91–100 of 212 posts
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It has grown by a factor of 4 in the past two years (visible when you switch to the 2 year or 'all time' scale).
That hardly tells anything about consumer adoption though, but about trade volume.
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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'm wondering why Coinbase doesn't offer a cashback program where they would charge the merchant the typical 2-3% and pass it on to the payer as a discount. This would hugely incentivize paying with BTC. The merchant should be indifferent about this fee since he has to pay it already 95% of the time.
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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 ($millions) could then…
Honestly, the price of the BTC is decently stable, I wouldn't expect anything to happen which would effect their prices enough to make a difference within a 15-minute window. Ex. The Bitcoin is on an uptrend and went up 30$ in the window between when I checked it ~8 hours ago and just now. Even if it managed to do that in a 15-minute window of time, that's only 30-dollars off of every 600 dollars you spend. A 100$ do…
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That hardly tells anything about consumer adoption though, but about trade volume.
That's true. Still 100% growth per year is not exactly 'no growth'.
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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…
What protects against this is that if you put in a bunch of buy orders for BTC at high dollar amounts, a rash of people would rush to sell their BTC. You might temporarily drive up the exchange price sharply, but at the cost of buy a ton of BTC at an inflated price.
e.g. buying $800K worth of bitcoin in 15 minutes, so that you can increase the price of BTC and then buy $5M worth of goods NewEgg - would $800K in fifteen minutes press newegg's btc-denominated price well below wholesale on those same electronic goods? (including to cover what you overpaid for the btc to execute your position.)
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For 2), surely you would have to pay capital gains tax on the increase in value. To be fully compliant with the law, it may be hard to enforce in reality.
Depends on your country of residence. In the US, I believe this is the case, in Denmark, this isn't the case ( http://taxinsights.ey.com/archive/archive-news/danish-assess... ).
Sweden for example does, and I believe Norway as well. Funny that, Scandinavian countries usually have similar legislation. ( http://blog.btcx.se/bitcoin-nytt/dags-att-deklarera-bitcoin-... )
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Isn't that illegal?
Credit card companies use to dictate that you couldn't charge different prices for them but they were sued and lost so now you can.
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…
Companies who don't care about brand and companies who have not yet established a brand are, however, somewhat indistinguishable.
The chargeback facility (among others) provides a cushion and safety net to allow consumers to transact in cases where they are less than 100% certain who they are dealing with.
Removing it would kill the ability of smaller businesses to transact as people like me would never give them any cash, and I would advise my non-technical friends and family to behave similarly.
I know this disagrees with your view on the world, sorry.
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True there's no advantage to paying with bitcoin currently and most people are just using it for the novelty value. But enough growth and merchants will just have to offer discounts with bitcoin purchases to stay competitive.
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…
And you have to use a hard to obtain (bureucratic nightmare to exchange), volatile, dealing with shady "institutions" with no real history or assurances behind them (MtGox anyone?), and use a novelty currency for that?
There are "one use" recharchable virtual credit cards used all over the world, you can "fill up" one from your online banking and have it handle as much or as little money as you want (e.g just for one transaction).
This can be done wholly online, and takes like 1 minute.
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Isn't that illegal?
Credit card companies use to dictate that you couldn't charge different prices for them but they were sued and lost so now you can.