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Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

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91–100 of 132 posts

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#91
post #85

This is a strange case for bitcoin, competing with credit cards. Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none), more protections (the ability to dispute bad merchants over defective goods). It's not a bad idea for Square to add it, since some people have bitcoins obtained through speculation, mining, cheap money transfers, and so forth. But even so, they would be a little better served payin…

> I have yet to hear why bitcoin reflects a better choice than cards for the consumer.

I think security would be an obvious answer.

Credit cards are like symmetric cryptography: there's only one secret (a number), which you must share with everyone you ever want to send or receive money from. Any malicious actor who gets that number can then use it to extract money from your card. Sure, it's probably FDIC insured, but they still make out with some of your money.

With Bitcoin, you only ever share your public key. It operates entirely on public key crypto. You can safely share your Bitcoin account public key with anyone and everyone to send and receive funds. Plus, anyone can verify any time you send or receive a payment very quickly. That way you can't lie and say you paid when you didn't (no checks in the mail). You also can't do chargebacks or otherwise recall your funds, like you can easily do to scam with credit cards or Paypal.

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of reasons, actually. This will be a short version of something I'm still in the process of writing, so consider this very high level, broad strokes. Consider "Coinbase" a stand-in for any service like it. I also know that lots of Bitcoin enthusiasts won't agree with me, and that's fine. The most important one is that merchants generally want USD, not BTC. Instant Exchange is a really important fea…

"Websites don't actually accept USD, for example: they accept Visa" This has to be a joke. Are you going to ignore the part where I you can't send USD over the wire? Websites would definitely accept USD, if they could .

[deleted]

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#93
post #85

This is a strange case for bitcoin, competing with credit cards. Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none), more protections (the ability to dispute bad merchants over defective goods). It's not a bad idea for Square to add it, since some people have bitcoins obtained through speculation, mining, cheap money transfers, and so forth. But even so, they would be a little better served payin…

> Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none)

Correction here: There IS a credit card cost, but it is billed to the merchant and passed along to the consumer by being built into product prices. The fact that you think it is "none" when it is merely "hidden" speaks volumes.

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#94
post #85

This is a strange case for bitcoin, competing with credit cards. Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none), more protections (the ability to dispute bad merchants over defective goods). It's not a bad idea for Square to add it, since some people have bitcoins obtained through speculation, mining, cheap money transfers, and so forth. But even so, they would be a little better served payin…

> Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none) Correction here: There IS a credit card cost, but it is billed to the merchant and passed along to the consumer by being built into product prices . The fact that you think it is "none" when it is merely "hidden" speaks volumes.

Most people understand that, and also understand that it's irrelevant so long as there is no discount for using a different payment method. If you're going to pay for the protection of credit whether you use it or not, you might as well use it.

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#95
post #85

This is a strange case for bitcoin, competing with credit cards. Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none), more protections (the ability to dispute bad merchants over defective goods). It's not a bad idea for Square to add it, since some people have bitcoins obtained through speculation, mining, cheap money transfers, and so forth. But even so, they would be a little better served payin…

> Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none) Correction here: There IS a credit card cost, but it is billed to the merchant and passed along to the consumer by being built into product prices . The fact that you think it is "none" when it is merely "hidden" speaks volumes.

In that case, a merchant would have to offer a discount in order to make Bitcoin worth pursuing.

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none) Correction here: There IS a credit card cost, but it is billed to the merchant and passed along to the consumer by being built into product prices . The fact that you think it is "none" when it is merely "hidden" speaks volumes.

In that case, a merchant would have to offer a discount in order to make Bitcoin worth pursuing.

Don't the credit card companies require that you charge the same price for cash or credit?

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#97

Does anyone have an opinion on why the price of Bitcoin doesn't seem to move on news like this? It seems significant in my opinion and I would think that wider acceptance would lead to a higher price, but that hasn't been the case over the past few weeks / announcements.

It's not actually big news, is what I would say. Square is prominent to us because we know how it's growing, but it doesn't represent some insane amount of volume and this is only Square Market. It doesn't really change anything to say "a high profile tech company wants PR related to Bitcoin and to simultaneously test out what accepting it could do to their business". Every tech company is considering this - somebody probably brings up such a move to me every single day - and many are doing it. This is AWESOME and I'm excited to see Stripe and Square getting involved in BTC in less than a week (way more excited about Stripe btw) but for the larger value of BTC, it's NBD.

Other factor: the price of BTC is still REALLY high (not that it couldn't 1000x) and assumes there's tremendous (billions of dollars) value in BTC long term. Square processes billions of dollars a year in value, but not on Market and it's not many billions and not much of that will go to BTC.

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#98
post #85

This is a strange case for bitcoin, competing with credit cards. Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none), more protections (the ability to dispute bad merchants over defective goods). It's not a bad idea for Square to add it, since some people have bitcoins obtained through speculation, mining, cheap money transfers, and so forth. But even so, they would be a little better served payin…

There are many cases where credit cards don't work so well. Traveling abroad for instance. Every had your card denied because of a false positive for fraud? Ever lost your card on a trip? They won't send it to you where you're at. They'll only send it to your home address.

You'd be much better off using something like the blockchain.info wallet while traveling. As long as you have web access, you have access to your wallet.

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, a merchant would have to offer a discount in order to make Bitcoin worth pursuing.

Don't the credit card companies require that you charge the same price for cash or credit?

I believe it's ok to offer a discount for cash as long as you don't have to pay more than the posted price when you use credit.

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#100
post #85

This is a strange case for bitcoin, competing with credit cards. Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none), more protections (the ability to dispute bad merchants over defective goods). It's not a bad idea for Square to add it, since some people have bitcoins obtained through speculation, mining, cheap money transfers, and so forth. But even so, they would be a little better served payin…

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7499308
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