111–120 of 139 posts
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I don't think bitcoin won yet. I haven't heard of paypal allowing people to pay for bitcoins yet. (as in transfers of funds to exchanges) They accept it for their service, but noone else can.
I'd say we're still somewhere in the ignore -> laugh stage.
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> why would anyone want to exchange a reasonable stable national currency for bitcoin? Name me 10 currencies you'd be comfortable holding. It'll probably be very difficult. Fact is, billions use currencies with high inflation rates and with relatively short lifespans. And it's not just places like Zimbabwe that have many problems besides insane inflation the past decade. It's also relatively developed countries like…
>Bitcoin can save 1-3% in fees on any transaction. Cash has no fees and debit has negligible fees (a few cents plus up to 0.05% in the US). Most B2B transactions aren't done with credit cards either.
Serious 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…
> why would anyone want to exchange a reasonable stable national currency for bitcoin? Name me 10 currencies you'd be comfortable holding. It'll probably be very difficult. Fact is, billions use currencies with high inflation rates and with relatively short lifespans. And it's not just places like Zimbabwe that have many problems besides insane inflation the past decade. It's also relatively developed countries like…
Serious 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…
I'd imagine the greatest benefit would be as a low friction P2P payment option. It's still hard to just send a fixed amount of money to someone with traditional payment systems, and if both parties have and use BTC, it would be pretty convenient.
How about Venmo? That looks pretty easy.
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>> "at this point I can already say that cryptocurrencies are the future of the global economy" You can say it all you want - that doesn't mean it's going to happen. Personally I see cryptocurrencies becoming popular enough that 'normal' people use them from time to time and understand how they work but I don't see the entire global economy switching from current currency forms to cryptocurrency anytime in the near f…
Merchants are paying 3% or so to accept money from their customers today. There are zero-fee, instant conversions for customers and merchants to use Bitcoin (Circle and BitPay, respectively). Once the user experience is right, customers will pay using funds from their bank account via Bitcoin with near-zero costs (slight exchange rate differences between services), and merchants will offer their customers discounts t…
If you run a SaaS company and your Pro service level costs $20/month, would you change your price to $19.40/month if you were able to eliminate credit card transaction fees? What if your service involved a little bit of manual data entry by your employees every month and you found a more efficient way to do that; would you reduce your monthly fee by the effective cost of the few seconds a month of employee time you've just saved? Perhaps drop it from $19.40/month down to $19.37 a month? Of course not. Whoever signs up for your service sees value in paying $20/month and they honestly don't care what your underlying fee structure looks like.
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> why would anyone want to exchange a reasonable stable national currency for bitcoin? Name me 10 currencies you'd be comfortable holding. It'll probably be very difficult. Fact is, billions use currencies with high inflation rates and with relatively short lifespans. And it's not just places like Zimbabwe that have many problems besides insane inflation the past decade. It's also relatively developed countries like…
Large retailers like Amazon don't save on their margins if they start accepting BTC because 1) BTC won't be used by any significant number of their users 2) they already get special discounts for CC processing from companies like Visa and Mastercard because of the huge volume they handle. Fraud is as applicable to credit cards as to bitcoin. You store bitcoin with a third party service means you rely on them to keep…
For point 1, obviously wrong. Any sale they make in bitcoin is one they save on their margins. Just because it's not applicable to 100% of sales doesn't mean it has no effect.
On point 2, that's true but is the discount 0? Because BitPay processes bitcoin payments at 0% right now (and has billion-dollar clients like Newegg already), with enterprise options. Point is, whatever discounts CC can make to large clients, bitcoin processors can do, too. Only more, because an average bitcoin order is inherently cheaper.
Fraud is as applicable to credit cards as to bitcoin
Absolutely, but there's obviously different levels of security. e.g. say I tell you 'let's move from checks to creditcards, it's much safer'. It'd be pretty silly to say 'no, creditcards also have fraud'. Yes, but checks are worse. Why? Due to its inherent design.
