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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

#131

Post by Ruphin »

stakhanov wrote: post #121

The biggest argument against bitcoin, in my mind is this: Regulators really only get involved in allowing/prohibiting innovations very late in the game. I'm thinking of how Air BNB and Uber were allowed to grow really huge despite being blatantly in violation of a lot of laws in a lot of places (for example restrictions around subletting in contracts between tenants and landlords, regulations around running businesse…

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are an active issue for regulators right now. Statements have come out from several parties that confirm networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. The SEC is actively shutting down ICO schemes that are deemed securities. Things are moving slowly because it's a complicated topic, but we are seeing more and more guidance from regulators like the SEC and others.

AirBnB and Uber are doing pretty fine for companies that got killed by regulators.

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

#132

Post by gst »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #48
fyfy18 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time). In fact, ACH supports multiple settlements per day now so if that feature is supported by your bank ACH transfers can even arrive on the same business day. There are a few banks that are slower, but that's not the fault of ACH - don't use slow banks and you're not running into that issue.

That's very similar to SEPA transactions, with the exception that some European banks support real-time settlements for SEPA. For banks that don't support this yet funds usually arrive on the next business day.

Transfers between the US banking system and the European system are usually slow and expensive as those two systems aren't directly linked to each other. So you your bank needs to send the funds to a correspondent bank which forwards the funds to the final destination. But if you use 3rd party services such as TransferWise those transfers are significantly faster and cheaper. My last transfer from my US bank account to my European account (via TransferWise) arrived on the next business day and cost something like 0.36% on top of the mid-market rate.

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

#133

Post by TomMckenny »

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…

The other issue which kills wide adoption is price fluctuation.

People using it as a regular currency need their account value to remain what they expect it to be. High viability strongly repels regular users and attracts high risk speculators. And maybe that is a fun outcome but it does make it unusable as currency.

It's still worth accepting on principle of course.

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

#134

Post by hartator »

stevekemp wrote: post #125
hartator wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

One surprise for me, as a European, is that in America people seem to regard bank account numbers as secret - I dwell on forums for landlords, etc, and people expect to collect cash/cheques from their tenants, rather than sharing bank details. Unrelated to your alleged speed, but another odd perception of the American banking systems. (Lots of other people in this thread seem to suggest you're an outlier; I don't kno…

Your account number is on every checks. Checks are usually prefered because in the US you can cash them immediately and online.

Of course, YMMV. I've experienced both the US bank system and the EU (France) bank system. Even if Americans are very critical of our banks, no fee (usually) for anything, reduced red tape, and credit cards that are on your side won me over. When you take account of cash back and interests on checking, you've usually a cash positive relationship with you bank. Good luck finding that in Europe.

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

#135

Post by scrumbledober »

Ruphin wrote: post #129
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…

Users that already have a Bitcoin wallet don't have to jump through any hoops to spend BTC. It's just as easy as any kind of digital money transfer. Obviously using BTC to pay for anything is a huge hassle if you don't already have a wallet with some BTC in it. But that's like saying Apple Pay is inconvenient because your customers have to go to and buy an iPhone first.

except i don't need to wait for blockchain confirmations on apple pay, it's instant.

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

#136

Post by dnautics »

acdha wrote: post #52
dnautics wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why I said "at some level": what are governments backed by?

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

#137

Post by dnautics »

wheelie_boy wrote: post #34
dnautics wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet today, half the world with computer access uses Linux, directly. And the entire world uses it indirectly.

He's specifically talking about Linux on the Desktop, which is hovering around 2% market share ( http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/... ) It might be that bitcoin is similar to linux - used as a backbone, but not customer friendly enough to ever be used directly by customers. Like maybe banks use it to transfer large amounts of money between each other or something.

> It might be that bitcoin is similar to linux - used as a backbone, but not customer friendly enough to ever be used directly by customers.

That's my point; I think this is a possible and not unreasonable outcome for Bitcoin.

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

#138

Post by whttheuuu »

scrumbledober wrote: post #135
Ruphin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users that already have a Bitcoin wallet don't have to jump through any hoops to spend BTC. It's just as easy as any kind of digital money transfer. Obviously using BTC to pay for anything is a huge hassle if you don't already have a wallet with some BTC in it. But that's like saying Apple Pay is inconvenient because your customers have to go to and buy an iPhone first.

except i don't need to wait for blockchain confirmations on apple pay, it's instant.

Confirmations are pretty quick now. And with Lightning is instant.

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

#139

Post by acabal »

At Scribophile, I set up an option to pay for a membership upgrade directly with Bitcoin, i.e., without an intermediary to USD like Coinbase. Customers would be given a Bitcoin address to send a certain amount of Bitcoin to for a 1-year upgrade purchase, and once the transaction was verified, their account would be upgraded.

In the ~5 years we had the option, I think we had about 3 purchases with Bitcoin.

I kept it as an option for a long time because I was mildly interested in the philosophy of Bitcoin. That is, its use as an alternate currency for everyday transactions, not its use as an intermediary for USD transactions or its use as a Ponzi scheme to separate the stupid from their savings.

But with such a poor sales rate I finally removed it some time last year. It was interesting while it lasted but Bitcoin is clearly nowhere near being useful for e.g. buying a bag of flour.

After some thought I decided that the entire cryptocurrency space, in its current pump-and-dump/outright scam incarnation, is mostly stupid, and unethical at best and criminal at worst. I could have kept Bitcoin payment as an option indefinitely--it's not hard to keep a static page up--but I felt that doing so would be in some small way promoting an unethical industry. (Unethical not because of what people are buying with crypto, but because today crypto is being used as a thinly-veiled scam to trick gullible people out of their investment money.)

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

#140

Post by thaumasiotes »

notamerican wrote: post #81
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…

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 fast…

> The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!

Exchange fees show up in a number of different places. I have a Capital One card that I got specifically for the advertised "no foreign exchange fees". In reality, it consistently charges me about 1% more than the official exchange rate at any given point. 1% doesn't seem like a terrible fee. I wish it would itemize it, though.

Many merchants will not bill the card in their local currency -- instead, because it's a US card, they refuse to bill it in anything other than USD. That means they end up making me pay extra to cover their exchange costs, which are always exorbitant, maybe 10 times as much. They appear to have something worked out with their local bank, where the bank accepts payment in USD and gives them payment in CNY or HKD. Here, the bank is teaming up with the merchant to screw the customer without even benefiting the merchant.

I recently ordered something from Amazon's Canada site, and they generously offered to let me have them bill me in USD -- they would cover currency exchange themselves. Left unstated was that they would charge, again, an order of magnitude more for the service than my card would. At least they gave me the option to say "no, bill me in CAD".

The best option I generally have for transacting in China is to pull cash from an ATM (paying Capital One's 1%ish fee), and pay cash even for very large purchases. It's quite possible that banks aren't where you're getting hit by exorbitant fees -- transact directly with a bank, and you should be able to get low fees.

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