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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

#71

Post by mattferderer »

oarsinsync wrote: post #55
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 tak…

Good to know. I was under the assumption you were to use the price at the time of the transaction.

The daily spot price seems like a huge risk for businesses.

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

#73

Post by vortico »

Kaotique wrote: post #66

Bitcoin is more like gold or diamonds. Expensive to mine. Interesting as an investment and to store wealth outside normal currencies. But nobody pays in the store with diamonds or gold. It's not practical.

Great analogy, I'll remember that one. BTC is only really useful to me when other payment methods surpass ~$100 of effort. For example, when paying contractors tens of thousands of $ internationally, it's impossible to avoid $50-300 fees from bank wires, TransferWise, or Xoom. So if both parties are fine with sitting down and figuring out how to send/receive BTC on their computer, only then it is worth my time.

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

#74

Post by xiphias2 »

cal5k wrote: post #18
spectramax wrote: post #8

Bitcoin has the same sort of issues that plague Linux Desktop and why Linux never took off as the defacto standard for PC OS. It’s the lack of user focus. Setting up a bitcoin account, understanding the security implications, hardware wallet, secret keys, the whole enchilada is too big for an average consumer to digest. Somewhere in Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson, there is a snippet about how products often fail…

I have a better analogy: Bitcoin has the same sort of issues as TCP/IP. It's weird that people are expected to interact with it on the protocol level. I think the term "cryptocurrency" is the "Big Data" of 2018. The term itself has been somewhat tarnished, but the underlying technology is super useful and will find its way into a lot of applications. And no, I don't mean "blockchain". I mean Bitcoin... it's rather ni…

I would say Bitcoin has the same issues as TCP/IP in 1984. It's just 10 years old. Developers know what to do (Eltoo, Schnorr signatures, better multisig for hardware wallets, watchtowers, better routing, AMP, Lightning support for exchanges), but implemention speed is limited, and just simply adding more developers or even complaining about lack of UX won't make it faster. Also people with Bitcoin don't accept the ,,move fast and break things'' mantra, because it's money. I like the cautious speed of development, it helps build my trust in Bitcoin.

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

#75

Post by cal5k »

CPLX wrote: post #39
cal5k wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a better analogy: Bitcoin has the same sort of issues as TCP/IP. It's weird that people are expected to interact with it on the protocol level. I think the term "cryptocurrency" is the "Big Data" of 2018. The term itself has been somewhat tarnished, but the underlying technology is super useful and will find its way into a lot of applications. And no, I don't mean "blockchain". I mean Bitcoin... it's rather ni…

I have a better analogy. Bitoin has the same issues as Flooz. It’s a more complicated and convoluted solution to a nonexistent problem. The only people who have problems with spending money the normal way that are serious enough to accept the horrible user experience and unreliability of bitcoin are those conducting illegal transactions or evading currency controls. The market has no reason to rise beyond that narrow…

That's just ill-informed. "If you don't accept the banking oligopoly you're clearly trying to launder money" is the kind of nonsense that tries to shut down legitimate concerns over self-determination.

Money is an essential input to freedom. If you can't make an income, pay rent, buy food, pay for transportation, etc. you are not very free. I'd also go so far as to say that the right to transact anonymously should be part and parcel to a free society.

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

#76

Post by foepys »

mateuszf wrote: post #12

There is still a pretty good chance that with Lightning it will change, because of minimal transaction costs, speed and scalability.

An on-chain transaction is required to create a lightning channel which holds funds.

For every person in the world to open just a single channel in their lifetime, it would take just about 34 years (with 7 transaction per second, 7.5 billion people, and a block every 10 minutes).

This doesn't include the transaction necessary to close the channel to receive the funds back in the Bitcoin wallet.

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

#77

Post by dr_win »

IMO, UX is a minor issue. Why would anyone spend hard money before fiat money? (Gresham's law) Also each spending could trigger a separate taxable event (depending on your jurisdiction) and that would be a serious accounting nightmare if done willy-nilly for casual payments.

Bitcoin is a store of value and a payment rail for significant sums. Currently it is not suitable for casual/small retail payments.

In near/mid-term future I expect new banking services to allow people to stay in bitcoin for "savings accounts" and offering traditional fiat credit in "current account" for daily spending (backed by bitcoin in savings account as a collateral). Settlement and transfers between savings and current account to be less frequent and easily trackable for tax purposes. This would allow a person to completely stay out of fiat while still having access to fiat payment infrastructure - this would cost some interest on borrowed fiat which I expect to go pretty low thanks to collateral (bitcoin) liquidity. See companies like BlockFi which are getting close to this model.

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

#78

Post by short_sells_poo »

cal5k wrote: post #69
short_sells_poo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next d…

So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same ( cough the metric system cough ), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks. In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of…

How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all!

Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework.

It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.

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

#79

Post by pjc50 »

vortico wrote: post #73
Kaotique wrote: post #66

Bitcoin is more like gold or diamonds. Expensive to mine. Interesting as an investment and to store wealth outside normal currencies. But nobody pays in the store with diamonds or gold. It's not practical.

Great analogy, I'll remember that one. BTC is only really useful to me when other payment methods surpass ~$100 of effort. For example, when paying contractors tens of thousands of $ internationally, it's impossible to avoid $50-300 fees from bank wires, TransferWise, or Xoom. So if both parties are fine with sitting down and figuring out how to send/receive BTC on their computer, only then it is worth my time.

I'm reminded of the guy who lost $400k by trying to do an international transfer of his own money through Quadriga at the point they collapsed.

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

#80

Post by isostatic »

cal5k wrote: post #69
short_sells_poo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next d…

So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same ( cough the metric system cough ), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks. In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of…

There appears to be plenty of competition in the "send money abroad" market

https://www.money.co.uk/money-transfers.htm

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