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Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

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Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#61

Post by maxerickson »

oleganza wrote: post #25
sanswork wrote: post #2

Pay 1% more(or 3%-8% more if you have a cash back card and depending on where you bought your coins) to save them 2% and lose all consumer protections in the deal. It's no wonder there is almost no consumer growth in the bitcoin world while new merchants are announced every other day.

Paying in Bitcoin makes a lot of sense: 1) You don't have to provide private info like CC number. 2) If you bought bitcoins at X and now they are valued at 10X you may effectively enjoy 90% discount on all purchases. All these mythical user-protecting chargebacks are almost never used by consumers for refunds (companies who care about brand help them settling refunds) and almost always for the cases when you CC detai…

A credit card number is vaguely sensitive. It certainly isn't meaningfully private. A home address is similar, except it is less sensitive.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#62

Post by user24 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #48

Great. So, when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves? This is exactly a "schlep blindness" problem that a startup could be solving. Deliver a turnkey solution for consumers to store their own coins. Don't m…

> So, when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves?

Given the huge amount of developer interest, I'd be pretty surprised if several groups of smart people aren't kept awake at night by their awesome ideas about how to fix this.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#63

Post by mcherm »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #48

Great. So, when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves? This is exactly a "schlep blindness" problem that a startup could be solving. Deliver a turnkey solution for consumers to store their own coins. Don't m…

Your question doesn't make sense to me.

> when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves?

As you point out in your own statement, there are companies meeting the need for a "turnkey solution": you list Coinbase and they are an excellent example of a company doing that well and being quite successful at it.

You apparently reject them because working with Coinbase requires the customer to "trust their coins to a third party service". Trusting the third party service is pretty much mandatory for using ANY third party service. Imagine a hypothetical service that provided "turnkey" software to store wallets on your own computer -- you would still need to fully trust the provider of this service to ensure that they actually stored the money rather than siphoning it off someplace else.

The only way to (mostly) avoid having to trust a third party is to avoid using a "turnkey" solution that is fully packaged without user serviceable parts. You would instead need to learn on your own how to safely store the coins yourself. Which is ALSO a choice, and many people do it. You complain that it takes "a solid week" to learn how to do this -- and indeed, it does take a few days to become an expert on any subject; there are 10 minute tutorials, but I presume you (rightfully) reject them as being insufficient to really teach a user enough to be fully safe.

Honestly, I think that you are just being unreasonable in your expectations.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#64

Post by sillysaurus3 »

mcherm wrote: post #63
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #48

Great. So, when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves? This is exactly a "schlep blindness" problem that a startup could be solving. Deliver a turnkey solution for consumers to store their own coins. Don't m…

Your question doesn't make sense to me. > when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves? As you point out in your own statement, there are companies meeting the need for a "turnkey solution": you list Coinbase…

there are companies meeting the need for a "turnkey solution": you list Coinbase and they are an excellent example of a company doing that well and being quite successful at it.

And if Coinbase goes bankrupt, all their users lose all their money.

I've written about this extensively several times before, so I won't rehash the old points. But the summary is, if you trust your money to an entity that doesn't have insurance, you're being very, very brave. Coinbase can go bankrupt for a multitude of reasons, some of which aren't fair.

One could counter this with, "Don't store very much money in Coinbase." Sure, but then consumers don't have much money on hand to buy things on a whim, which reduces consumer adoption. That's why I've been saying: Make bitcoin safe, and adoption will follow.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#65

Post by xur17 »

sanswork wrote: post #2

Pay 1% more(or 3%-8% more if you have a cash back card and depending on where you bought your coins) to save them 2% and lose all consumer protections in the deal. It's no wonder there is almost no consumer growth in the bitcoin world while new merchants are announced every other day.

I wonder this too - I rarely use cash right now, because I get:

1) Cashback (1-3%)

2) Chargebacks if needed

by using a credit card. Bitcoins are basically like cash in my mind - very easy to move around, but no protections in case of it being stolen, and no cashback. I think Bitcoin is very neat technology, and has some useful features (transferring money between people quickly and easily with basically no fees), but I fail to see the incentive for me to use it to replace my credit card. The business receiving it receives all of the benefits.

