Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

seymour-locksmiths.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 243 posts

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

#81

Post by notamerican »

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…

Nobody mentioned the Euro Zone before you did; they're talking about Europe "as a continent", for the most part.

Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions. And having lived in both Switzerland (where they use CHF), and Germany (Euros), I can say it's much the same across Europe.

International payments within Europe are fast too; a couple of days if you're changing currencies, and faster if both sides are in the Euro Zone.

Banks don't have to be slow. The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!

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

#82

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

While I can agree about the lack of user focus, I disagree with the precise way in which lack of user focus is the failure point for both Linux Desktop and Bitcoin.

See, neither of these things can be presented to a user as a tool that can make their lives better, which is what users actually want. Strip away all the hype and math and crypto jargon and what is Bitcoin to someone? An inconvenient currency they can't pay taxes with and have to jump through hoops to use for nebulous benefit. Where did Bitcoin actually find traction amongst users? As a way of transferring money overseas, because it could do it with a lot less hassle than traditional methods.

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

#83

Post by spectramax »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #82
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…

While I can agree about the lack of user focus, I disagree with the precise way in which lack of user focus is the failure point for both Linux Desktop and Bitcoin. See, neither of these things can be presented to a user as a tool that can make their lives better, which is what users actually want. Strip away all the hype and math and crypto jargon and what is Bitcoin to someone? An inconvenient currency they can't p…

> See, neither of these things can be presented to a user as a tool that can make their lives better

Did you read the article?

Quoting: "In 2014 a large school of thought suggested that the main breakthrough use case for Bitcoin would be peer to peer transactions. That being customers and businesses paying for goods and services directly between one another without having to rely on payment networks such as Visa."

The use case is certainly for consumers. Direct consumers. Same with Linux Desktop. Just go to Ubuntu.com - what are they pitching?

In my view, there is no question whether there is a lack of user focus. It is one of the major reasons (if not the top reason) for lack of traction.

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

#84

Post by hartator »

fyfy18 wrote: post #35
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…

Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. Within the same country transfers mostly arrive the same day (often it's under 1 hour), and sometimes that happens internationally too. Oh and I don't need to pay anything for that. A few years ago I was working in the Mid…

> I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest.

I can do the same in the US, except it’s instantaneous, not sure what you are talking about.

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

#86

Post by hanniabu »

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.

Curious to hear what those are of you have a moment to expand on it

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

#87

Post by cwyers »

Cypher wrote: post #2

Well bitcoin is better for store of value, just use a CC for spending - more protection.

The original Bitcoin paper is all about payments:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

If Bitcoin isn't any good for that, it's kind of a failure.

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

#88

Post by hanniabu »

throwaway77384 wrote: post #46
DiseasedBadger wrote: post #20

I personally never got into, because it's not private. No regular person can verify their transactions without joining a public vehicle that requires a credit card . Even bitcoin atms require a photograph of your face. Mining is a huge loss of value. Bitcoin itself was simply never a good idea for most people.

Bisq sort of solves that problem.

Bisq uses centralized intermediaries

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

#89

Post by turkeytotal »

This should come as no surprise, but not for the reasons the author thinks.

>I could list 50 different reasons why but for us it boils down to two main facts. A very small percentage of our customers posses Bitcoin in a hot wallet ready to transfer and secondly, Bitcoin can be slow and expensive for small payments.

The main reason is that no one needs to use Bitcoin to pay for their locksmithing. Bitcoin is not your neighborhood Visa competitor. Bitcoin is your last resort payment method/store of value--for when you don't have access to traditional financial infrastructure (for whatever reason). This article is a signal only that people are not ideologically using Bitcoin as a payment (which is a good thing, I don't care to store payments on my node that would be better served by Visa).

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

#90

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

spectramax wrote: post #83
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can agree about the lack of user focus, I disagree with the precise way in which lack of user focus is the failure point for both Linux Desktop and Bitcoin. See, neither of these things can be presented to a user as a tool that can make their lives better, which is what users actually want. Strip away all the hype and math and crypto jargon and what is Bitcoin to someone? An inconvenient currency they can't p…

> See, neither of these things can be presented to a user as a tool that can make their lives better Did you read the article? Quoting: "In 2014 a large school of thought suggested that the main breakthrough use case for Bitcoin would be peer to peer transactions. That being customers and businesses paying for goods and services directly between one another without having to rely on payment networks such as Visa." Th…

> That being customers and businesses paying for goods and services directly between one another without having to rely on payment networks such as Visa.

We already have cash for that! It completely ignores the reasons why people use payment networks like Visa instead of just exchanging cash. There are fraud protections, credit, reward points, etc. What bitcoin brings to the table is simply not something very many people actually want for the tradeoffs involved.

Post reply on HN