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Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

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Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#161

Post by sanswork »

tinkerrr wrote: post #113
aquadrop wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A crucial missing data point is that Coinbase does all their transactions off-chain. If you send Bitcoin via Coinbase to a friend, it doesn't get reported on this chart. They have their own accounting system. Bitcoin at its current stage cannot handle many transactions, as you point out. However, this doesn't mean there isn't a plan to make it handle many more transactions. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability…

And coinbase stopped reporting their volume after they were caught out fudging the numbers. I think people vastly overestimate how much off block chain stuff they do.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#162

Post by sanswork »

aianus wrote: post #116
sanswork wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring the cost of acquiring bitcoins in that 3%. Also cheaper still to buy gift cards via raise, cardpool, giftcardgranny, hundreds of other results for "discount gift cards" which are 3%-6% off AND get your 1% cash back.

Please link me to a site that has Amazon gift cards at a greater than 3% discount. I tried searching last time someone gave me that reply and couldn't find one.

http://www.giftcardgranny.com/store/amazon/

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#163

Post by sanswork »

mhluongo wrote: post #118
sanswork wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring the cost of acquiring bitcoins in that 3%. Also cheaper still to buy gift cards via raise, cardpool, giftcardgranny, hundreds of other results for "discount gift cards" which are 3%-6% off AND get your 1% cash back.

Buying Amazon cards on the secondary market isn't a good idea, though, due to the fraud. Otherwise agreed.

Which is helped by the ability to do chargebacks when you are defrauded.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#164

Post by sanswork »

mrb wrote: post #66
sanswork wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll believe it when I see numbers for multiple days over multiple months. Both bitpay and coinbase have been caught in the past using spikes and holiday volume to make their overall volume look much higher than it is.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#165

Post by throwaway5752 »

Newegg itself is not accepting Bitcoin, it is not keeping a balance in Bitcoin, and it has no exposure to Bitcoin related risk.

It has a payment processor, Bitpay, that accepts Bitcoin. As long as you have a competent engineer on staff, it's about as difficult as accepting PayPal.

It's nice that this is happening, but the headline should be, "BitPay lands Newegg as client". The maturity of the services around Bitcoin helps everyone that holds them, so it's not unimportant. It's just a very, very far stretch from a merchant directly accepting and holding a currency balance in BC.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#166

Post by jusben1369 »

zapdrive wrote: post #129
jusben1369 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the other night I stopped at a Mexican food truck and was without cash. They didn't have Square or anything. I drove 3 blocks to the ATM only to buy something next to the ATM vs go back. So for my family of 4 I put $50 into one store vs the food truck. So a $50 lost sale is a lot of 2-3% to make up by not accepting cards at all.

It's not like they were selling digital copies of something, that they lost all of it. It all depends upon how much is their margin? Maybe they go home every night after selling all their stock. How long did they have to wait to sell that $50 worth of stock that you didn't buy? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? Were those 10 minutes worth $1.50 they saved on fees?

It's a great point to add that it's nuanced. But a lost sale is a lost sale and should be avoided if you're in the business of selling things. Unless your margins are under 3% (the reason why Overstock is say an early Bitcoin champion)

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#167

Post by coldtea »

mrb wrote: post #149
coldtea wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a BS, extremely naive argument in favor of bitcoin. For one, you can very much have the same happen to any bitcoin user, using their personal details online in such sites.

No. The point is that Bitcoin does not require you to share your billing info with the merchant. Therefore no info shared = no data leak possible = higher security.

All those high profile merchants who accept bitcoins do require you to share your "billing info" so the argument is moot.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#168

Post by foobarqux »

AnIrishDuck wrote: post #152
ThomPete wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So can a bank and you will loose all your money just ask the people of Cyprus. Bitcoin has been around for 4 years banks for several hundreds. Your point is true but trivial and hardly says anything conclusive or useful other than you don't trust 3rd parties. With time you wont have to.

> So can a bank and you will loose all your money just ask the people of Cyprus. This is a silly comparison. In the USA, all deposits under $200k are guaranteed by the FDIC [1]. If the bank folds, you still get your money from the federal government. I imagine many similar institutions exist in other countries. Why there was no such institution in Cyprus baffles me. Perhaps they haven't had to deal with institutional…

The Cyprus banks didn't fail, the government confiscated a fraction of account balances. The FDIC guarantee wouldn't help you in that situation or many other types of national calamities.

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#169

Post by neomindryan »

sanswork wrote: post #157
blhack wrote: post #144

Reading these comments is depressing. Bitcoin isn't a few geeks trading bits over IRC anymore, guys. To some of the common bitcoin concerns: 1) They're easy to steal! Look at this person who did $something_stupid and had all their coins stolen! Yeah, sure...and if you had left $10,000 in cash just sitting on your table, the same thief could have stolen that as well. There are stories every single day of people having…

1) What are the best practises for having a bunch of bitcoin? You say you shouldn't keep it stored on your local machine but where? Keeping it stored on exchanges is kind of prone to failure in the bitcoin world. If you want to use a cold wallet you need a second computer that you don't plan to use for anything else and you need to learn linux or its pointless 2) Just because its new doesn't mean its better or makes…

1) Try this? https://www.bitgo.com

Re: Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin

#170

Post by blhack »

sanswork wrote: post #157
blhack wrote: post #144

Reading these comments is depressing. Bitcoin isn't a few geeks trading bits over IRC anymore, guys. To some of the common bitcoin concerns: 1) They're easy to steal! Look at this person who did $something_stupid and had all their coins stolen! Yeah, sure...and if you had left $10,000 in cash just sitting on your table, the same thief could have stolen that as well. There are stories every single day of people having…

1) What are the best practises for having a bunch of bitcoin? You say you shouldn't keep it stored on your local machine but where? Keeping it stored on exchanges is kind of prone to failure in the bitcoin world. If you want to use a cold wallet you need a second computer that you don't plan to use for anything else and you need to learn linux or its pointless 2) Just because its new doesn't mean its better or makes…

1) Store it on coinbase. And don't invest your life savings into bitcoin in the same way that you might not want to "invest" your life savings into Western Union Travelers Checks.

2) What is a way that I can transfer value to somebody in a far away place that is easier (if both parties already accept coins) than bitcoin?

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