Quote from: dannotestein on June 01, 2015, 07:27:41 pm

You can purchase BitShares using Bitcoin at: http://blocktrades.us

Apparently not

It's been like that all day...

Well, not all day, it was down while we were tied up in Monday design meeting (bitshares client got confused and needed to be re-indexed), but it's back up now.

I believe Shapeshift.io let's you exchange any digital currency into another.

BlockTrades.us and Metaexchange.info also support these pairs

Quote from: roadscape on May 15, 2015, 06:01:19 pm

There's also https://blocktrades.us/
Suggested deposit limit: 6.61478521 BTC
(this limit represents a "safe fraction" of their reserves)

Whoa, why is blocktrades able to transfer so much more than MetaExchange?
Are they a BitShares based DAC?
Do they have huge fees or something?
Sorry for the barrage of questions

Hi Ken,

BlockTrades can handle large transfers primarily because we maintain large "pools" of each asset we supply. This is mainly a matter of our capitalization level, although some of the pricing and market-making algorithms we use are also a factor.

BlockTrades isn't a BitShares-based DAC, it's just a company like Metaexchange, but  we were comfortable to risk a fair amount of money to provide good liquidity for large investors. Our pools can run low, and just like metaexchange, we have to buy on external exchanges when there is too much of an imbalance in the flow of transactions (for example, if more people are buying BTS with BTC than vice versa for a sustained period of time).

As a practical matter, however, it's generally cheaper to buy a large quantity from BlockTrades than from an exchange, unless you have a lot of free time on your hands, because we're slowly buying over time, whereas if you tried to quickly buy up a large quantity on an exchange, you would end up buying most of the asset at a higher price than the "feed" price.

Metaexchange is better advertised, in large part because of their placement on bitsharesblocks, so our higher liquidity is our best counter to that. From what I can tell, we get fewer, larger orders and they get more smaller orders, so I suspect the business level is somewhat balanced between the two companies.

Rates between metaexchange and blocktrades are reasonably close I would say, although I suspect we've generally offered a slight edge in price.

We also allow direct Credit-Card to cryptocurrency conversions, which allows buyers to eliminated the fee associated with the intermediate fiat-to-bitcoin conversion. These purchases are currently processed manually, and only for larger quantity orders (i.e 2K USD or more).

best regards,

Dan

P.S. Just to dispel any rumours about "dev funds", "AGS funds" were not used to buy our initial pools. The pools were purchased with my personal BTC, some as AGS contributions that resulted in BTS in the genesis block and later via exchange purchases.

Hi all,

I saw a post selling a large block of NOTES today, and realized that we apparently never announced on the trading subforum that http://blocktrades.us is offering NOTES for sale. You can buy NOTES there with BTC, BTS, BitUSD, BitCNY, and BitBTC.

Quote from: dannotestein on May 01, 2015, 06:00:46 pm

Our site, http://Blocktrades.us is probably the simplest, most effective way to acquire a large BTS stake I think.

First I've heard of your site. I'll give it a try. Do you have an affiliate program?

We plan on setting up a program like that before too long. It will be tied in through our new "user account" support.

To that end, I think that all gateways and bridges should also have an api that developers can use. It doesn't make sense to me that blocktrades.us does haven't a public api.

We do have an API, and we're more than willing to share it with anyone who wishes to access it, we just haven't formally published it yet as it's subject to potentially rapid evolution right now, but that will certainly happen. It's at a lower priority level right now because there hasn't yet been a lot of interest expressed in accessing at the API level, but we did just recently send one of the forum members information on how to make calls to get current pricing and suggested deposit limit info.

http://blocktrades.us has added pairs for purchasing DVS with BTS and BTC. Since there's no official feeds for DVS, we just set an arbitrary exchange rate of 1 BTS = 10 DVS.

This isn't intended to set any real economic value on DVS, we just wanted to setup a simple mechanism for easily obtaining small amounts of DVS for testing purposes and for generating DVS transactions to DevShares accounts. In particular, this is definitely not recommended as a method of acquiring DVS for speculation purposes and there's no reverse flow that supports buying anything with DVS on blocktrades.us...

Wasn't sure you were same guy that wildpig mentioned in skype, but just in case you're not I've sent you some DVS.