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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

#421

Post by imtringued »

rawtxapp wrote: post #102
bpodgursky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Visa has incentives to play by the tax rules and make it easy for the average consumer to spend Bitcoin in dollars. Most cryptocurrency credit card companies built on top of Visa aren't willing to get their feet wet, not even in the country they are operating in.

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

#422

Post by imtringued »

Aunche wrote: post #293
67868018 wrote: post #179

The number of people commenting who completely misunderstand Bitcoin and crypto is astounding. Bitcoin will never be used directly for payments, it's a value store. Immutable deflationary digital gold. I wrote it off for years too because it was too slow and the fees were too expensive. That was the dream they had, but they couldn't realize it at the base layer. I was still walking around last year believing that's t…

If you actually wanted to store value you would buy gold. You can't store value in Bitcoin because it has no inherent value. It's a distributed ledger on the internet. If I hoard 100% of the world's gold bullion, there's a good chance that people would want to buy it from me at a price similar to today's spot. If I hoard 100% of bitcoins, it loses all of its value. Moreover, if hyperinflation does occur, there's a go…

The reason why gold is at least acceptable (as opposed to worthless) is that you cannot create another competitor element. Meanwhile Bitcoin is effectively a highly advanced piece of paper that has numbers written on it. It can be replaced by any other highly advanced piece of paper. Heck Bitcoin could even be replaced by its own clones.

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

#423

Post by imtringued »

auc wrote: post #192
SigmundA wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -Sagan

Columbus also deserved to be laughed at. People in his time period knew the world was round and even had a pretty accurate estimate of its radius, but he (very erroneously) thought it was way smaller. That's why he thought he landed in India.

This delusion convinced him to make the journey. Everyone who knew the world was round expected a whole lot of nothing in the direction Columbus was going.

The problem is that I don't see how Bitcoin will suddenly figure out a way to justify itself. Columbus was clearly looking for land and found it. Where are all the goal oriented Bitcoin owners?

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

#424

Post by varispeed »

This de facto duopoly for electronic payments is very concerning, but there seems to be no incentive to break it up. Why do you think that is? Ideally people should be able to create their own banks and issue their own cards provided they talk the same open source protocol. We have all technology available that could enable this, but there needs to be a political will to make this happen. This could me nationalisation of the infrastructure of both payment processors or forcing them to open it up for 3rd parties - for example a private small bank should have no worse fees than a big whale bank. As long as these corporations can gatekeep our money (and time), we are not free.

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

#425

Post by imtringued »

kajumix wrote: post #119
hnrodey wrote: post #108

One of the reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin over the next decade is precisely because of the anti-BTC sentiment on this board.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

>There is no intelligent critique.

Bitcoin "people" hail second layer scaling solutions like lightning which is basically paypal but decentralized. So why on earth would you not expect the people/companies who would participate in lightning to not just build their own scaling layer? What we are seeing is just that Visa and other competitors build a central scaling solution outside Bitcoin. Thus Bitcoin failed to decentralize anything if the vast majority of people using Bitcoin don't even interact with the block chain.

The fees are incredibly high, so high that any Venezuelan that is using Bitcoin is already rich and just wants to flee the country with their wealth.

It's not private, anyone who knows your address can track your balance, your transactions and can even send tainted Bitcoin to you, to ruin the untainted Bitcoin in your wallet.

>lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

They haven't. The only thing I see is that people consider Bitcoin as the perfect Cryptocurrency as it is and nothing has to be changed to make it better, yet they expect the market cap to grow forever without doing anything for it, but still assume that the changes they refuse to implement will be the driving force of that value.

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

#426

Post by imtringued »

rawtxapp wrote: post #140
karpierz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core issue I've seen that goes unanswered is what problem does BTC solve? The answers I've seen so far are: 1. Avoiding Venezuelan hyper-inflation - it is a use-case, but doesn't really apply to the United States for example. 2. Store of value - volatility is way too high and there are much better alternatives (Treasury bonds) 3. Evading capital controls - it is a use-case, but not really applicable to most citiz…

> The core issue I've seen that goes unanswered is what problem does BTC solve? To me, it's trustless money. I don't need to trust the US gov, I don't care about who they will elect or which wars they are gonna start or which banks they are gonna bailout. You can verify everything through code and math. If that's not valuable to you, maybe there's some other use case you're interested. If you've done your research an…

>To me, it's trustless money. I don't need to trust the US gov, I don't care about who they will elect or which wars they are gonna start or which banks they are gonna bailout.

If there is nothing to spend your Bitcoin it's worthless. If there is no US economy that is begging to exchange "worthless" dollars to Bitcoin then your Bitcoin will not amount to much. Really, when people are betting on Bitcoin or gold they assume that in the future there will be a bigger pie and thanks to their ownership stake in Bitcoin or gold they receive the same percetage portion of the bigger pie. If the pie shrinks because of a war then guess what? Your Bitcoin will be just as worthless as the dollar.

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

#427

Post by imtringued »

colinmhayes wrote: post #399
kajumix wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

Bitcoin is incredibly wasteful and has no genuine use case that isn't better served by ethereum2 or monero.

The fact that there are competitors to a "store of value" is exactly the problem. When you put your money into funkopops you don't want people to suddenly decide that beanie babies are in again.

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

#428

Post by imtringued »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #211
Spivak wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they have which is why they keep coming up again. BTC genuinely uses a stupid amount of energy and there isn’t a terribly good reason for it since we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal. It would be necessary if establishing trust was impossible but it isn’t. BTC transaction fees and throughput are still an issue. Off-chain transactions that use the main…

> we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal Who's "we" ? I certainly do need it.

Okay then let's compare Bitcoin to Monero. One of those is actively used as a trustless financial system because drug dealers absolutely need it to be trustless and private. The other one is a speculative bubble that is growing faster because there is no anchor to gauge the value by so people can do whatever they want with it even if it is stupid or unsustainable.

Before you say that drug dealers ceasing to use Bitcoin is a good thing..., it really says more about the ability to regulate Bitcoin and the ability to trace people than it says anything about the users of Bitcoin suddenly deciding they are law abiding. Secondly, drug dealers are forced, absolutely forced, to use your cryptocurrency, they are the few users that absolutely cannot do without cryptocurrency, at least not over the internet. Cash is still king, but only on the street. If the most "diehard" users of the cryptocurrency move on that is a signal that it will absolutely fail for all the "softcore" users who don't really need your cryptocurrency.

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

#429

Post by imtringued »

qeternity wrote: post #225
rawtxapp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the open nature of the blockchain, the IRS knows all your exact movements, so there's no nudge-nudge-wink-wink especially if you have tied your real identity to a Bitcoin address using a centralized exchange. Presumably, tools like cointracker (maybe even Visa themselves), etc, will take care of reporting these taxes for you, still a pita, but doable.

Or maybe nobody really wants to spend Bitcoin because its only use-case is wild speculation and this is just a marketing stunt on Visa’s behalf.

People will spend Bitcoin, grudgingly (remember the pizza? what a fool, never spend your Bitcoin!), thanks to Visa people will actually be able to spend it. Thanks to Visa Bitcoin will not be decentralized anymore either.

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

#430

Post by imtringued »

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 would raise it because more people will use it, but it would also eliminate all the usual "crypto" marketing reasons to put money into Bitcoin.
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