First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
BTC becoming an official currency and time travel are the two things I'm not expecting to see in my lifespan :-)
PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
71–80 of 139 posts
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why use Bitcoin? 1. As a consumer, it's fast and cheap. My dad in France can send money, instantly, to me who live in the US. No waiting days for wire transfers. No trip to a local Western Union branch necessary. No exhorbitant fee (worldwide remittance fees average 9%!) I don't even have to bother exchanging the coins with dollars to spend them, because more and more merchants begin to accept Bitcoin. 2. For consume…
1. It's a not a real-world scenario. Especially the part where you don't spend USD becuase more merchants begin to accept BTC , like if you're going to buy bread with BTC. You're not and if you do, you're 1 in 100.000.000.000. 2. Yes, that might work but it's extremely risky and complicated. When if you need to cash out quickly? What if BTC prices goes back to 150 USD because a large BTC holder (an investment bank) d…
> 1. It's a not a real-world scenario.
Kidding? Many many many immigrants who come to the US come in order to find a job so that they can send money back home and help support their relatives who live in the developing world. It is incredibly common, and Western Union (and only a few other players) have had a monopoly/oligopoly in this space for far too long, making bank.
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
A serious question in return: What's wrong with speculation and evading government interference?
Depends, do you believe in 'democracy'? If not, then nothing is wrong with that. If you do, then there's a whole lot of things that can go wrong. ps. The argument that we don't have democracy today in the western world, holds true to an extend but it is as close to democracy as we can get.
> do you believe in democracy?
I can get ~$500 for a bitcoin. Idealistic political concepts are worth nothing on the market.
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#74Serious question: If one is engaged in entirely legal activities - no money laundering, no drugs, no illegal weapons, no tax evasion, no slipping around international monetary controls - why would one want to use Bitcoin? With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, transfer costs of traditional payment methods (1-3%) are totally dwarfed by the risk of holding Bitcoins for even a short period of time. Maybe there is some…
Alodial rights to your wealth. There isn't really another great reason.
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends, do you believe in 'democracy'? If not, then nothing is wrong with that. If you do, then there's a whole lot of things that can go wrong. ps. The argument that we don't have democracy today in the western world, holds true to an extend but it is as close to democracy as we can get.
I believe most democratic country will vote in favour of bitcoin, eg. letting people speculate with it freely and use it somewhat freely (you still have to pay tax).
I think that you're fond of bitcoin (the protocol) but you clearly don't understand the social ramifications of what you're talking about: Democracy and anonymous, decentralized currencies do not play well together :-)
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#76Serious question: If one is engaged in entirely legal activities - no money laundering, no drugs, no illegal weapons, no tax evasion, no slipping around international monetary controls - why would one want to use Bitcoin? With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, transfer costs of traditional payment methods (1-3%) are totally dwarfed by the risk of holding Bitcoins for even a short period of time. Maybe there is some…
Sooner or later, a trusted financial institution will start to issue USD and EUR as colored coins on the Bitcoin network (or another cryptocurrency). From that point on, the volatility risk will be gone, but the benefits of a freely transferrable currency will remain. With the benefits being: fast (with traditional currencies, settlement takes two days), easy to integrate, and open source. In particular, the latter p…
I don't think that colored coins will have much success. There is a reason that bitcoin was designed without a fixed exchange rate to any other asset or currency.
An issuer of colored coins would be centralized. It would be a weak spot that needs to be trusted and that can be controlled. The benefits of bitcoin would soon be lost.
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
But so little of that is exclusive to BTC as opposed to a digital transaction valued in national currency, and almost none of the benefits you list accrue to consumers - they all benefit merchants. - Getting rid of charge back fraud also gets rid of charge backs - an important consumer protection. - I don't need 10 currencies I'd be comfortable holding, but any of these - http://fxtrade.oanda.com/analysis/currency-vo…
>Looking to the future doesn't make me want to transact in BTC right now. And that's fine. Contrary to popular belief, most core Bitcoiners are not particularly interested in "converting" non-Bitcoin users. There was a big group that bought Bitcoin as a (risky) investment in fall of last year who try to pump it up, but they don't even share many of the core values of the Bitcoin community. I do want people to be educ…
With that sentence, I meant that bankless people suffer hardship because they can't get access to basic banking services like savings accounts, currency exchanges, and money lending.
