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Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

seymour-locksmiths.co.uk

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Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#51

Post by eropple »

joshstrange wrote: post #10

It's about time we admit the emperor has no clothes. BTC/ETH/XYY/123 can store value (I don't care to get into the fluctuations right now) and moving it around can be a lot easier than outdated systems like ACH but they are terrible for paying for things. Maybe something like the lightning network or similar will be able to solve part of that but accepting BTC has always been more of a fad/PR-move than an actual busi…

> moving it around can be a lot easier than outdated systems like ACH

To be specific: a lot easier than outdated systems in the United States.

If you do any work outside the United States, this is much less of a thing.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#52

Post by acdha »

dnautics wrote: post #24
acdha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only value Bitcoin has is group consensus. If nobody has a need to use it, the values of otherwise-meaningless numbers will trend to zero.

Literally true for every currency at some level. I suppose you could use a greenback as very poor toilet paper.

The part you're leaving out is that most currencies are backed by governments with significant economies and that backing creates a substantial market because you use those currencies to pay your taxes and government workers and contracts are paid using that currency.

In contrast, a pure fiat currency like Bitcoin has no inherent value and no built-in demand. If something else becomes popular, there's zero anchor for anyone who doesn't have a substantial holding and the pitch of “you should use this so I get rich” is not generally compelling.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#53

Post by acdha »

jondubois wrote: post #47
acdha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only value Bitcoin has is group consensus. If nobody has a need to use it, the values of otherwise-meaningless numbers will trend to zero.

'Need' is a relative term. If you ask me what I need, I'll say I need a house to live in, air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. If you ask Mark Zuckerberg what he needs, he'll say "All that can be counted". Mark Zuckerberg has much more money than you or me. So when it comes to valuing things on the open market, his opinion of what 'Need' means matters a lot more.

That doesn't really relate to anything I wrote. My question was that if Bitcoin collapsed tomorrow, who'd notice other than the get-rich-quick crowd? Statistically nobody uses it for daily transactions and almost everyone has other options which are some combination of cheaper, faster, safer, and easier to use. There just isn't a long-term anchor pushing people to use that particular system, certainly not at the level needed to sustain the high infrastructure costs.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#54

Post by theandrewbailey »

jondubois wrote: post #31
theandrewbailey wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is terrible for storing value.

It's been a great store of value over the past 6 years. It has outperformed every major index and currency. If you had invested just $10K in Bitcoin in May 2013, by July 2013 you would have lost almost half of your money... But if you were smart and had held on to it, today you would have over $350K! As Warren Buffet would say, you just have to buy when everyone else is selling and sell when everyone else is buying.…

Stores of value aren't investments.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#55

Post by oarsinsync »

mattferderer wrote: post #28

I find accepting it & having to pay US taxes to be a pain unless I convert it into USD immediately. Otherwise I have to use special software to figure out the USD price at the time of receipt & then the USD price at the time of conversion into anything else. I would imagine for large businesses this probably isn't to big of a concern. I also wonder if they could get away with making significant amounts of money by pi…

> I would imagine for large businesses this probably isn't to big of a concern. I also wonder if they could get away with making significant amounts of money by picking the price highs & lows of the day of receipt and day of conversion to USD when reporting taxes.

Nope. The daily spot price is determined and that's the value you need to use in your accounting with currency conversion for tax purposes. It's set by taking the value at a particular time of the day, and that's the value set for the day. That also happens to be the busiest time of day in the Fx markets, unsurprisingly, as minor fluctuations in the price can have massive positive (or negative) impacts on banks businesses.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#56

Post by kbody »

Nursie wrote: post #41
hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Lightning has been released. It works. There are multiple implementations. It isn't perfect. Version 1.1 should fix a lot of the shortcomings.

It has routing problems that are unsolvable.

Unsolvable like internet/BGP routing? I guess internet doesn't work either.

Tech evolves, most teams working on LN are working on getting the basic cases to a rock-solid state before doing more R&D on different routing strategies although there are already proposed alternatives on the mailing list.

Layered-strategies are the way to go.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#57

Post by oarsinsync »

jstanley wrote: post #15
jelling wrote: post #11

Of possible interest, Moon, a company in our our accelerator cohort, lets people pay with crypto on any website that accepts credit cards: https://paywithmoon.com/

Why does it require a Coinbase account?

Most likely because intra-coinbase payments are instant, as they don't occur on the blockchain, but in the coinbase local database only

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#58

Post by oarsinsync »

hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #19
futureastronaut wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing about Lightning for a couple years now, is this the new Duke Nukem 3d/Perl 6 or what?

No, Lightning has been released. It works. There are multiple implementations. It isn't perfect. Version 1.1 should fix a lot of the shortcomings.

Sounds a lot like if 'early access' was a thing, and duke nukem forever released a half baked first level that was difficult to use, and didn't really amount to anything beyond being able to point to a 'release'

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#59

Post by jondubois »

acdha wrote: post #53
jondubois wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Need' is a relative term. If you ask me what I need, I'll say I need a house to live in, air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. If you ask Mark Zuckerberg what he needs, he'll say "All that can be counted". Mark Zuckerberg has much more money than you or me. So when it comes to valuing things on the open market, his opinion of what 'Need' means matters a lot more.

That doesn't really relate to anything I wrote. My question was that if Bitcoin collapsed tomorrow, who'd notice other than the get-rich-quick crowd? Statistically nobody uses it for daily transactions and almost everyone has other options which are some combination of cheaper, faster, safer, and easier to use. There just isn't a long-term anchor pushing people to use that particular system, certainly not at the leve…

A lot of rich people use Bitcoin for self-realisation (e.g. to get that special "I own a lot of Bitcoin" feeling). As an average person, you might think it's a ridiculous use case but it's actually very important to them, therefore it's very important full stop.

It's the same reason why fine Art is expensive. People want to experience a very specific "I own a Picasso" feeling. Normal people don't understand this, but what normal people think doesn't matter in the current economy.

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