Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers • Hacker News Board

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#181

Post by Smokinator » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

spectramax wrote: post #8

Bitcoin has the same sort of issues that plague Linux Desktop and why Linux never took off as the defacto standard for PC OS. It’s the lack of user focus. Setting up a bitcoin account, understanding the security implications, hardware wallet, secret keys, the whole enchilada is too big for an average consumer to digest. Somewhere in Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson, there is a snippet about how products often fail…

No-coiner who has never used Bitcoin spotted.

You don't need an "account" to use Bitcoin. It's kind of the whole point. If I want to send you Bitcoin, you can download an app, we tap phones, and that's it. It's way easier to use than any other payment method.

Bitcoin's price doesn't matter. Its value will become apparent when your bank cards stop working. Money without banks. In fact, money that is better in every conceivable way than bank money. Isn't that the dream?

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#182

Post by andirk » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #21

I also run a small clothing business. We have received about bitcoin 6 sales over 5 years. Only 1 was offline though. Bitcoin is too valuable to spent. Hopefully something like Grin or Dai will make more sense for spending day-to-day.

How many sales were purchased through gold bars? Probably only like 1 or 2 per year.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#183

Post by Nursie » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #159

Nursie wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, unsolvable like routing payments from A to B requires finding routes from A to B that are well enough funded to allow the payment to go through, but with no knowledge of the funding states of the channels (as this would be a privacy leak)

The Byzantine Generals problem was "unsolvable" until Satoshi Nakamoto sidestepped it to make Bitcoin work. You don't need perfect solutions to have practical applications. It's such a stupid argument against LN. I can make the same argument that you connecting to Hacker News is unsolveable (there is no mathematical proof that you will be able to connect to HN, because various gateways could drop offline). What does…

Proof that I will be able to connect to HN is a lot different and less important than payments. It's also far from the only problem LN has.

If the network grows much, people creating and closing channels (two on-chain transactions) will start to gum up the system. If they don't close channels then they need to keep a node online or face various forms of attack. If they delegate that task to someone else, we've got yet another party to trust in a system that's already a failure when it comes to trustlessness. Even before all this, to make it work properly, vast quantities of BTC will need to be committed to the effort. The LN seems to me to be a joke.

And beyond that, well, what's this story about? Nobody really transacting in bitcoin anyway.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#184

Post by jakobegger » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

A handful of people have requested that I add Bitcoin as a payment option to my store. But when I offered these people to purchase my app with Bitcoin, none of them actually bought a license.

As much as I like the idea of Bitcoin, it just doesn't seem like people really use it for buying legal things.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#185

Post by Smokinator » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

cal5k wrote: post #18

spectramax wrote: post #8

Bitcoin has the same sort of issues that plague Linux Desktop and why Linux never took off as the defacto standard for PC OS. It’s the lack of user focus. Setting up a bitcoin account, understanding the security implications, hardware wallet, secret keys, the whole enchilada is too big for an average consumer to digest. Somewhere in Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson, there is a snippet about how products often fail…

I have a better analogy: Bitcoin has the same sort of issues as TCP/IP. It's weird that people are expected to interact with it on the protocol level. I think the term "cryptocurrency" is the "Big Data" of 2018. The term itself has been somewhat tarnished, but the underlying technology is super useful and will find its way into a lot of applications. And no, I don't mean "blockchain". I mean Bitcoin... it's rather ni…

sigh

Why do people feel the need to comment on subjects of which they are glaringly ignorant.

There are hundreds of Bitcoin wallets. They're extremely easy to use. Try one. I'll send you $20 worth of Bitcoin that I paid $2 for a few years ago. Hang on to it for a couple years, and it will be worth $200.

