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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

#201

Post by root_axis »

AgentME wrote: post #177
LiquidSky wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>centralized options This seems to be the crux of all of these discussions and why they inevitably go nowhere. For a small but passionate core of libertarian-minded crypto/Bitcoin boosters, decentralization is a good unto itself. All other issues caused by it are irrelevant. Hard for normal people to use? But it's decentralized! Not useful for anything normal people want to do? But it's decentralized! Massive price f…

>This makes it impossible to discuss because this small group's focus is so different from everyone else's. Well, if people don't value decentralization, there's not much need for them to use Bitcoin. There's a lot of problems that come with decentralization. I feel this is like comparing car seating to couches. Car seat fans only seem to care about going places! Car seats are small and don't let you lie down? But it…

> if people don't value decentralization, there's not much need for them to use Bitcoin

Correct. That is the reason why most people don't need and will never need bitcoin.

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

#202

Post by tim333 »

argo_ wrote: post #99

Bitcoin on-chain transactions are almost on its historical peak again: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions?timespan=al... This forum has been denying bitcoin since the first time someone posted about it: first time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793 second time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

It's interesting that that is the case while interest in Bitcoin as evidenced by twitter activity seems to have dropped back to levels seen in 2014 and 2016 https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-tweets.html

I'm not quite sure why. More algo trading perhaps?

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

#203

Post by xd »

tim333 wrote: post #194
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.

>Bitcoin appeals to human greed, that's it Much of the motivation of the founders and enthusiasts was that governments and existing financial systems are flawed so it may be valuable to have a peer to peer financial system outside of that.

Flawed how? This is a problem solving furum keep in mind.

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

#204

Post by A2017U1 »

rchaud wrote: post #109
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…

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…

Their exchange rates are terrible deals and blatantly taking advantage of people who only see the upfront fee and don't think further than that.

Get the feeling they'd have no problem making money with zero fees but that would suddenly make customers think twice about it.

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

#205

Post by aeternus »

bastawhiz wrote: post #110
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 would never make an everyday purchase with Bitcoin.

I used to think the same, but there is a coffee / snack shop nearby that accepts bitcoin/bcash/ethereum, and offers $1 off if you pay with it. A surprising number of people pay via cryptocurrency.

For a small purchase like that, cryptocurrency is perfect. Amounts are small enough that you don't need to wait for blockchain confirmations, risk is low. Credit card fees are high in-part because they are providing that fraud protection. For a purchase like this, both the merchant and I save money by not having to worry about transaction reversals and fraud.

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

#207

Post by AgentME »

root_axis wrote: post #201
AgentME wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This makes it impossible to discuss because this small group's focus is so different from everyone else's. Well, if people don't value decentralization, there's not much need for them to use Bitcoin. There's a lot of problems that come with decentralization. I feel this is like comparing car seating to couches. Car seat fans only seem to care about going places! Car seats are small and don't let you lie down? But it…

> if people don't value decentralization, there's not much need for them to use Bitcoin Correct. That is the reason why most people don't need and will never need bitcoin.

I think decentralization is important. I think the benefits of it should be argued to get people to use Bitcoin, instead of crypto-enthusiasts trying to get people to use Bitcoin because it's "easier" or lower fees, which aren't always true.

If email didn't exist and people mainly used Facebook messages, I'd want to help agitate for something open and decentralized like email to become popular. It wouldn't be because I thought email was easier than Facebook messages. It's because there's benefits to the competition that comes from an open ecosystem.

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

#208

Post by andirk »

dmitriid wrote: post #117
argo_ wrote: post #99

Bitcoin on-chain transactions are almost on its historical peak again: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions?timespan=al... This forum has been denying bitcoin since the first time someone posted about it: first time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793 second time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

Less than 10 transactions per second while spending more electricity than several medium-sized countries. Yup. Technology of the future that we are fools to dismiss.

Is there hard evidence that shows the energy consumption of bitcoin? How is that calculated? I do believe it's "a lot" when I see those giant farms churning. And how do we compare it to fiat where the security is via vaults and sharks with lasers and other types of security?

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

#209

Post by gst »

vsipuli wrote: post #171
gst wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

But you cannot deposit money into any arbitrary U.S. bank account using ACH. For every account that you want to make transfers to, you first need to sign a bunch of forms. With the European IBAN system, no permissions or forms are needed to make deposits to a new arbitrary account.

Almost all of the US banks allow you to add other ACH accounts that you control. Just confirm the two trial deposits and you can push or pull money from that account.

A few banks also allow to send ACH transfers to third-party accounts that you don't control - for example with USAA that's possible. This still doesn't 100% match how transfers work in Europe (you first need to add the account, then wait 1-2 days, then you can send funds to it), but it's definitely better than "signing a bunch of forms".

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

#210

Post by amanaplanacanal »

turkeytotal wrote: post #89

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…

> Bitcoin is your last resort payment method/store of value

This is what people have traditionally held gold for. It feels to me like there are very few use cases that aren't already served by physical gold.

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