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Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

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Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#131

Post by kennyasare »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #127
kennyasare wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "appreciating cryptocurrency" part is tricky though, right? Speculating on currency prices is a business; it is *not however the business that digital currency infrastructure companies are in.

> Speculating on currency prices is a business; it is not however the business that digital currency infrastructure companies are in Yes it is. It may not be how they market themselves. But it's the principal risk they take and, directly and indirectly, the principal determinant of their profitability.

I am literally the CEO of LitePay, I know the CEO's of the other infrastructure companies, and it is NOT what our business are doing with the Debit Card product.

We take the risk as a service to the community, and the product is a cost center.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#132

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

mtw wrote: post #121
bentruyman wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're trying to buy a coffee, don't use BTC. Isn't this sorta what we were hoping to do one day? A proper digital cash replacement? This Bitcoin scalability problem seems like a much bigger deal than most seem to realize. And it's only getting worse.

to pay coffee, you can use any other altcoins, monero, dash, ether has low transcation fees etc. We're past the idea of one crypto rules them all and going to a world where each coin rules in one area. Bitcoin as a store of value, ether for dapps, monero for secure/private transactions, ripple or stellar for international banking etc.

If your vision of the future is individuals carrying a balance of dozens of cryptocurrencies in order to do business, then congratulations: you have managed to reinvent barter, with cryptography as sheer overhead.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#133

Post by staplers »

kennyasare wrote: post #114

A few thoughts from a CEO in this space: 1. There are very few issuing banks for crypto fiat debit cards. Internationally there has been 1 WaveCrest; which as of a few months ago decided to discontinue support. 2. Even when a bank will sponsor a crypto fiat debit card into one of the payment networks, the company offering the card will face constant pressure from their own bankers. 3. This happening is from my perspe…

The irony of making it difficult to exit crypto means traditional banking will long-term be on the losing end as people who buy into crypto (even as novelty) won't want to "cash out" due to difficulty while realizing how convoluted the fiat process is when viewed from the outside. They'll find ways to stay in crypto and get things done.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#134

Post by throwaway5752 »

jstanley wrote: post #56
throwaway5752 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it was a very bad business idea in the first place, and I'm surprised it wasn't cancelled sooner. Before you downvote me consider the business model of credit card processors, and how volatility and rapidly deflating currency would effect their cash flow.

> how volatility and rapidly deflating currency would effect their cash flow. Not at all? You obviously don't understand what a bitcoin debit card is. It's just like a normal debit card, but you fund it with bitcoin. The company you get the card from sells your bitcoin for fiat currency at the time you make a purchase (or at the time you top up the card, depending on how they do it). The properties of bitcoin are com…

> Not at all? You obviously don't understand what a bitcoin debit card is

I don't really know if that kind of condescension is called for. I know enough about BTC and general credit/debit card mechanics. I know, for one, that credit cards have very low margins as a percentage of volume processed. I figured that the mechanics of a BTC transaction would be similar to a standard forex conversion, which I would not expect to be 1:1 with actual transactions, but from a hedged reserve (which I assume would be very very difficult to accomplish with BTC volatility, but also possibly inevitable given BTC network transaction rate limitations, as card transaction rates scaled up). Also, though debit and credit differ, wouldn't you have to take some degree of fraud and chargeback risk into account on both sides of the transaction? It's not that these are technically insurmountable, but - back to my original point - it seems like a bad business given the overhead and peoples' expectations around transaction fee rates.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#135

Post by JumpCrisscross »

kennyasare wrote: post #131
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speculating on currency prices is a business; it is not however the business that digital currency infrastructure companies are in Yes it is. It may not be how they market themselves. But it's the principal risk they take and, directly and indirectly, the principal determinant of their profitability.

I am literally the CEO of LitePay, I know the CEO's of the other infrastructure companies, and it is NOT what our business are doing with the Debit Card product. We take the risk as a service to the community, and the product is a cost center.

> We take the risk as a service to the community, and the product is a cost center

JPMorgan Chase could just as well say it issues mortgages and accepts deposits as a service to the country, that its retail operation is a cost centre for the real business of this or that. (It was popular, before the crisis, for banks to claim mortgages were simply a cost centre for winning wealth management and investment banking business.)

The business you're in is the business from which you earn profits and in respect of which you hold risks. Railroads and trucks [1], McDonald's and real estate [2]...this is an adage in business as old as commerce.

[1] http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/tag/railroads/

[2] https://qz.com/965779/mcdonalds-isnt-really-a-fast-food-chai...

