Bittr Q&A follow-up

This is the promised follow-up Q&A article on Bittr, a company from the Netherlands that provides a convenient service to dollar cost average Bitcoin via bank transfers.

As usual, all my public work is available for free. I didn’t receive anything for my testing.

This feedback was provided by Ruben Waterman. Ruben is the founder of Bittr and a passionate Bitcoin advocate since 2013.

Check out my previous article on dollar cost averaging Bitcoin if you didn’t already for some additional context.

Question: Why and when did you build Bittr? What is your long term vision for Bittr?

Ruben: Doing my MSc in Digital Currency (University of Nicosia), we had to come up with a financial service that exists in traditional finance but not in crypto (yet). Back when I lived in the US, I was using Acorns (fantastic app for making investing easy to the laymen), so there it was: my goal was to build something like that for bitcoin! We were building the product between November 2017 and April 2018, then setting up the company and getting a bank account took another 4 months, so we launched in October 2018. Long term vision, add more ways to stack sats:

1. Invest your spare change into bitcoin (using PSD2 bank APIs) “monitor” spending and round up every purchase to the nearest number and stack sats with that, of course only with the user’s consent. This is a perfect use case for lightning payments :)
2. Partnering up with companies that would invest into your bitcoin piggybank (example: https://www.acorns.com/earn/foundmoney/ ), basically reward people in bitcoin spending fiat with certain brands (it’s better than cashback because it’s usually more than just 1–2%)

Question: How do you imagine your average user / how will he interact and use your services?

Ruben: Average user would be people that have either understood the power of DCA’ing (most of my users today) but I’m working on a new website to be more appealing to complete newcomers.

Question: What new features are on your roadmap in the next few months? (Lightning? ;-)

Ruben: Most important feature is support for xpub keys so that we can payout every payment into a new address. This has been really bothering me since the beginning but I had to keep the balance between “easy to use” and good privacy. Of course, the default option will still be to enter a single address, but there will be an advanced button to do xpub’s. I’d love to support lightning payments, unfortunately spontaneous payments / watch towers is not stable enough yet to use in a production environment. As soon as it is, I will definitely get that implemented!

Question: Do you have any plans to support other cryptocurrencies with your service?

Ruben: NO, Bittr will forever remain bitcoin-only :)

Question: Where and how long do you store my personal data? Can i request deletion?

Ruben: Your personal data is stored in The Netherlands and you cannot request deletion. Basically any financial institution is bound by regulatory requirements to store your data for 7 years (or at least 5 years once you terminate the service), which supersedes any legal requirements following the GDPR regulation of last year.

Question: What does your infrastructure look like (in layman terms)?

Ruben: As people only use our website once (to sign up) the infrastructure is quite basic and doesn’t require very powerful stuff, it’s just a website after all. We also have a bitcoin core node running as we don’t want to rely on any third parties to read/send data on the bitcoin blockchain. The database and back end is separated and runs on a different server (this part is reading out the bank APIs, talks to the exchange APIs and makes the bitcoin RPC calls to our node).

Question: How many members does your team have?

Ruben: I’m the only Bittr employee but I do work with two contractors for building the service and maintaining it nowadays.

Conclusion

Hopefully this gave you some insight in the way Bittr is set up and how the team around Ruben plans to improve it in the future . If you have any suggestions, please let Ruben know via Twitter or an email to hello@getbittr.com!

Thanks for reading that far & have a lot of fun! BTC donations also welcome and never forget:

Have fun, this is crypto after all!

Disclaimer

“The above references an opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. These ideas and strategies should never be used without first assessing your own personal and financial situation, or without consulting a financial professional. Do your f*cking homework and don’t gamble.”