171–180 of 225 posts
The only people really interested in BitCoin are only interested in the "untraceability" of it. Consequently, nobody really cares about the fees as it's all about the ability to move your money around while avoiding government scrutiny. And these fees are what they are willing to pay to accomplish that.
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Is currency ever a good store of value? If you're a billionaire you're certainly not storing it in fiat. Bitcoin being a globally distributed ledger has the ability to represent shares of commodities and equities. It's why Delaware is considering incorporating blockchain tech. You could imagine merchants pricing in shares of Apple - and customers paying in shares of oil and Google - to be settled at PoS. Check out sh…
Stable currencies are a good short to medium term store of value. If I withdraw $100 from the ATM, I can spend it a week or a month later and be fairly confident that it'll be worth essentially the same. I'm not rushing to the stores on payday to buy all of my supplies before fluctuations wreck my money. This is not the case for BTC or AAPL. If I get 1BTC today, some new MtGox story might wreck its value before I buy…
In Kenya people trade in cell phone minutes (MPESA). It's not a huge stretch to imagine trading in units of energy or other commodities.
It seems to me that having an instant settlement layer challenges the need for currency as an intermediary.
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This reminds me of Uber and Ryanair. They scrape out of sight properties and claim lower prices when it's just playing on words. Later when people realize they quite wanted the full thing, the magic disappear. A decade of memory loss disguised as innovation. Not even a new error.
I get what you're saying with Ryanair (a sub-standard product sold cheaply), but I don't see the link with Uber. It's cheaper than taxis, and is a much much much better product. I consider Uber/Lyft "the full thing" these days, and taxis are archaic. Unclear if Uber's pricing is long-term sustainable, but even at higher prices I'd choose it every time over a taxi.
The customer interface is (was? I don't know if taxi companies competes on the app side) way above and that's the value here. Better information and information model, almost no idle time.
I don't think USD -> Bitcoin -> USD is really the way to go on this. If you are trading in USD, why would you move it into bitcoin and back again? You already had it in USD. If you need to buy some groceries in the US, you wouldn't trade your USD for CAD (Canada money), then bring CAD to a grocery store that also accepts USD. You would only bring CAD if you already had CAD.
totally agree. the author of that article completely doesn't even mention the fact that his bank wire is already in the proper currency and doesn't require a currency conversion. currency conversion from your bank will definitely cost you money - min is 1% fee for the bank, usually a bit more. So while the banking wire is a flat fee, a currency conversion would have cost him a fair amount. if he already owned BTC he…
and still ended up paying $20 more as for using a wire.
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Is currency ever a good store of value? If you're a billionaire you're certainly not storing it in fiat. Bitcoin being a globally distributed ledger has the ability to represent shares of commodities and equities. It's why Delaware is considering incorporating blockchain tech. You could imagine merchants pricing in shares of Apple - and customers paying in shares of oil and Google - to be settled at PoS. Check out sh…
> Is currency ever a good store of value? If you're a billionaire you're certainly not storing it in fiat. What? Do you change all of your savings into stocks or bonds each month? Currency is the best short-term store of value. And "short term" means anything I plan to use in the next 6 months (My emergency fund will last 6 months without me being forced to touch my bonds or stocks, giving me breathing room for when…
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If he's trying to deposit USD into an account, he should have just wired it rather than converting USD -> BTC -> USD. If, on the other hand, he already had $5-6k worth of Bitcoin somewhere, he could have eliminated one of those conversions and it would have cost about the same. Alternatively, he may have been able to find an exchange that accepts Bitcoin directly rather than through some intermediary with a conversio…
Which one? I don't know what these service providers do. I have a GNU/Linux server. Which service providers can I eliminate? Using my own server, suppose my neighbor has a bunch of BTC and I have a bunch of cash. If I want to buy BTC from her (by physically handing over the cash), what service providers do we need to use? Suppose my neighbor uses the same providers (or some subset) the author of this article uses.
This is the easiest to answer so I'll start here. You don't need any service providers beyond:
1) Any one of the many free bitcoin clients out there to
a) create a wallet for you, and
b) send the bitcoin to that wallet
1) Wire it from the bank
2) Convert your dollars to bitcoin, send that bitcoin to BitPay, which will send it to WB1, which will send it to TradeZero. Oh, and everyone will take a fee out in the process.
My suggested alternative, is that if the author already has bitcoin, is to find a stock-trading company that will just let him fund the account with bitcoin. Then the options would be:
1) Wire cash from the bank
2) Send some bitcoin to the company's bitcoin wallet
In that case, the fees incurred from 1 would be $25-50, and the fees incurred from 2 would be approximately 5 cents.
Given all that, I have no idea if there exists even a single stock brokerage that just accepts bitcoin directly, so that likely isn't a real option.
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FATCA means plenty of legitimate financial institutions want nothing to do with US persons.
That doesn't mean that financial institutions that won't deal with US persons are legitimate. They don't deal with Bahama persons either, even though they are licensed to do so. That might get them in trouble with local regulators.
What an ignorant article. It's unrealistic to expect cryptocurrencies to behave as flawlessly as wire transfers. The technologies need to mature. But for those with patience, they're pretty awesome.
> It's unrealistic to expect cryptocurrencies to behave as flawlessly as wire transfers. Wire transfers are $35. You'd think that BTC would be able to be cheaper than that.
If you do an international wire and change currencies you'll pay much more than $35.
The new title is worse than the first. Sure, it's easier and cheaper to wire USD to another country than it is to exchange USD for BTC, send BTC, and then exchange BTC to USD. Just like it's cheaper to wire USD to another country than it is to exchange USD for literally anything , send that literally anything, and then exchange that literally anything to USD. If you insist on using BTC as a transfer mechanism for USD…
Why do you even need to know about Bitcoin at all? Why isn't it just a cheap(ish) financial resolution layer?