Side note, I'm noticing a lot of merchants accepting bitcoin asking for more information than they should need. For example I tried to buy an ebook recently and it required my home address. For Credit cards I believe that's required to verify the billing info, but there's no reason bitcoin purchases should need it for non-shippable products. And it cancels out a lot of the benefits of using bitcoins (fast purchase, a…
We sell digital services (ebooks count), and require the customers address (or part of) to determine the VAT status of the sale. Even though buying an e-book for Bitcoin seems like you shouldn't need any personally identifiable information, quite often merchants do need to collect it.
Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
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Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#22In a later stage, when bitcoins are more diseminated and people feels bitcoin more "domestic", then there will be a interest for "personal-wallets" and "business-wallets", which may be hardware-wallets, or multisig-insured-online-services...
TLDR; this is a good-first step toward bitcoin adoption, further later will be another step towards personal-wallets.
Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
We sell digital services (ebooks count), and require the customers address (or part of) to determine the VAT status of the sale. Even though buying an e-book for Bitcoin seems like you shouldn't need any personally identifiable information, quite often merchants do need to collect it.
So collect the country or state, not the home address.
Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#24The common thread in many of these announcements seems to be coinbase.
Does coinbase sit on the Bitcoins, or turn around quickly and convert to USD somehow (where?)? Holding thousands of bitcoins as a startup seems like it would introduce a lot of volatility, even if the long-term prospects of bitcoin are good (still need to pay the employees).
See also this quote from Rothbard: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43378777734/on-circulation-of-...
Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you accept Coinbase payments? I don't need help for accepting bitcoins. I trust bitcoins themselves, I consider them a real currency, not something that has to be immediately exchanged for centralised currency. So I'm fine just accepting them without an intermediary. My hope is that as bitcoins get more popular, businesses like Coinbase will seem less important. Instead, I need help getting bitcoins from all th…
I would contend that though you are at the tail end of the curve that doesn't need an intermediary, many of your customers are likely to need/desire an intermediary to facilitate for the people you mention, with no idea how to get bitcoins. Regardless of whether you, I, or HN hates Coinbase or loves Coinbase, they provide a layer of accessibility to an otherwise intimidating ecosystem.
If you want to do away with intermediaries, what Bitcoin needs is a large ecosystem, such that my BTC never needs to be converted to USD to be useful - I want to be able to be paid in BTC, then to be able to exchange that same BTC for food. The food vendor in turn needs to be able to exchange that BTC for, say, a car.
For that to happen, Bitcoin needs a critical mass of adopters. Unfortunately, the Bitcoin feature of capping the number of total BTCs in circulation means that the number of BTC users will always be limited.
Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#26The common thread in many of these announcements seems to be coinbase.
Does coinbase sit on the Bitcoins, or turn around quickly and convert to USD somehow (where?)? Holding thousands of bitcoins as a startup seems like it would introduce a lot of volatility, even if the long-term prospects of bitcoin are good (still need to pay the employees).
Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#27This seems good. But at the heart of it I fear it defeats the whole point of Bitcoin the payment system. Why? I thought the whole point of Bitcoin was to create a decentralized payment system. And here is Coinbase (or Bitpay) becoming centralized payment systems...
Almost all of these merchants are receiving USD and they do need some party to handle the exchange risk. Coinbase/Bitpay do this and their fees are substantially lower than credit card companies.
Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does coinbase sit on the Bitcoins, or turn around quickly and convert to USD somehow (where?)? Holding thousands of bitcoins as a startup seems like it would introduce a lot of volatility, even if the long-term prospects of bitcoin are good (still need to pay the employees).
As far as the merchant end you can get the BTC turned into USD immediately if you choose. I integrated coinbase payments into my sites a few months ago. You also have the option of holding them in BTC. The technical side of what they are doing I'm not sure about that. Unless they have a huge pool of cash to buffer this money conversion they are probably selling the BTC behind the scenes.
Hardly behind the scenes...
Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#29This seems good. But at the heart of it I fear it defeats the whole point of Bitcoin the payment system. Why? I thought the whole point of Bitcoin was to create a decentralized payment system. And here is Coinbase (or Bitpay) becoming centralized payment systems...
Yeah, I hear you. I am hoping they are just crutches to bootstrap bitcoin adoption. If bitcoins become popular, perhaps we can lose the crutches. Or perhaps we'll have tons of competing escrow businesses. What is it with humans' tendency to centralise anyways? Here is democracy... now here's an all-powerful president and congressional oligarchy. Here is the industrial revolution to facilitate transportation of goods…
Decentralization, while having a bigger overhead, also benefits from a bigger pool of contributors...
Example 1 - mathematics: if the europe-mathematics did not cooperate with other world-mathematics, they would limit their knowledge to only european findings, which would leave them reduced compared to the worldwide mathematics investigation
Example 2 - wikipedia: more updated and complete than many classic-editor-encyclopedias that were sold before wikipedia was made.
Re: Expedia Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Hotel Bookings
#30This seems good. But at the heart of it I fear it defeats the whole point of Bitcoin the payment system. Why? I thought the whole point of Bitcoin was to create a decentralized payment system. And here is Coinbase (or Bitpay) becoming centralized payment systems...
Yeah, I hear you. I am hoping they are just crutches to bootstrap bitcoin adoption. If bitcoins become popular, perhaps we can lose the crutches. Or perhaps we'll have tons of competing escrow businesses. What is it with humans' tendency to centralise anyways? Here is democracy... now here's an all-powerful president and congressional oligarchy. Here is the industrial revolution to facilitate transportation of goods…
Almost everything else you list is a matter of scale. As far as industrialization goes, all that industry requires an infrastructure, which itself requires an infrastructure, adjacency to materials, shipping, energy and a labor pool which won't be paid well enough to simply drive in to work from wherever. Even mere agriculture can be considered a centralization of hunting and gathering - as you needed one place to keep all the farms and the slaves and the temples and preferably all of that close to a river. It's not irrational. In fact, I believe the more difficult argument is in favor of decentralization - Bitcoin is attractive to speculators, scammers and hipsters but why would it be attractive to businesses or the average consumer without a proxy for the existing legal apparatus?
Gmail is not "the single location to email", it's simply the leader, there are still many email services out there, you can host your own email server if you want, it's (probably) not illegal. Is Google not an example of a free market working as intended? Surely, just because a free market suggests there should be competition, it doesn't imply there must be. You don't have to use Facebook if you don't want to. Sure, everyone you know is probably on facebook but you're free to try to create your own social media site and compete, or simply not use it. The market decided on facebook, if you don't like it, well, too bad I guess. Github exists because someone decided an online version of git would be successful, and they were right, it is. The market chooses winners, either honestly or dishonestly, legally or extralegally, and eventually the winners dominate, which Facebook and Google do.