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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

#61

Post by notyourwork »

purple_ferret wrote: post #57

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.

It's such an anti-pattern for the world to adopt this approach. Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved. Sadly, I'm less and less hopeful that crypto will be what the movement conveyed over last 10 years.

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

#62

Post by tylersmith »

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.

Nobody wants to be the bottom of a pyramid scheme. That's the scheme.

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

#63

Post by Consultant32452 »

flatline wrote: post #51
ketamine__ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the poison pill for BTC in my opinion. I have a very small amount of BTC and this is the primary reason I don't have a larger investment, don't make more of an attempt to use it as currency, etc. The central banks/governments aren't going to give up their power so easily. They may have low-key destroyed crypto by considering them commodities.

The only way crypto can win* is if a plurality of people just choose not to follow the tax laws. It has to be enough people that it becomes unenforceable.

win* in this case is defined as being a 1st order currency largely unencumbered by central banking/government authority.

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

#64

Post by tylersmith »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #20

Nothing like using a credit card and paying a $15 fee for a transaction that takes 2 hours and can’t be reversed.

Visa would be providing 0 value if it exposed these drawbacks of Bitcoin's transaction network to users. Making cheap, fast transactions with fraud protections is exactly what a company like Visa has to offer.

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

#65

Post by CyberDildonics »

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 :)

That doesn't solve anything, it still has to be synced with the chain so that the balance can be useful to anyone else. The average transaction is around $20 USD and has been around this much for a while. Opening and closing second layer channels is even more expensive than an average transaction.

There is no universe where 1.5KB/s in transactions makes sense. Any other cryptocurrency works better, ethereum and bitcoin cash already have more transactions than bitcoin and any other cryptocurrency works better.

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

#66

Post by nonameiguess »

kevinak wrote: post #50
ketamine__ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The idea is to never go off-chain, so no need to close your channel(s). And aren't you already committing cash if you're "in" bitcoin? The tax filing doesn't sound so bad in the long run. I'm sure someone will write some nifty tool to extract whatever payments you've done.

Arguably, the tax filing sounds like the single worst part of it. Imagine if you really used Bitcoin for every purchase you make in a normal tax year. Suddenly how much you pay in taxes depends on the path integral of the exchange rate over the entire period. That's an absolute accounting nightmare. Now you have a huge incentive to batch all of your purchases at market low points to minimize tax burden and you're stuck trying to beat the market just to buy groceries. That isn't something I want to have to think about.

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

#67

Post by dingus9 »

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!

Some exchanges will let you withdraw to a lightning wallet so you never have to interact with the base blockchain layer for smaller day-to-day transactions.

I would imagine most exchanges will have similar lightning withdrawal options in the future, if there's demand for it.

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

#68

Post by T-A »

Kranar wrote: post #46
ketamine__ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would USDC fail?

USDC uses Ethereum so it has all the scaling issues Ethereum has. That said Ethereum would be a reasonable alternative, but in terms of stability and performance, Bitcoin is far ahead of Ethereum currently. Maybe Ethereum 2.0 with sharding and staking solves those scalability issues and at that time it will be the best choice, but right now there are too many unknowns.

> USDC uses Ethereum so it has all the scaling issues Ethereum has

USDC also uses Algorand, Solana and Stellar:

https://www.circle.com/en/usdc-multichain

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

#69

Post by dencodev »

Not sure if this was the first year for tax returns to have it, but I was asked to document every single time I spent bitcoin to purchase something. Because you have to pay capital gains on the value above when you bought it. I wonder if this is true here but either way it's a massive pain in the ass.

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

#70

Post by qeternity »

tryonenow wrote: post #47
qeternity wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an investment? A very solid choice. What’s the thesis?

Institutional and retail investors are just starting to pile on and there will be potentially massive gains to be had in the near to mid term before the bottom falls out. Long term? Probably not smart. Safe to get in now? Debatable, pretty high risk. But if you have a bunch of coins laying around and you're willing to gamble a bit longer...

GBTC was trading at 15% discount to spot today...

The institutional thesis is massively overblown. And retail isn’t piling in like in 2017.

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