<story><title>Thanks for the feedback. I&apos;ve closed the service</title><url>http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.829697.9</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rubypay</author><text>Just saw this post about our startup, I&apos;ll clarify some things since some people seem interested.&lt;p&gt;RubyPay was a points based payment system for digital content that anyone could use. Points were bought for cash, and redeemable for cash.  It was released because we wanted to generate some feedback on the model.&lt;p&gt;RubyPay was closed so quickly because we realized some problems, and didn&apos;t want any live transactions going through our system that we&apos;d later have to refund.  Among some of the problems were:&lt;p&gt;1) allowing anyone to sell content without a screening process for them or the content&lt;p&gt;2) allowing consumers to redeem the points for cash, which brought a whole new set of laws into play&lt;p&gt;3) not anticipating all of the ways that fraud could propagate through the system&lt;p&gt;We&apos;re currently working on the service to address these and other issues.  We&apos;ve also discussed the business further with lawyers, became PCI-DSS compliant, and are in the process of forming industry partnerships.  As always thanks for the feedback (there was another discussion thread on HN too), it helped us quickly pivot and iterate on our model, and probably saved us tons of time and headaches.</text></comment>
<story><title>Thanks for the feedback. I&apos;ve closed the service</title><url>http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.829697.9</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mtigas</author><text>Can you imagine how much worse this could have been if they’d never posted this and simply plowed ahead?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Knowing when you’re in over your head&lt;/i&gt; is crucial and it looks like they caught it early enough since they opened up the feedback thread. Hopefully they’ll take this, regroup, and have a bit more ground to stand on in the next phase or project.</text></comment>