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Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

btctimes.com

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Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#31

Post by k1rcher »

tryonenow wrote: post #25

I have very little long term faith in BTC at this point. It is effectively centralized, has limited capacity, outrageous fees when the network is busy, and then there are growing concerns over environmental impact...but I'm still holding on to my stash as the growing institutional momentum over the last year or so seems like it might have a significant positive influence on price, before BTC is eventually abandoned.…

100% agree with you on all points.

As a valid replacement for currency, it is inherently flawed. As an investment? A very solid choice.

Many seem to have difficulties differentiating between the the two distinct concepts, myself included.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#32

Post by ketamine__ »

kevinak wrote: post #26
RyanShook wrote: post #4

Bitcoin transaction costs are very high so I’m assuming all these payment processor transactions will be off-chain. Do you think that having so many off-chain transactions that are essentially converting USD reduces the perceived value of BTC or raises it?

It's just on-chain layer 1 transactions that are somewhat expensive. The lightning network solves this and works great, can do thousands of transactions per second and has close to 0 fees. Feels like magic to use it :)

It's magic until you realize you need to spend $15 to get off chain to buy a coffee. And then you realize you aren't ready to commit a bunch of cash to a speculative currency (or investment) so that you can buy coffee.

Also, you will need to file taxes for your coffee if your bitcoin goes up after you bought it. Fun!

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#34

Post by ketamine__ »

Kranar wrote: post #12
baby wrote: post #6

Why is everybody betting on bitcoin for payments when there are faster and more stable alternatives in the crypto space? I’m thinking that this is more about a proof of concept to get into the space.

None are as stable as Bitcoin. There are some that are faster right now because no one uses them, but are likely to fail if they get any serious adoption. Ethereum is the only sensible alternative to Bitcoin but Ethereum has major scalability issues and much less infrastructure compared to Bitcoin to alleviate those issues.

How would USDC fail?

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#36

Post by staplers »

baby wrote: post #6

Why is everybody betting on bitcoin for payments when there are faster and more stable alternatives in the crypto space? I’m thinking that this is more about a proof of concept to get into the space.

I used to think this community was bright techies. Now I'm here having to explain basic network effect.

Why is ipv4 still being used? C'mon guys you're smarter than this.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#37

Post by [deleted] »

loceng wrote: post #9
baby wrote: post #6

Why is everybody betting on bitcoin for payments when there are faster and more stable alternatives in the crypto space? I’m thinking that this is more about a proof of concept to get into the space.

Because they want to be at the bottom of the pyramid scheme and now that it's gained enough mainstream media attention it doesn't even cost ridicule.

[deleted]

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#38

Post by mrkramer »

baby wrote: post #6

Why is everybody betting on bitcoin for payments when there are faster and more stable alternatives in the crypto space? I’m thinking that this is more about a proof of concept to get into the space.

Satoshi said in 2009: "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. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size."

"By Moore's Law, we can expect hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years and 100 times faster in 10. Even if Bitcoin grows at crazy adoption rates, I think computer speeds will stay ahead of the number of transactions."[1]

[1] https://plan99.net/~mike/satoshi-emails/thread1.html

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#39

Post by k1rcher »

gervwyk wrote: post #30

Not directly related, but has anyone looked at Kin [1] recently. Besides btc and eth, they are the only guys with SEC clearance. And given that they are running on the Solana chain, as far as I understand, makes micro transactions possible. Also from a dev point of view, their weekly reward engine payouts is quite attractive! I’m really interested to hear what others think of Kin? [1] - https://kin.org

This is super interesting, thanks for sharing.

Cryptocurrencies and alt coins are a dime a dozen these days and it is incredibly difficult to filter through the noise.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#40

Post by arduinomancer »

tylersmith wrote: post #27
imglorp wrote: post #3

Why? Nobody's going to spend the transaction fee, currently about $US16, to buy a coffee. For big items maybe?

Almost certainly Visa would be acting as a (centralized) transaction aggregater that uses the settlement-layer pattern. There's no value for Visa to provide anywhere else really, other than to use their transaction network to transact the bitcoin asset.

What happens then if I pay in bitcoin and the price drops before Visa posts the aggregate transaction to the chain?

Who takes the hit?

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