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yuup
Curious, why would you do that? Why wouldn't you transfer coins to a wallet you control and then conduct the transaction from there? Doing it from Coinbase throws away anonymity -- why not just buy your drugs with a Visa card then?
personally, I prefer to do all my gray market drug purchases on the ol' regular internet with a prepaid debit card.
Also, it's worth noting that both Shift and Coinbase are YC companies.
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But that was not a disaster for bitcoin, that was a case of fraud and theft. Not much different to someone embezzling fiat from a firm e.g.secure investmen, and that wasn't a disaster for fiat currencies or the traditional banking system. I think that many people hold bitcoin and bitcoin businesses to a higher standard than they would companies that operate outside this sphere.
If someone stole 5% of all the world's fiat currency from an unregulated, uninsured financial institution (Which in that sense was no different from any other BTC exchange... So it's not like anyone had better options.) with customers not getting any recourse, that would be a disaster for fiat currencies. At least, it would be an unmitigated disaster for the Wild West style of regulating fiat currencies. People hold…
What about the $1bn stolen from moldovan banks?
There has been no customer recourse there.
Trillion? Really? That is an order of magnitude grater than bitcoins total market cap.
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Likely a considerably higher exchange rate + fee ... but hey, who cares when the people spending the Bitcoin are only spending it when it's likely only much higher than they acquired it for..
That only works if someone else is buying the bitcoin at the current exchange rate. Coinbase gets its dollars from someone to give to the merchant.
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Where it's headquartered? Or where it's doing business? Microsoft, for example, is making a strong distinction between its operations in the US vs Ireland.
Unfortunately, both. Because that is how financial laws work.
Seems like nobody understands how this can work, or why would they do that. Easy. You swipe your card, Coinbase pays with $, then Coinbase tries to sell enough of the bitcoins you have there to make it even (there might be a fee). So you need to have a bitcoin balance in Coinbase when you want to use this card. Now why would you do this? If you're asking yourself this question, there are high chances you are not the…
> There are a lot of people who made a lot of money in bitcoins, and who hold a LOT of bitcoins. This is going to be an easy way for them to spend it on a normal day-to-day basis. It's a wonderful way to laundry your drug money!
If you wanted to use a visa card, why would even bother with bitcoin? Or vise-versa
(Probably not with this card specifically, but if there was a Somalian equivalent...)
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Almost equally bad.
Perhaps we can quash the notion that financial privacy is "bad". Anyone who deals with international finance knows that KYC compliance is a joke and the required submission of sensitive personal documents to third-party companies is a major contributor to identity theft and fraud. Indeed, identity fraud is in many ways a product of policies that force companies to collect this data. Nor is there any sensible moral ar…
Citation needed.
I'm curious what the exchange rate looks like when purchasing stuff that's not in USD. If the conversion is the same as that of Bitcoin USD, then it would make this card super useful for people who travel a lot. What I mean is, it'd be cool if the card would do: - Bitcoin CAD - Bitcoin EUR - Bitcoin BHT - Bitcoin HKD - Bitcoin AUD So that we wouldn't need to do: - Bitcoin USD CAD - Bitcoin USD EUR - Bitcoin USD BHT -…
I'm curious if this could also be used to help with remittances. I have several friends who emigrated from countries around the world, and they struggle to find an easy way to remit to their parents. Bitcoin seems so close, but it's difficult for their folks to get it converted to local currency. The fees and hurdles they currently deal with are outrageous, and while it looks like the shift card is US only, it seems…
Witness the darling Square getting its lunch eaten by iZettle and Paypal (!) even in the UK, to say nothing of rest of Europe, to say nothing of rest of the world.
Everyone and their dog has been trying to solve remittances with technology at least since Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon. Ultimately it's much less a tech problem than a human problem.
You don't have bitcoin if you just have a balance in Coinbase, so this debit card really has no connection to Bitcoin at all. No transactions will reach the blockchain when you use this card.