The inherent design of creditcards (1950s technology, by the way) is writing all the security details (i.e. your money-vault password) on a plastic card. And handing over that information to anyone you're paying, and then they can (and often do) keep that information on file.
Imagine you want to pay with cash at a supermarket and have to hand over your wallet to the company. And when you're done paying and leave, they still have access to your wallet for years.
It's a security nightmare. Bitcoin is different in that you don't send access to your money to a business, you just send money. It's by design more secure.
That's not to say the bitcoin ecosystem is a secure paradise, far from it. But I do truly believe that bitcoin's properties allow an ecosystem with less fraud. Things like multi-sig can create (in fact, already exist) third-party custodians who have no exclusive access to your money and just act as a signing counterparty, for example.
Chargebacks are an interesting topic that I'd be willing to talk about more if you want to know. But it's not a key issue. If it does turn out that chargebacks are wanted by customers, they can be built into the bitcoin ecosystem through third parties like today, keeping all the other benefits of bitcoin. But more importantly, chargebacks as they exist today are pretty shitty, invite fraud, create huge costs, paid for by the customer, and are barely needed. If you want to know the arguments, let me know I'll write them up for you, wall o text already.
yet better systems are emerging to solve those problems (Ripple, Stellar, Ether)
I disagree on the point of remittance, but I'm keeping an eye out for sure! These three are definitely exciting. All three projects by the way see themselves co-existing with bitcoin, check out the bitcoin talks by the CEO of stripe who launched Stellar, but you're probably familiar already.
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> why would anyone want to exchange a reasonable stable national currency for bitcoin? Name me 10 currencies you'd be comfortable holding. It'll probably be very difficult. Fact is, billions use currencies with high inflation rates and with relatively short lifespans. And it's not just places like Zimbabwe that have many problems besides insane inflation the past decade. It's also relatively developed countries like…
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 actually suck. In the Netherlands the majority of online payments are made with Ideal, all banks are linked to it and it doesn't have chargebacks. It's awesome, cheap, fast, every bank participates and virtually everyone uses it. It's not just theory, the chargeback thing isn't even a problem, it's not a consumer protection that's needed or asked for.
Why is this so? Because of the nature of business. A business, like Amazon, has a brand. It's in business for decades, makes billions of dollars doing legitimate work. The moment Amazon takes $400 for a new phone and doesn't send it, then lies about it, and does this quite a few times, that's the moment the billion-dollar brand and business collapses. The chance that Amazon will scam you and you needing to resort to a chargeback is 0.
What about the other way around? What's the chance that I, with one of the 100 creditcards I can get, make an account, for every creditcard I have, and send $400 for a phone, receive the phone, then do a fraudulent chargeback? It's small, but it happens. Despite this also being rare, it happens orders of magnitude more often than the other way around. Now Amazon is out of a product and out of $400. It costs them too much to prosecute me (their 0.35% profit margin on that sale won't cover 10 seconds of their lawyers). All they do is blacklist the creditcard.
As you can see, this system invites fraud. It rewards criminals in a way that's pretty easy to get away with half of the time. Amazon now loses money, which means it (and every other business in the world) increase their prices a little bit, charging honest customers. We collectively pay for this consumer protection that is often used for fraud.
Guess what, bitcoin can have chargebacks TOO. IF a consumer really wants it, let him go to a third-party business and say look, I don't trust Amazon, I will pay 1% extra for you to insure the delivery. If I don't get the product, you pay me back the full amount and deal with Amazon yourself if you want. That market will arise if there is demand for it. Difference? In this market ONLY the people who don't trust the merchant they pay for the risk. (very rarely do I buy from a business I don't know, can't locate on a map, or that doesn't have a business registration, and as such I have never in the past decades of my life done a chargeback). All the other people now don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud.
Not only is this cheaper for all but it's also more equitable. Chargebacks ARE useful in one circumstance, which is when e.g. you bought 1 month at the gym, and they keep charging you for 12 months. But bitcoin doesn't have this problem because it has PUSH payments. YOU decide when to pay (excuse the arrogant capital letters lol, I know). Credit has pull payments, of course in a system where anyone can take money from your account is it useful to charge that back. But that protection has no need in a push-system.