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#136

Post by Nursie »

kennyasare wrote: post #114

A few thoughts from a CEO in this space: 1. There are very few issuing banks for crypto fiat debit cards. Internationally there has been 1 WaveCrest; which as of a few months ago decided to discontinue support. 2. Even when a bank will sponsor a crypto fiat debit card into one of the payment networks, the company offering the card will face constant pressure from their own bankers. 3. This happening is from my perspe…

We're talking about bitcoin here - the talk of fees extracted and of centralisation as a bad thing look somewhat odd given that context.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#137

Post by JumpCrisscross »

staplers wrote: post #133
kennyasare wrote: post #114

A few thoughts from a CEO in this space: 1. There are very few issuing banks for crypto fiat debit cards. Internationally there has been 1 WaveCrest; which as of a few months ago decided to discontinue support. 2. Even when a bank will sponsor a crypto fiat debit card into one of the payment networks, the company offering the card will face constant pressure from their own bankers. 3. This happening is from my perspe…

The irony of making it difficult to exit crypto means traditional banking will long-term be on the losing end as people who buy into crypto (even as novelty) won't want to "cash out" due to difficulty while realizing how convoluted the fiat process is when viewed from the outside. They'll find ways to stay in crypto and get things done.

> traditional banking will long-term be on the losing end as people who buy into crypto (even as novelty) won't want to "cash out" due to difficulty

There is context for this. China and Venezuela's capital controls are why everyone wants to hold renminbi and bolivars.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#138

Post by Nursie »

staplers wrote: post #133
kennyasare wrote: post #114

A few thoughts from a CEO in this space: 1. There are very few issuing banks for crypto fiat debit cards. Internationally there has been 1 WaveCrest; which as of a few months ago decided to discontinue support. 2. Even when a bank will sponsor a crypto fiat debit card into one of the payment networks, the company offering the card will face constant pressure from their own bankers. 3. This happening is from my perspe…

The irony of making it difficult to exit crypto means traditional banking will long-term be on the losing end as people who buy into crypto (even as novelty) won't want to "cash out" due to difficulty while realizing how convoluted the fiat process is when viewed from the outside. They'll find ways to stay in crypto and get things done.

Surely this is only true if the point of cryptocurrency for those people is to get things done. If it's mostly speculation, as it seems to be right now, not so much.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#139

Post by taxtherich »

kennyasare wrote: post #114

A few thoughts from a CEO in this space: 1. There are very few issuing banks for crypto fiat debit cards. Internationally there has been 1 WaveCrest; which as of a few months ago decided to discontinue support. 2. Even when a bank will sponsor a crypto fiat debit card into one of the payment networks, the company offering the card will face constant pressure from their own bankers. 3. This happening is from my perspe…

Realities:

1) Bitcoin is a terrible vehicle for value transfer. Slow. Expensive. Impractical. Unpredictable. Unforgiving.

2) No coins have meaningful consumer uptake, and there is no meaningful demand for other integration.

3) Normal people don't want the responsibilities involved with being their own bank.

4) Normal people are fine with the existence of credit systems (and thus "fractional reserve")

Note: my bank has coinbase integration. This is how any such thing will work. there will be slow uptake as consumers decide they care about it. banks will support it if clients want it in meaningful quantity.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#140

Post by Nursie »

oelmekki wrote: post #89
etr-strike wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning Network exceeds the throughput of VISA. The scaling problem is being addressed -- just not in the naive "let's throw away decentralization and increase the blocksize" way.

I've heard mentions about the lightning network quite a lot in previous years, but never got what the implementation was. I get it it's "offchain transactions", but how does it relate to bitcoin, exactly? Is it "sidechains", like lisk (each third party managing its own blockchain), or is it simply "outsourcing" money and transactions and waiting for a general report from the trusted party to engrave it in the blockch…

It seems to work by setting up channels of funds between entities. To create a channel and fund it requires a bitcoin transaction. Payments from the fund to the recipient can then proceed off-chain to a maximum of the fund amount, then another on-chain transaction settles it.

This sounds somewhat cumbersome, but AFAICT the gains apparently come from routing between channels, so if A wants to pay B, and channels exist from A->C and C->B then payments can route that way, without the need for more on-chain transactions.

To me this sounds really quite complex, and also like it's going to involve intermediary 'hubs' which will process off-chain transactions and... well it sounds like banks and centralisation again, something the BTC crowd apparently hate.

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