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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

#51

Post by flatline »

ketamine__ wrote: post #32
kevinak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You may have been downvoted for a snarky tone, but this is the first time I've seen it mentioned here - bitcoin is taxed as a commodity in the US, each exchange is a capital gain or loss.

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

#52

Post by aeternum »

bhouston wrote: post #33

Bitcoin is an asset that tends to appreciate. Why would I use it as payment? Lastly, is it considered legal tender? What is the meaning of legal tender if one can use Bitcoin everywhere usd is accepted?

This lets you keep your funds in BTC until you the instant you want to use it. If you believe that Bitcoin is an asset that 'only goes up', wouldn't you want to keep even your spending money in BTC for as long as possible?

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

#54

Post by eximius »

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.

Ethereum does face additional problems because of the EVM.

Proof of Stake is coming which helps a lot with overall effort expended, if not directly tx/s.

What does Bitcoin have that Ethereum doesn't for scaling transaction rate?

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

#55

Post by tylersmith »

postalrat wrote: post #17
thebean11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it reduce the value? Off-chain transactions are something the core Bitcoin team are very much in favor of.

That sounds like they are in favor of not using bitcoin.

Instead of using Bitcoin, the transaction network, they are using their transaction network to transact bitcoins, the asset. The chain gets used primarily for settlements in this model.

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

#56

Post by drchopchop »

1023bytes wrote: post #53

I already have a Binance VISA card that works anywhere. So what's supposed to be new with this solution?

Not much.

From the article: "And secondly, working with Bitcoin wallets to allow the Bitcoin to be translated into a fiat currency and therefore immediately be able to be used at any of the 70 million places around the world where Visa is accepted."

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

#57

Post by purple_ferret »

Misleading Title. Visa says it will allow for Bitcoin to be converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card in the same way debit cards already work.

This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc

The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.

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

#58

Post by gervwyk »

k1rcher wrote: post #39
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.

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve tracked these guys from the start. Really solid concept behind it and the founder make a really strong commitment from the start to say that if its a currency the only thing that matters is the number of daily transactions. Which is really true if you consider the value of a currency related to the value of the network.

unfortunately they really hit a speedbump with the long ongoing SEC case, but now that it is finalized it all can really play into their advantage.

Also the fact that they have done 3 chain migrations did not do any favors, but the techs say its for the best. Would be really interested to understand why changing from Stellar to Solana is so important?

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

#60

Post by tylersmith »

arduinomancer wrote: post #40
tylersmith wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They would be totally decoupled, but essentially they'd take risk of the underlying prices changes. Same as now with the USD, it's just not as pronounced.
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