to the order book, like Mt.Gox does, which is very useful to keep track of the market. Kraken could be an interesting alternative to Mt.Gox, since they seem to run a solid operation. If they add such a streaming API with real-time updates about the order book and maybe get some more volume, then I would consider switching the backend over.
Or someone else does it first - it's open source now, after all! ;-)
Or maybe you could hedge the whole thing just with some financial swap construction, but I haven't looked into that too much and it's not my area of expertise. I would be interested to find out how much something like that would cost in terms of overhead/fees and who would be a partner to provide such financial services for Bitcoin. If you have some input regarding this, feel free to contact me - my email address is on the Bridgewalker website.
btw if you plan to make an iOS app, maybe you'll be delighted to know that you can apply as an open source developer to free Xamarin licenses: http://resources.xamarin.com/open-source-contributor.html
(I guess writing F# would make you happier than ObjectiveC, given that you wrote your server side in Haskell ;)