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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

#101

Post by tim333 »

mattferderer wrote: post #71
oarsinsync wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm more up on the UK system than the US but how it kind of works here is technically the liability is the price at the time of the transaction but they don't mind you estimating or using approximate prices if it doesn't have a large effect on the tax liability.

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

#102

Post by criddell »

ecwilson wrote: post #49
ausbah wrote: post #36

until cryptocurrencies are able to be as accessible, easy to use, and fast as everyday debit or credit cards, i fail to see any significant future for their usage beyond people well versed in tech

They never will be. I think people misunderstand cryptocurrencies because of the mania that surrounds them. Bitcoin, for example, is a protocol, and should be judged as such. The most important thing for the protocol is trust, reliability, and scalability. Not UX and convenience. That could/should come from the layers/products that get built on top of the protocol.

Satoshi Nakamoto did say this:

> The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost.

He clearly expected Bitcoin to cheaper and faster than credit cards and I've often wondered how he could have been so wrong about that.

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

#103

Post by acdha »

jondubois wrote: post #59
acdha wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, so in addition to that claim being unsupported and rather unlikely you have a major problem with this theory: art only requires one person to like it but a currency requires an active network and someone who just likes to look at SHA hashes isn't going to generate much transaction volume.

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

#104

Post by boznz »

The only advantage and attraction of bitcoin to date to the lay person has been capital gains, not so much lately but at least its semi-stabilised to most holders relief.

I suspect that was the secret attraction of most businesses who set up to accept it.

However in real life it is too awkward for the average joe or joan and if you want to "go dark" cash or gold much easier to use and understand.

Cryptocurrencies day will come but not until it is as easy to use as a credit card or cash

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

#105

Post by justaguyhere »

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…

* infact just issues with North American banks.*

Yup, same experience here. It takes at least 10 days to send a paltry 1000 USD for me and yes, there is a fee. The bank is probably making money on the exchange rate too, not sure. At one point, I was asked all kinds of documentation - passport etc. All this to send very small amounts of money (I don't remember sending more than 3K, 50K Euros without questions is amazing to me).

Edit: Many comments here mention that Europe is way ahead of the US i the money transfer space. Can someone talk about why the US is lagging behind?

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

#106

Post by tim333 »

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.…

What Warren Buffett actually said "In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending."

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

#107

Post by cal5k »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #78
cal5k wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world.

That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end.

Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be.

You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer.

The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer

I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).

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

#108

Post by JoeAltmaier »

cal5k wrote: post #107
short_sells_poo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world. That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end. Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the…

I understood bitcoin transfers could take days. If so, that's not really very liquid?

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

#109

Post by rchaud »

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…

I see this point about remittance fees being made frequently. For payments from Canada to the Philippines, Xoom (bought out by Paypal) charges $2.99 to send $200 (1.5%) and $21.49 to send $1000 (2.2%). That's not anywhere near 20%.

I've worked in this industry in the past. Historically yes, poor people have been overcharged. The way they dealt with it was to develop networks of people who they could pay to carry the money with them on trips back home and set up a pickup. It's crude, but it's a system that persists in India and Pakistan, especially for unskilled migrants in the Middle East who don't have access to local banking services. Not really a target market for bitcoin given the steep learning curve.

For computer-literate migrants who work in developed countries and are OK with using banks, paypal etc, the fees are pretty reasonable.

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

#110

Post by bastawhiz »

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…

> 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.

I respectfully disagree. Bitcoin solves problems that the average consumer didn't care about, plus it introduces new problems.

I would never make an everyday purchase with Bitcoin. If I don't get the product I was promised, I can file a dispute with my credit card company. If the product I purchased breaks, it may be covered by a warranty from my card company. If my card number is stolen, I get reimbursed for the fraudulent charges and get a new card in the mail. None of these conveniences come with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency solved a problem with moving money ~anonymously with no interference from authorities. Most average folks want the exact opposite of that.

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