If stores passed the savings onto the consumer with 2 or 3% cashback, I could potentially see people using it. Especially if this was returned as points or something, similar to how it's treated for credit cards.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#66

Post by mrb »

sanswork wrote: post #49
mrb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overstock is just one merchant, one data point. Not enough to draw a conclusion. On the other hand, BitPay represents 30k merchants. And they did not stop releasing numbers. They recently announced processing $1 million every single day. This is 3.3x their daily average of 2013. Source: http://www.pfhub.com/bitpay-processing-1-million-per-day-ove...

Your source is a link to a story which sources some random bitcoin news blog which sources...nothing but their own claim that they were told that. Every other news source references it or doesn't give a source for the claim. This is common in bitcoin reporting. One blog makes something up, misunderstands something, or makes a mistake and the rest report it as fact.

This milestone ($1M/day) was widely disseminated in a business wire 2 weeks before the newsbtc.com blog post: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-payments-pioneer-bitpa...

Notice how it is burried in the announcement of the $30M funding round. This is probably why the fact was not picked up by more people.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#67

Post by pwim »

aquadrop wrote: post #54
mrb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong, there is tremendous consumer growth happening. The two biggest US processors (BitPay and Coinbase) release numbers every once in a while. One example: "Since [...] October, along with the integration with Shopify in November, [...] the transaction volume has tripled." Source: http://blog.bitpay.com/2013/12/11/bitpay-exceeds-100-000-000...

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions I don't see any growth. Also, 70k transactions/day - one average shopping mall.

Wow, that's amazingly low. Especially because I'm guessing most of these transactions are just mixing services. I wonder how much represent actual transfers of wealth between individuals? I would guess less than 1K per day, which would make it incredibly low compared to all the hype bitcoin has got.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#68

Post by jliptzin »

mcherm wrote: post #63
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #48

Great. So, when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves? This is exactly a "schlep blindness" problem that a startup could be solving. Deliver a turnkey solution for consumers to store their own coins. Don't m…

Your question doesn't make sense to me. > when can customers expect their money to be protected after they convert their savings into bitcoin, without trusting their coins to a third party service like Coinbase, and without spending a solid week learning how to safely store their coins themselves? As you point out in your own statement, there are companies meeting the need for a "turnkey solution": you list Coinbase…

You could use multisig transactions so that you don't put your trust centrally in one third party service, for example you could trust three independent services to each hold a private key, that way 2/3 would have to be compromised at the same time in order to for something bad to happen. For more robust security you could add services and need 3/5, 6/10, etc. I'm not sure of the exact implementation details, but in theory I think that would be one solution.

> https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Theory

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#69

Post by logicallee »

beaner wrote: post #20
nly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is decentralised, so, from Neweggs perspective, the transaction is never completed 'online'. Their payment processor (I'm guessing it's going to be Bitpay) has to wait until they see your transaction on the Bitcoin network before they tell Newegg that it's paid. Think of it as waiting for a cheque to arrive. A timeout is just sensible so you're not reserving stock.

That's not what the timer is referring to. The 15 minute timer is in place due to the exchange rate. Newegg prices their items in dollars, BitPay converts it to a BTC price and presents that price to the user. They can't show that same BTC price forever, becasue if the price of bitcoin drops by 50% over 24 hours, and you decide to leave your window open and order then instead of now, you will get whatever you are buy…

If it's a moving spot price that lasts just 15 minutes, is the exchange market deep enough to keep people from abusing this?

By placing a huge number of buy orders at a time when the market is quite shallow, all within a few minutes (temporarily driving the exchange price up sharply) the BTC-denominated price of goods on Newegg can become very low in a 15-minute windows.

Huge numbers of orders ($millions) could then be placed at that low BTC price, included by a distributed group of people.

What protects against this? Moving the price for 15 minutes seems quite plausible but I don't know the details - and am not an expert.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#70

Post by mrb »

bergeoisie wrote: post #60
mrb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the numerous and massive data breaches, and subsequent credit card theft and fraud events of the last few years have taught us anything, it is that yes paying in bitcoins has one fundamental advantage: you are never handing the store your full billing info which can be stolen and reused by fraudsters. Now, Bitcoin also has its own security challenges (eg. how to secure a wallet), but there are solutions (hardware…

I would much rather spend 10 minutes on the phone with my credit card company once every couple years contesting fraudulent transactions than have the potential for all of my money to be stolen if I make one security fuck up ever. The number of "I had all my bitcoins stolen, here is the list of 25 security precautions I've taken, where did I fuck up" articles is terrifying. I'm willing to sacrifice the 1% savings or…

You completely ignored my 2nd paragraph. NONE of the theft victims you read about used hardware wallets.
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