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BitPay and PayPal

blog.bitpay.com

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Re: BitPay and PayPal

#21

Post by Aqueous »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #8
andrewljohnson wrote: post #2

BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: * https://btc-e.com/ * https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 * https://www.bitstamp.net/

Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief. This is how it's been for almost a year now. Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consume…

'What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable'

It isn't? Western Union makes $5 billion in revenue every year. PayPal - and a reference to sending money to friends is literally the name of the company - also makes $5 billion in revenue every year.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#22

Post by tim333 »

rcraft wrote: post #7

Is paypal just ignoring the IRS' recent guidelines that bitcoin is treated as property? From http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property... : Today’s IRS guidance will provide certainty for Bitcoin investors, along with income-tax liability that wasn’t specified before. Purchasing a $2 cup of coffee with Bitcoins bought for $1 would trigger $1 in capital gains for the coffee drinker and $2 of gross i…

I'm not totally sure about the US case but in the UK you are technically liable for capital gains tax on foreign currency appreciation so if I buy US$ at 1.60 to the £ and buy a cup of coffee when for $2 when it's 1.40 to the £ I should declare the 20c or so appreciation in my dollars in pound terms. In practice no one bothers for small sums and if you've made a gain of say £10k you can estimate an average rate rather than itemising each coffee. In theory the tax inspectors could come back and ask you to itemise but in practice they have better things to do with their time. I imagine the US and bitcoins would be similar.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#23

Post by [deleted] »

tonyhb wrote: post #19
trevordev wrote: post #14

BitPay sponsored angel-hack Seattle that I participated in this summer. Their developer api was horrible and poorly documented wasting everyone time. I was in one of the few groups that got it to work. When asking when we would find out who won the 5 bitcoin prize for best use of it we were told to contact bitpay. I contacted them multiple times and support told me to to contact their CEO who ended up not responding…

I've worked with Bitpay while making https://www.incoin.io/ and their developer docs are average to good. It wasn't horrible, the documentation was good enough and Bitpay offered to help (and were super helpful when we asked any questions). In fact, other than having to implement BitAuth ourselves it was pretty painless. Regarding your AngelHack prize... the same thing happened to me. I'd be more skeptical of AngelHa…

[deleted]

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#24

Post by sillysaurus3 »

Aqueous wrote: post #21
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief. This is how it's been for almost a year now. Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consume…

'What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable' It isn't? Western Union makes $5 billion in revenue every year. PayPal - and a reference to sending money to friends is literally the name of the company - also makes $5 billion in revenue every year.

Except Bitcoin makes it free to send money to friends. One way I could see this being financially viable to build a company around is if lots of people are storing money in the company's webwallet. Then the company could invest customers' money, like a bank. But if you are using a webwallet like Coinbase, then you are asking to get screwed out of your money, since there are no FDIC protections.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#25

Post by danbruc »

Aqueous wrote: post #21
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief. This is how it's been for almost a year now. Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consume…

'What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable' It isn't? Western Union makes $5 billion in revenue every year. PayPal - and a reference to sending money to friends is literally the name of the company - also makes $5 billion in revenue every year.

Exactly, it is mostly a solved problem. The question is, what value does Bitcoin add (for the average customer not interested to buy narcotics on Silk Road) and what is the price for this, for example unsolved security issues and large price fluctuations during the early adoption phase?

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#26

Post by sillysaurus3 »

joshuaxls wrote: post #16
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief. This is how it's been for almost a year now. Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consume…

This has been a bear market for bitcoin for months—many of the bears have been rooted out. It's not a conspiracy that bulls are coming in and pushing the price up. It's expected. Not every bull will close their position immediately. That's too simple of a view of how markets work. There is massive value in bitcoin. Payments, asset tracking, international remittances, etc. Take just one of those markets, and just one…

Heard that before. The question to answer is, "Why now?" What's different now? Nothing. Not yet. This will change someday, but I don't think that's today.

The day Bitcoin gets FDIC protections is the day it can go mainstream.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#27

Post by martindale »

trevordev wrote: post #14

BitPay sponsored angel-hack Seattle that I participated in this summer. Their developer api was horrible and poorly documented wasting everyone time. I was in one of the few groups that got it to work. When asking when we would find out who won the 5 bitcoin prize for best use of it we were told to contact bitpay. I contacted them multiple times and support told me to to contact their CEO who ended up not responding…

Hey, Eric with BitPay here. If you're still waiting on information about AngelHack, email me: eric@bitpay.com

We just this past week launched our new REST API, which should be significantly better than our old API: http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/09/18/announcing-the-new-bitpay-... – we spent a long time thinking very carefully about making the developer experience as smooth as possible, but I'm sure there are things we can be doing better. If you've any ideas on how we can improve it, please let me know.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#28

Post by awt »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #8
andrewljohnson wrote: post #2

BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: * https://btc-e.com/ * https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 * https://www.bitstamp.net/

Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief. This is how it's been for almost a year now. Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consume…

The value proposition is not for consumers. The value proposition is for the wealthy. Bitcoin grants allodial title to wealth. Nothing else does.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#29

Post by awt »

danbruc wrote: post #25
Aqueous wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable' It isn't? Western Union makes $5 billion in revenue every year. PayPal - and a reference to sending money to friends is literally the name of the company - also makes $5 billion in revenue every year.

Exactly, it is mostly a solved problem. The question is, what value does Bitcoin add (for the average customer not interested to buy narcotics on Silk Road) and what is the price for this, for example unsolved security issues and large price fluctuations during the early adoption phase?

Let's be more general. Set A = stuff you can buy with USD. Set B = stuff you can buy with BTC. Set W = all stuff. Set A will always be a subset of set W, and is getting to be a smaller subset every day. Set B will in the future be an exact match for Set W. Which unit of account would you choose? A or B?

edited: typo (C instead of B)

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#30

Post by joshuaxls »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #26
joshuaxls wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a bear market for bitcoin for months—many of the bears have been rooted out. It's not a conspiracy that bulls are coming in and pushing the price up. It's expected. Not every bull will close their position immediately. That's too simple of a view of how markets work. There is massive value in bitcoin. Payments, asset tracking, international remittances, etc. Take just one of those markets, and just one…

Heard that before. The question to answer is, "Why now?" What's different now? Nothing. Not yet. This will change someday, but I don't think that's today. The day Bitcoin gets FDIC protections is the day it can go mainstream.

The point of bitcoin is that you don't need FDIC protection. You need FDIC protection with a bank because the bank isn't required to hold enough reserve to cover its deposits. If there's a run on the bank, and everyone wants to pull their deposits out, and the bank is insolvent, then the government guarantees to protect consumers by printing more money (inflation) to fulfill the bank's reserve requirements.

With bitcoin, you either have it or you don't. You can run your own bank, as long as you know how to safely store a private key.

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