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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

#151

Post by Nursie »

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.

And Bruce Schneier says the trust thing is a bust - it moves trust, rather than eliminating it. Usually to parties that I have far fewer reasons to trust.

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

#152

Post by sparkie »

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.

It's also reversible.

With bitcoin, it might take a bit longer, but transaction are non-reversible after a few confirmations.

Any other system can reverse payments even 6 months down the line. Sucks for businesses.

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

#153

Post by pjkundert »

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…

Wow, no...

I'm just a computer consultant trying to get paid. Bank payments to/from the US is an absolute, unmitigated train-wreck.

Even with the spectacular deficiencies of the Bitcoin/Ethereum user experience, it is already a vast improvement over the Bank transfer debacle.

The next generation of Cryptocurrencies (that solve most of the complexity/risk of creating, securing, managing and recovering public/private keys) and improve the transaction thruput and cost by 4+ orders of magnitude? These are going to kick the banks to curb.

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

#154

Post by jcfrei »

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…

> send large amounts of money around the world without snaking through the nightmare that is international banking

This has little to do with technology but with regulation. If you think bitcoin can solve this then you either envision a future where these regulations don't apply (in some sort of technologically independent anarchistic society) or you expect bitcoin to cause a reduction in the high regulation surrounding international asset transfers - which is very unlikely, regulators around the world are pushing for more stringent AML policies.

This is where a blockchain (the technology) could actually come in handy. If every asset is tokenized and controllable through some smart contract (and every transfer needs to be authorized by the responsible financial regulator) then such a system would make any kind of international asset transfer much more frictionless. But of course this runs contrary to the idea of most current crypto currencies (whose proponents mostly hope for the aforementioned scenario).

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

#155

Post by foobiekr »

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 don't understand the TCP analogy. TCP is incredibly straightforward and scales from a knowledge-required level of almost nothing to very advanced usage like paying attention to ECN markings. Most of the layers above TCP have, over the last 20+ years, had many many problems that related directly to people not wanting to understand TCP, from RMI and similar RPC schemes to things like BEEP/BXXP where the head-of-line blocking problem somehow surprised people.

In the end people working with technologies do need to understand their semantics. I don't mean you should be able to write a competent TCP implementation from scratch, but you do need to understand how the protocol layer makes itself an issue in every layer above it in practice.

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

#156

Post by minikites »

Are the drawbacks of Bitcoin (massive global electricity usage, makes email/malware extortion scamming much easier) worth the advantages (the ability to anonymously buy things online at a small number of places) overall?

I'm of the opinion that Bitcoin is a net negative (Bitcoin mining has wiped out all of the gains we've made from the recent renewable energy boom), but perhaps there a useful purpose that I'm unaware of.

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

#157

Post by xd »

It shows your customers that you are a forward thinking company.

Bit of a loaded assumption that; accepting bitcoin has nothing to do with being forward thinking.

Bitcoin appeals to human greed, that's it. The comments comparing this to Linux and TCP/IP is apples and oranges.

Why would I as a hard working member of my society with a house and kids invest money into a system completely unregulated. I'm all ears.

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

#158

Post by pjkundert »

"Why does no one want to pay their local locksmith with Bitcoin?"

The reasons given (few customers have it in a hot wallet ready to use, slow and expensive for small payments) are not the reasons! Even if many people had it, and the expense was lower -- few people would use it.

The real reason? Gresham's law: a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good".

Given 2 forms of commodity money in circulation, the more valuable commodity will eventually disappear from circulation.

A fixed-issuance token is designed to Deflate (go up in value), if its uptake and utilization increases. Hence, Bitcoin will "disappear from circulation" as money, vs. almost any alternative form of money!

Who's going to spend something that the believe is likely (barring catastrophic failure) to go up in value?

It is astonishing to me that this topic is even a question that people actually have...

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

#159

Post by sparkie »

Nursie wrote: post #141
kbody wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, unsolvable like routing payments from A to B requires finding routes from A to B that are well enough funded to allow the payment to go through, but with no knowledge of the funding states of the channels (as this would be a privacy leak)

The Byzantine Generals problem was "unsolvable" until Satoshi Nakamoto sidestepped it to make Bitcoin work. You don't need perfect solutions to have practical applications.

It's such a stupid argument against LN. I can make the same argument that you connecting to Hacker News is unsolveable (there is no mathematical proof that you will be able to connect to HN, because various gateways could drop offline). What does this matter in practice? You can still get here most of the time.

In LN, if the first route from A to B does not have the capacity to make the payment, an alternative route is tried. Many routes can be attempted, because they're usually sub-second negotiations between peers. If it happens that there is no route between A and B with sufficient htlc capacity that can be found in a timely manner, then you might be out of luck. Can always fall-back to an on-chain transaction. A LN invoice already supports a fallback bitcoin address. As the network grows this will become less and less likely because there will be an enormous number of routes to attempt for any payment. Chances of not making a payment will usually indicate your own or the payment destination nodes are the ones lacking capacity to make the payment.

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

#160

Post by exit »

xd wrote: post #157

It shows your customers that you are a forward thinking company. Bit of a loaded assumption that; accepting bitcoin has nothing to do with being forward thinking. Bitcoin appeals to human greed, that's it. The comments comparing this to Linux and TCP/IP is apples and oranges. Why would I as a hard working member of my society with a house and kids invest money into a system completely unregulated. I'm all ears.

at a base level its regulation is completely transparent and algorithmic, unlike the closed-door regime of central banking.
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