Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

seymour-locksmiths.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 243 posts

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

#211

Post by gjs278 »

GreenJelloShot wrote: post #142
mikeash wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it get any easier than one of the 87 different mobile apps that let you send money to another person with a few taps?

The fact alone that are 87 different mobile apps makes it difficult. Which one do you use? Is there a difference? Having one single, well-branded app is easier to use than 87 random no-name apps.

The fact alone that are 87 different banks makes it difficult. Which one do you use? Is there a difference? Having one single, well-branded bank is easier to use than 87 random no-name apps.

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

#212

Post by cal5k »

A2017U1 wrote: post #204
rchaud wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this point about remittance fees being made frequently. For payments from Canada to the Philippines, Xoom (bought out by Paypal) charges $2.99 to send $200 (1.5%) and $21.49 to send $1000 (2.2%). That's not anywhere near 20%. I've worked in this industry in the past. Historically yes, poor people have been overcharged. The way they dealt with it was to develop networks of people who they could pay to carry the…

Their exchange rates are terrible deals and blatantly taking advantage of people who only see the upfront fee and don't think further than that. Get the feeling they'd have no problem making money with zero fees but that would suddenly make customers think twice about it.

This. Their posted fees mask exchange rates that are horrendous.

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

#213

Post by bluejellybean »

sparkie wrote: post #152
scrumbledober wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except i don't need to wait for blockchain confirmations on apple pay, it's instant.

It's also reversible. With bitcoin, it might take a bit longer, but transaction are non-reversible after a few confirmations. Any other system can reverse payments even 6 months down the line. Sucks for businesses.

I've heard this argument a few times now and while yes this is true for Bitcoin, there is nothing stopping another project from implementing this feature. Smart contracts, for example, make this type of feature open to any developer who wishes to code it.

In my view, Bitcoin is like MySQL and cryptocurrency/blockchain is SQL. Sure bitcoin has specific limitations but any other generic cryptocurrency doesn't have to implement features in the same way.

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

#214

Post by kmetan »

fyfy18 wrote: post #35
cal5k wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. Within the same country transfers mostly arrive the same day (often it's under 1 hour), and sometimes that happens internationally too. Oh and I don't need to pay anything for that. A few years ago I was working in the Mid…

>Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks.

This is true only for transfers between and within Europe, north America and couple of exceptions in Asia. The world is bigger...

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

#215

Post by dmitriid »

argo_ wrote: post #163
dmitriid wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less than 10 transactions per second while spending more electricity than several medium-sized countries. Yup. Technology of the future that we are fools to dismiss.

The technology still evolving. 10 transactions is not and will not be the limit. The Lightning Network already proved that a much higher volume of bitcoin transactions can be made without slowing down the bitcoin network. I like to think the energy consumption of the bitcoin network is an "idle energy": 10 transations/s = mid-size country 100 transations/s = mid-size country 10.000 transations/s = mid-size country An…

> An increase in transations do not directly increase energy consumption.

So far this has always been the case

> The Lightning Network already proved that a much higher volume of bitcoin transactions

It hasn’t proven anything yet, and as already pointed somewhere in this discussion there’s already a new version trying to fix shortcomings and limitations.

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

#216

Post by dmitriid »

andirk wrote: post #208
dmitriid wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less than 10 transactions per second while spending more electricity than several medium-sized countries. Yup. Technology of the future that we are fools to dismiss.

Is there hard evidence that shows the energy consumption of bitcoin? How is that calculated? I do believe it's "a lot" when I see those giant farms churning. And how do we compare it to fiat where the security is via vaults and sharks with lasers and other types of security?

> And how do we compare it to fiat where the security is via vaults and sharks with lasers and other types of security?

You can easily compare. Fiat provides orders of orders of magnitude more value added services on top of just money. Bitcoin is consuming all that energy while struggling to send money between to people at a (often an order of magnitude) higher cost.

Oh. There’s not just bitcoin, of course. There’s the joke called ethereum which was crippled by a game which in real world can be run on a mid-2000-era netbook.

Yup. Incomparable.

—-

Edit: On Singles Day Alipay handled over a billion (yes, a billion) transactions in a day, with a peak of 120 000 transactions per second.

Bitcoin would deplete the Sun attempting the same thing.

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

#217

Post by vbezhenar »

fyfy18 wrote: post #35
cal5k wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. Within the same country transfers mostly arrive the same day (often it's under 1 hour), and sometimes that happens internationally too. Oh and I don't need to pay anything for that. A few years ago I was working in the Mid…

If I would receive $50k in Kazakhstan from foreign country, they will be put on hold for a few months for security investigations and I'll have to provide all the documents about that money before I could have them. And even then someone corrupted might invent something to steal them from me. I definitely don't trust banks for anything but pocket money.

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

#218

Post by vbezhenar »

A2017U1 wrote: post #204
rchaud wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this point about remittance fees being made frequently. For payments from Canada to the Philippines, Xoom (bought out by Paypal) charges $2.99 to send $200 (1.5%) and $21.49 to send $1000 (2.2%). That's not anywhere near 20%. I've worked in this industry in the past. Historically yes, poor people have been overcharged. The way they dealt with it was to develop networks of people who they could pay to carry the…

Their exchange rates are terrible deals and blatantly taking advantage of people who only see the upfront fee and don't think further than that. Get the feeling they'd have no problem making money with zero fees but that would suddenly make customers think twice about it.

Can you open account with US dollars as a currency and transfer money there without any conversions, then withdraw and exchange locally?

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

#219

Post by turkeytotal »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #210
turkeytotal wrote: post #89

This should come as no surprise, but not for the reasons the author thinks. >I could list 50 different reasons why but for us it boils down to two main facts. A very small percentage of our customers posses Bitcoin in a hot wallet ready to transfer and secondly, Bitcoin can be slow and expensive for small payments. The main reason is that no one needs to use Bitcoin to pay for their locksmithing. Bitcoin is not your…

> Bitcoin is your last resort payment method/store of value This is what people have traditionally held gold for. It feels to me like there are very few use cases that aren't already served by physical gold.

You can't use gold online in an trust-minimized way. One counterexample are industries with high chargeback/fraud rates. Bitcoin is perfect for merchants exposed to friendly fraud, it completely removes the leverage customers have over them.

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

#220

Post by leereeves »

turkeytotal wrote: post #219
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is your last resort payment method/store of value This is what people have traditionally held gold for. It feels to me like there are very few use cases that aren't already served by physical gold.

You can't use gold online in an trust-minimized way. One counterexample are industries with high chargeback/fraud rates. Bitcoin is perfect for merchants exposed to friendly fraud, it completely removes the leverage customers have over them.

But accepting only Bitcoin is hardly an option even for those merchants.
Post reply on HN