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OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

getonebit.com

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#31

Love hearing the phrase "Let's face it. Today, it is still ridiculously difficult to spend Bitcoin in the real world." I love Bitcoin but I can't integrate it into my life because it is just way to complicated in most of my transactions, not due to my lack of understanding of how to use it.

The issue really is that bitcoin isn't suited for retail transactions. I work in the payments industry and we took a long hard look at integrating bitcoin payments into our point-of-sale and determined that it was effort we would get no reward for. Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold. Working with risk le…

> they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit.

The element of risk is ALWAYS present with cash and credit. You could be handed counterfeit bills. You could be hit with chargeback fees (even when the CC processor will let you keep the money because it was a card-present transaction). But somehow merchants accept these risks... so why not Bitcoin?

Sounds like your employer isn't as confident/competent as other point-of-sale manufacturers who have been able to support Bitcoin, like point-of-sale giant NCR http://www.ncr.com/news/news-releases/small-business/ncr-sil...

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#32
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Pay and contactless are both the same technology & same standards. If you support one, it's essentially trivial to support the other. Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.

>> Apple Pay and contactless are both the same technology & same standards. If you support one, it's essentially trivial to support the other Ah, this I didn't know, thanks. >> Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well. It's different hardware. Historically the hardware has been more likely to support ICC/EMV and not NFC, but if the US is actually ever going to do a big EMV rollout th…

What about the advent of current technology that Samsung recently acquired, Looppay (MST), that uses a magentic tokenization to be able to complete transactions? These are useful and readily accessible with 90% of POS terminals that read the magnetic stripe on your credit card. It if different from the RFID-based NFC but it can be used compatible as current POS systems transfer to EMV-updated systems that will also support NFC transactions. This MST technology is mostly srpead to Japan and not neccessarily in the US though our current terminals are already ready to accept these payments.

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#34
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue really is that bitcoin isn't suited for retail transactions. I work in the payments industry and we took a long hard look at integrating bitcoin payments into our point-of-sale and determined that it was effort we would get no reward for. Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold. Working with risk le…

> Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold. A guarantee isn't what you want. Cash and card isn't guaranteed either — the cash might be counterfeit; the credit card might be stolen. What you want is to reduce the rate of fraud. So let's compare the rates of fraud between bitcoin and cash/card. Credit card trans…

> But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions.

Then you are simply not very well informed. Problems with BTC transactions have happened repeatedly. Here is a great example of a successful 10k double spend during a chain fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956 It was was made possible buy slightly different behaviours in the different client versions. The core developers had to get on IRC with the miner using the 0.8 version and talk them into giving up their (correct) chain to resolve this problem. Currency of the future!

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#35

Isn't that exactly what we shouldn't want, that the credit card companies also record our financial transactions made via a currency created to be decentralized? This basically ends as a bit of convenience for us, at the cost of them keeping the near monopoly on world-wide transactions... What's the point of bitcoins if VISA, MasterCard, etc. still know everything we buy world-wide, conveniently accessible in their d…

Recording financial transactions has nothing to do with decentralization. I see nothing wrong with this.

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As right as you are about the American market, it's extremely annoying that the rest of the world doesn't get to use services like Google Wallet and Apple Pay. In Canada, I've been tapping to pay for years, yet there are no popular 3rd party services to use my phone for paying. So sure, it'll be stillborn in the US. But I don't give a crap about the US, you guys get enough of the cool stuff. This is a sweet deal for…

I will admit that while scanning through the content on the site again, I missed an important piece of wording that initially formulated half of my opinion here. It is important to note that it does say World-wide. If they are poised to launch in other countries besides the US then I retract my statement about it being a waste. However, I've seen much of this financial tech go straight to US for launch. If its NFC it…

I agree that launching in the US is a bad idea for the reasons you mention, and I'm hopeful that more companies try starting outside of the US. The potential is huge, and there is a sizeable market for this kind of thing that is unfortunately overlooked by most.

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#37
post #35

Isn't that exactly what we shouldn't want, that the credit card companies also record our financial transactions made via a currency created to be decentralized? This basically ends as a bit of convenience for us, at the cost of them keeping the near monopoly on world-wide transactions... What's the point of bitcoins if VISA, MasterCard, etc. still know everything we buy world-wide, conveniently accessible in their d…

Recording financial transactions has nothing to do with decentralization. I see nothing wrong with this.

Recording financial transactions has everything to do with centralization, when only a handful of companies control world-wide purchases.

These new electronic currencies are inherently untied from anything. What happens when the same handful of companies control them also?

Wasn't it Russia who was denied its own credit card by the same US companies? That's way too much power to have over the world. If we finally have a chance to decentralize some of these transactions, to remove some of that power they currently have, we certainly should take that chance.

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold. A guarantee isn't what you want. Cash and card isn't guaranteed either — the cash might be counterfeit; the credit card might be stolen. What you want is to reduce the rate of fraud. So let's compare the rates of fraud between bitcoin and cash/card. Credit card trans…

> But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions. Then you are simply not very well informed. Problems with BTC transactions have happened repeatedly. Here is a great example of a successful 10k double spend during a chain fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956 It was was made possible buy slightly different behaviours in the different client versions. The core devel…

This incident had nothing to do with zero-conf txs. In fact okpay did wait for multiple confirmations, and was still hit by this $10k double spend!

This whole thing was possible because of an accidental fork of the chain which lasted a few hours. This is the only accidental fork that occurred in the last 3 years.

Details: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#39

Isn't that exactly what we shouldn't want, that the credit card companies also record our financial transactions made via a currency created to be decentralized? This basically ends as a bit of convenience for us, at the cost of them keeping the near monopoly on world-wide transactions... What's the point of bitcoins if VISA, MasterCard, etc. still know everything we buy world-wide, conveniently accessible in their d…

>Isn't that exactly what we shouldn't want, that the credit card companies also record our financial transactions made via a currency created to be decentralized?

Yes, actually. I want my budgeting and spend tracking tools to continue to work.

Re: OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet

#40
This product helps people who already have bitcoin convert it to fiat more easily and offload the bitcoin->fiat conversion fees onto the merchant.

Is there a market for this? It simply uses bitcoin as a store-of-value instead of fiat in a bank. Unless you're in the tiny minority of people who can acquire bitcoin but cannot acquire a bank account, I don't see the benefit to consumers or merchants. Not to mention with bitcoin's current volatility it is rarely appealing as a store of value.

(NFC seems to be another problem, but other commenters have discussed that well.)

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