- I don't need 10 currencies I'd be comfortable holding
Point is that there are hundreds of currencies, and most are shit. So while I'm comfortable holding my currency (euro), and you probably your dollar (as would I), that luxury doesn't extend to a few billion others for whom bitcoin may be viable. As for your quote of bitcoin volatility, I'm talking long-term here. A currency that goes from 1 to 100 to 1000 to 1m users of course is volatile. But when that settles down, the inherent inflationary properties (generally the root of volatility issues in any economy) have low-volatility.
Besides that, I already mentioned you can lock in the price of bitcoin in a national currency. I'm not saying we should all HAVE bitcoin, but I'm saying we can benefit from using it. That could indeed mean regular joes owning $100 (in bitcoin), pegged to the dollar price built on a back-end derivative market for investors, and using it as if it was paypal. That could happen, too. People are working on that, e.g. the founder of CNET who launched Bitreserve.
- My credit card company provides fraud protection for when my card is stolen, my BTC wallet does not
Circle, Xapo and Coinbase all insure bitcoins already, more insurance services will inevitably follow. The point is, whatever creditcard theft happens that you get reimbursed for, someone has to pay for it, and that someone is you and everyone else, and the amount it costs you and everyone else is the average cost of theft per person. Same with bitcoin. But if bitcoin has more secure properties (and I believe it does, push vs pull, lower chance of fraud, multi-sig, no possibility of getting your wallet stolen), then whatever it costs to insure against bitcoin theft will likely be lower on average than the cost of insuring against creditcard theft, meaning it's a cheaper system. Any of today's financial services can be offered for bitcoin, too, but due to its generally better properties, at a cheaper rate. That's why it's so cool. Bitcoin is a protocol-layer, you can build anything on top if you want.
- Until bitcoin gains market share
Agreed that there are quite a few issues that may not be issues if bitcoin gains market share. A bit like the internet: until internet speed becomes faster, I'm not going to be able to make phonecalls, videochat, download movies, watch live news etc on my computer, or hell even my phone - guy in 1995. That's not a reason to walk away, it's a reason to be excited.
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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…
My dad in France can send money, instantly, to me who live(s) in the US. Umm, no. He can't send you "money", using BTC. All he can send you is bitcoin . There's still this pesky business of converting between bitcoin and fiat currency, on either end. And all the preamble about getting your Uncle to sign onto one of these proxy services (and to accept the general idea of bitcoin), and all that. Maybe the overhead work…
Look, bitcoin is money. It may not be as universally accepted as a national currency, it may not have some official country issuing it, but it's still money.
You don't necessarily have to convert it to anything. As he said, he actually used bitcoin to buy computer parts at a billion-dollar company like Newegg, which is just one of multiple billion-dollar computer companlies like Dell and Tigerdirect, just to limit the examples to billion-dollar companies in the computer retail industry.
And I recently signed up with Circle. The process of signing up takes 10 minutes, like opening a gmail account, you can then buy and sell bitcoin instantly and it's completely free, zero fees. It's founded by Jeremy Allaire who built a billion-dollar company now part of Adobe (ColdFusion, used by 75 of the fortune 100). Point is, within a very short timespan of 1-2 years we already see industry veterans like him jump into this market to make it more and more frictionless, they already managed free and instant bitcoin purchase and sale, insured, too, in fact.
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> 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.
Now I think you're trolling me, so I'll stop the conversation here.
The official Braintree post on the one-touch side of things is super interesting and vague[1] - does anyone know what the UX is like from a developers point of view? [1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/one-touch
Hey I work at Braintree on our SDKs. You can find the list of things you need to do to enable one touch here[1]. For Android there is nothing outside a normal Braintree integration you need to do and for iOS you need to register a URL type as well as make two changes in your app delegate to tell us about it. We generally think about two ways you can integrate with Braintree on the front-end: the drop-in UI and custom…