Simply because a financial institution that provides those services transacts in bitcoin doesn't make it any more ethical/moral than a traditional bank. While it's true that bitcoin doesn't have a central monetary authority, you still need a gateway to exchange currency for BTC (currency exchange), some way to safely store your private keys (savings accounts), and lenders.
For most bankless people, a trusted third party is going to be involved somewhere along the way, BTC or not.
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#78Serious question: If one is engaged in entirely legal activities - no money laundering, no drugs, no illegal weapons, no tax evasion, no slipping around international monetary controls - why would one want to use Bitcoin? With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, transfer costs of traditional payment methods (1-3%) are totally dwarfed by the risk of holding Bitcoins for even a short period of time. Maybe there is some…
If you would live in Argentina, like me, and your currency loss 95% value in less than 10 years, you will understand why.
Is Bitcoin being used there? Even among friends or something?
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends, do you believe in 'democracy'? If not, then nothing is wrong with that. If you do, then there's a whole lot of things that can go wrong. ps. The argument that we don't have democracy today in the western world, holds true to an extend but it is as close to democracy as we can get.
But "crony capitalism" is a much more accurate way to describe the US right now than "Democracy", so why do you choose this over that? I think it's a very weak argument to say "this is the closest we can currently get to X, therefore it can be said we have X". What we have now, as I said above, can be said to be closer to other things than it is closer to democracy. We should then pick the thing we're closest to, out…
Bitcoin != Democracy.
BTC could allow an anonymous party to control a currency, given enough % of that currency in circulation. Compare that to the current system. You may not like it, but currently the central banker (who creates policies for the good of his country) is appointed by the governments (ECB/FED).
The later sounds extremely more democratic to me. Now BTC is owned mostly by techies and small, adventurous investors. Once countries and investment bankers step in, hell will break loose. You don't want to seriously depend on something that you don't have a clue who controls.
Re: PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
But so little of that is exclusive to BTC as opposed to a digital transaction valued in national currency, and almost none of the benefits you list accrue to consumers - they all benefit merchants. - Getting rid of charge back fraud also gets rid of charge backs - an important consumer protection. - I don't need 10 currencies I'd be comfortable holding, but any of these - http://fxtrade.oanda.com/analysis/currency-vo…
- Chargebacks happen when cards are stolen. Cards are stolen because they are fundamentally pull payment methods. Every time you pay, you hand the keys to your money over to someone else. Think about this for a second, because it is absolutely insane. Whenever you pay with a credit card, you have to trust the merchant to (1) charge the right amount, (2) only do it once, and (3) themselves take your privacy seriously…
> So chargebacks due to fraud simply wouldn't be there.
That is far from the only reason there is credit card fraud. Actually most credit card fraud is linked to identity fraud (a hacker stealing someone's financial credentials or posing as them on an online/offline store).
Most of the credit card information stolen from Target and Home Depot is not used but sold as quickly as possible on underground forums to "the greater fool" who is willing to take a risk to use it (if it still works).
Because of the chargeback system, those millions of credit cards stolen are not a huge issue for consumers because they can immediately lock down their card. Cards are replaceable keys. If you believe that you've been compromised, chargeback for whatever amount was stolen from you and change cards. It's a pretty incredible system for consumers when you think about it.
Contrast that to bitcoin. Your third-party bitcoin storage service gets hacked, your bitcoin are gone forever. You choose to store your bitcoin locally and you're exposed to physical theft (like keeping cash under your mattress).
Bitcoin does not solve the fraud/theft problem. I facepalm every time I hear that argument. Chargebacks are omnipresent today because they protect consumers because theft has always been and will always be part of any financial/payments system — simply because thieves don't target "how" you pay (push vs pull doesn't matter) but target where you store your wealth.