document bitcoin processes

[chadwhitacre]

Reticketing from gratipay/gratipay.com#2148:

I'd love a documented process on how we actually manage bitcoin at some point (just to reduce your bus factor a bit)

[pjf]

@pjf Cool. Be sure to assign to me anything you want me to actually look at. My approach to Freshdesk is to only look at the "My Open and Pending Issues" filter, and only through the web (no email). I'm trying to check every day, so if something is especially urgent please also drop me a line on IRC or Twitter.

I guess this highlights a point of my confusion. We get a lot of messages along the line of:

• You just sent %f BTC to %s
• A sell of %f BTC has been initiated
• The %f BTC you purchased are now available
• etc etc

While the emails specify the amounts of wallets, there's no clear way to link those back to users or tickets. I haven't been assigning these to you, but if they're things you should look at, then I can.

Likewise, if there are things I can manage (oh, X's bitcoins have cleared, I can credit them and close this issue), then that's grand. Although without any clear way of linking transactions to tickets, that could tricky. Does coinbase give you any way of doing that? (Eg, having a transaction note?)

~ pjf

[chadwhitacre]

Yeah, you're right: the unclear action item associated with the messages we get from Coinbase are symptomatic of our confusing process for handling bitcoin payins and payouts. I'll make reference to those messages when I get around to writing this doc. There are some nuances around cross-linking Coinbase transactions to Freshdesk tickets that I'll address as well.

[rohitpaulk]

We don't do bitcoin anymore, closing this.

[techtonik]

Still the answer about why Credit Card -> BTC is illegal is not easy to understand. Even without BTC, blockchain is the future of transactions. If we can validate the ownership of BTC account (like Coinbase could be an authority), I don't see why we can't do transfers.