Bitcoin is literally going to save the world during the next economic crisis, and anybody with two functional neurons will have at least a little bit to prepare for that contingency.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#186

Post by sparkie » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #156

Are the drawbacks of Bitcoin (massive global electricity usage, makes email/malware extortion scamming much easier) worth the advantages (the ability to anonymously buy things online at a small number of places) overall? I'm of the opinion that Bitcoin is a net negative (Bitcoin mining has wiped out all of the gains we've made from the recent renewable energy boom), but perhaps there a useful purpose that I'm unaware…

Bitcoin is going to drive research into renewable (cheaper) energies faster than all of the G20 combined. The reason is simple: Mining profitability is measured in Hashes per Joule. Increasing hashes means bringing down the price of mining equipment, which is happening already, and it is reaching the limit of Moore's Law, meaning that the mining equipment will have a much longer lifetime, and the amount of energy it will burn in that lifetime will dwarf the cost of the chip. In effect, the "Hashes" in the above equation will become negligible - mining profit will be measured solely in Joules.

If miners want to remain competitive, their profit will be the difference between the bitcoin reward and the cost of their electricity. The mining reward is unpredictable, but the subsidy is going to decline over time. The clear path to increasing profitability then, is to reduce expenditure on energy!

Miners have an absolute requirement to invest in cheaper energies, because if they don't their competition will, and they will go out of business. Industrial mining is a race to see who can develop the cheapest, most abundant, lowest maintenance energy solutions.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#187

Post by Smokinator » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

gst wrote: post #132

short_sells_poo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next d…

An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time). In fact, ACH supports multiple settlements per day now so if that feature is supported by your bank ACH transfers can even arrive on the same business day. There are a few banks that are slower, but that's not the fault of ACH - don't use slow banks and you're not running into that i…

A BTC transaction arrives within minutes. For merchants, that's huge. Why wait 36-72 hours for your credit card sales to hit your bank account? Why pay 2% or more for the "privilege" of that clunky old system when you can use Bitcoin for free and offload the fees (.1 percent) to the consumer?

Watching you naysayers takes me back to the days when I used to try to get business colleagues to use e-mail, and they would be like, "But I have a fax machine. It works just fine."

Really they were just scared of this newfangled computer stuff, but the better tech wins out eventually every time.

It's funny to see so many so-called "techies" who are so incredibly ignorant of the most important technological advancement since the Internet itself. In fact, it's probably an even bigger deal than the Internet. lol

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#188

Post by tim333 » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

Ruphin wrote: post #131

stakhanov wrote: post #121

The biggest argument against bitcoin, in my mind is this: Regulators really only get involved in allowing/prohibiting innovations very late in the game. I'm thinking of how Air BNB and Uber were allowed to grow really huge despite being blatantly in violation of a lot of laws in a lot of places (for example restrictions around subletting in contracts between tenants and landlords, regulations around running businesse…

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are an active issue for regulators right now. Statements have come out from several parties that confirm networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. The SEC is actively shutting down ICO schemes that are deemed securities. Things are moving slowly because it's a complicated topic, but we are seeing more and more guidance from regulators like the SEC and others. AirBnB and Uber…

It's fairly hard to buy Bitcoin or ETH for fiat without uploading your passport and then subsequent transactions are logged on the public blockchain so it's not that bad for the regulators.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#189

Post by Smokinator » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #119

cal5k wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just ill-informed. "If you don't accept the banking oligopoly you're clearly trying to launder money" is the kind of nonsense that tries to shut down legitimate concerns over self-determination. Money is an essential input to freedom. If you can't make an income, pay rent, buy food, pay for transportation, etc. you are not very free. I'd also go so far as to say that the right to transact anonymously should be…

You're arguing an is with an ought. People ought to be able to to transact anonymously and without any middle-men. In reality, most people are only willing to put up with the inconveniences of bitcoin because it lets them side-step the law.

No-coiner spotted.

Bitcoin is much easier to use than your credit card. Download a wallet. Hit receive. Message me. I'll send you some Bitcoin just because I feel sorry for you.

Re: Accepting Bitcoin as a Small Business – 4 Years In, No Customers

#190

Post by Smokinator » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

jakobegger wrote: post #184

A handful of people have requested that I add Bitcoin as a payment option to my store. But when I offered these people to purchase my app with Bitcoin, none of them actually bought a license. As much as I like the idea of Bitcoin, it just doesn't seem like people really use it for buying legal things.

I've bought a lot of legal things with Bitcoin, and I've never bought an illegal thing with it.

Check out BTCPay Server if you're serious about accepting it as a merchant.