Bittylicious Blog

Bittylicious is now integrated with the excellent have i been pwned service created by well known security expert, Troy Hunt. This service collates used passwords from breaches and dumps when company data has been compromised.

For each user that newly logs in, Bittylicious will interrogate with the service to determine whether the password being used by the Bittylicious user is one that is commonly used and has been listed in one of many breaches. This means that from now onwards:

• Users will not be able to change their password to one that is very well known, i.e. used regularly by many others and appears in multiple lists.
• Privileged users (brokers and administrators) will not be able to use the service if their password is in any single list at all; the password will need to be changed before the service can be used.

We also intend on making other changes in the future, e.g. possibly decreasing limits if the account is more likely to be compromised, but we will assess the impact this has first.

If you’re a developer with any sort of sensitive service, consider also integrating. It’s a great project and a useful tool in the arsenal against compromised accounts.

Two new altcoins have been added to the Bittylicious exchange: DigiByte and Groestlcoin. These are both instantly available for purchasing via bank transfer (British Pounds), credit cards (in British Pounds, Euros and US Dollars) and SEPA transfers (Euros).

DigiByte is a quick coin with 15 second block timings, and was an early adopter of Segregated Witness. It also uses five different hashing algorithms in order to make it resistant to 51% attacks, and is GPU miner friendly.

Groestlcoin uses Grøstl-512 as its mining algorithm which is ASIC resistant and efficient, and thus ideal for GPU miners and associated centralisation. SegWit and the Lightning Network is also enabled, and there is a strong focus on anonymous transactions.

Sales of StartCOIN on the Bittylicious platform have been extremely low in the last few months meaning it is sadly facing removal from the platform. The last sale was on 19th December 2016 for around £50 and there has not been a single sale in 2017 yet.

To declutter the platform and stop CPU cycles from being wasted, we are intending on turning off the StartCOIN daemon at the end of March 2017 unless there is a significant uplift in StartCOIN sales.

Sadly, we have removed Vertcoin for sale from Bittylicious because of a lack of demand. The last sale was on 9th February 2015.

It is looking like Worldcoin will be the next to go, with the last sale on 29th March 2015 and only £454 worth of sales in the last three months. Quark and Peercoin are faring a little better, but are still at risk.

Bittylicious needs to, from time to time, purge coins that are no longer in demand. Each coin on Bittylicious takes up significant resources and stops being sustainable once demand drops to a low level.

At Bittylicious, we maintain a full node for each of the coins we have available for sale. This uses up server resources and also takes up extra page space.

Occasionally, we look at the altcoins we offer to see if any are under-performing, i.e. the interest in them is low. We were surprised to see that the sales on some of the altcoins haven’t just been low, they’ve been low to the point of making them unsustainable on Bittylicious.

Four altcoins are at serious risk, with two others also under-performing. We consider an altcoin to be at serious risk when the sales generated is less than or around £100 per month. This results in a profit of less than £1 per month, so this cutoff is already very generous. We really like all the coins on here and they all offer some sort of innovation, but at these levels, we cannot maintain them on the platform. For comparison, the amount of Bitcoin sales over the last three months is around £2 million.

The coins at serious risk of removal are (and total amount sold over the last three months):

• Vertcoin (£116.33 and €47.95)
• Quark (£227.87)
• Peercoin (£292.05)
• Worldcoin (£300.77)

The other coins under-performing are:

• Feathercoin (£522.39)
• Blackcoin (£584.91)

We need more engagement from the communities of these coins in order to promote them on Bittylicious, and also possibly for other sellers of these altcoins to offer them. A Worldcoin team member contacted us just before we published this and they have been promoting Bittylicious, raising their position in this list. This is the right thing to do – get the word out there and let us know if we can do anything to help, and we encourage all of the other altcoin teams to also get more engaged.

Bittylicious recently suspended its cash payments option but we have been in intense negotiations about how best to try and continue this service.

The cash payment service involves taking a payment slip to any one of over 10,000 Payzone locations in the UK. These are typically corner stores and other small shops. The Bitcoins are sent within a few minutes of the cash being accepted by the shop. It’s a quick and easy way to buy Bitcoins without needing a bank account, but it does require ID to be uploaded.

Cash payments are not a money spinner for Bittylicious and actually are not very popular. We typically sell £1,000-£2,000 per month, and this results in a profit for us of no more than £50 per month. Cash is often the cheapest way to buy Bitcoins on Bittylicious, or at least close to the cheapest.

Bittylicious has been given an offer to continue this service but at a minimum monthly cost of £250. This doesn’t make sense financially at the moment, but we like this service a lot and we know that some of you also enjoy using this option.

What would encourage you to use the cash service more often? Should we continue offering this service? We cannot subsidise it forever so we need to increase usage of the service. We would welcome your comments below.

Cash payments on Bittylicious are suspended for the time being. We are working with the cash payment processor to see if this is likely to be a temporary issue or permanent, but it is likely that cash payments will not be available for at least one week.

Cash payments on Bittylicious involve going to a Payzone location, typically a local corner store, of which there are over 10,000 in the UK. We are working hard to try and maintain this popular functionality, so please bear with us.

Bittylicious has recent been security validated and has been found to be operating in compliance with PCI DSS standards.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is designed to increase controls around credit cardholder data to reduce credit card fraud. Bittylicious processes Visa and Master credit card transactions and becoming compliant with these standards is becoming more important.

Bittylicious does not store cardholder information but merely captures it and passes it on to payment processors. This significantly decreases the available attack area, meaning that cardholder data is much more likely to be secure.

Bittylicious already follows all best practices when it comes to security, and the PCI compliance status was granted immediately after the first network scan with no major issues found.

Marc Warne from Bittylicious, along with law professionals Rich Folsom and Michael Taylor, will be hosting a webinar at The Law Society titled Digital Currencies – What Do You Need To Know? This will last for one hour on 15th October, costs £40 and is broadcast from The Law Society, Chancery Lane, London.

Marc will be providing a very quick introduction to Bitcoins before touching on the global legal and regulatory situation and UK-centred issues that impact Bittylicious. The other two presenters will be focusing on the common law and statutory law positions. Questions will be welcomed from the audience.

London, 6th August 2014. Bittylicious, the UK’s premier cryptocurrency vendor, now allows users to buy Darkcoins and StartCOINs quickly and easily.

Bittylicious has added Darkcoin and StartCOIN to its service after a long altcoin assessment process. Both of these coins can immediately be bought by users with UK bank accounts within minutes, and these will shortly be available via Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards for European citizens.

Darkcoin is an altcoin which, unlike Bitcoin, has comprehensive, in built support for true anonymity. This is done by changes to the Darkcoin client and the infrastructure of the Darkcoin network. Users can choose whether transactions should be public or private with private transactions being automatically split into smaller denominations and pooled with the split-up payments of other users.

StartCOIN is designed as a crowdfunding coin. It is an ambitious project which is designed to be used to pledge support for crowdfunding projects on the StartJOIN site. Rewards are additionally distributed to projects and also to users that choose to support various projects.

In order to make room for these two coins, Bittylicious has removed three altcoins from its lineup. These are Auroracoin, Namecoin and Primecoin. Although Auroracoin unfortunately seems to have failed, Namecoin and Primecoin are still innovative projects, but the volumes and interest from buyers of these coins has made these unsustainable on the Bittylicious platform.