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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

#101

Post by rowland66 »

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...

Wow, that is pretty basic economic fallacy. Whether you hold coins today or not should not impact an investment decision. If the BTC you bought 10 years ago for $100 is worth $100,000 today, and a couple of weeks from now the price collapses and is worth $100 again, you have still lost $100,000. Just the same as if you paid $100,000 for your BTC today. Only difference would be tax liability.

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

#102

Post by rawtxapp »

bpodgursky wrote: post #76
notyourwork wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The tax treatment of crypto as an asset makes it hard to avoid, right? Otherwise, you have to note the current price of coin in USD each time you use coin to pay for something, because you owe capital gains or losses on whatever currency you liquidated to make the purchase.

Presumably there will be tools to automate that, but I agree with you it would be a pita.

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

#103

Post by rawtxapp »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #65
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 :)

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 bitco…

> Opening and closing second layer channels is even more expensive than an average transaction.

That's true if opening/closing channels require you to go to the blockchain, but channel factories will significantly ease the burden of 2nd layers on the blockchain.

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

#104

Post by rawtxapp »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #63
flatline wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 choos…

You can just borrow against it to spend it. No tax whatsoever and you hold on to your asset.

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

#105

Post by KoftaBob »

notyourwork wrote: post #61
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.

Think of it like the currency equivalent of backwards compatibility.

It's meant to serve as a stopgap so that accepting bitcoin for a purchase doesn't require the friction/risk of only being able to use that bitcoin at other places that accept bitcoin.

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

#107

Post by beforeolives »

lottin wrote: post #21
imglorp wrote: post #3

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

People are paying good money for owning a serial number with no connection whatever to anything in the physical or in the virtual world. Don't be surprised if they also gladly pay a ridiculous fee to buy a coffee.

> Don't be surprised if they also gladly pay a ridiculous fee to buy a coffee.

I would be very surprised if people started deliberately picking the much more expensive option for no benefit whatsoever.

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

#110

Post by kajumix »

notyourwork wrote: post #61
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.

Bitcoin disrupts central bank, not payment networks. Lightning [1] as layer 2 on top of Bitcoin adheres to trustless and p2p ideals, and is actually the competition for Visa.

[1]: https://lightning.network/

Edit: added link

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