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Send Money to Friends in Messenger

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Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#261

Post by ForHackernews »

grubles wrote: post #250
vectorpush wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. Credit cards offer decent but limited consumer protections; bitcoins offer none.

The difference with bitcoin is that the protection is up to you . Same as with holding cash or precious metal in a safe at home. Except with bitcoin, you have m-of-n signatures, encrypted wallets, brain-wallets even. You can backup your encrypted wallet anywhere. Someone even put their wallet.dat on a website for anyone to download, but their passphrase is probably 1,000 random characters or something.

Why would anyone want that? Most people are not interested in holding cash or precious metal in a safe at their house. It's extremely inconvenient, expensive to do correctly, and still much riskier than keeping your money in an FDIC-insured bank.

This is the problem with bitcoin: Everything its advocates claim is a desirable feature is actually a huge bug for normal people.

Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#262

Post by vanzard »

vectorpush wrote: post #231
vanzard wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always true. The reality is less rosy than you depict it. Most credit card issuers don't let you charge back transactions older than 60 days. It is always fun to discover this fact after a merchant invents believable excuses to stall your order for 60+ days... ("Warehouse stock depleted, wait 4-6 weeks. We shipped it! Sorry we shipped the wrong item!") Merchants can dispute chargebacks, and in fact do win 40% of…

Fair enough. Credit cards offer decent but limited consumer protections; bitcoins offer none.

Credit cards enable theft at, or fraud by the merchant because you give the merchant your CC info; Bitcoin fixes this flaw by design as it cryptographically authorizes only transactions of specific amounts to specific addresses.

CCs and Bitcoin solve different issues with fraud and theft. I argue that the protection offered by CCs is overrated. For example plenty of people everyday are happy to use a system that does not offer these protections: cash. I don't see you running around warning people to not use cash because it offers no protection.

Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#263

Post by vanzard »

vectorpush wrote: post #225
vanzard wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> needs a bank account anyway if they want to convert their bitcoin into something that they can actually spend outside of the dark web That's not true. Americans (Facebook's intended audience for this Messenger money-sending feature) can spend bitcoins directly at Microsoft, Dell, Expedia, Overstock, Newegg, Tiger Direct, DISH Network, etc. They can use and spend bitcoins theoretically received from FB friends witho…

Admittedly, my dark web remark was an exaggeration, however, it remains a practical truth for every day life. In the overwhelming majority of locales, bitcoin cannot be used to pay for groceries, insurance, utilities, rent/mortage, fuel, student loans, daycare, tuition, taxes, medical expenses, phone service, car payments or pretty much any of the common expenses someone might need to pay for. Newegg, Tiger Direct, M…

All systems that require adoption are, initially, impractical.

Bitcoin is becoming more and more practical as more and more merchants adopt it. Again: 100,000 merchants accept Bitcoin today, and this number is (so far) increasing rapidly.

Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#264

Post by sanswork »

vanzard wrote: post #263
vectorpush wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly, my dark web remark was an exaggeration, however, it remains a practical truth for every day life. In the overwhelming majority of locales, bitcoin cannot be used to pay for groceries, insurance, utilities, rent/mortage, fuel, student loans, daycare, tuition, taxes, medical expenses, phone service, car payments or pretty much any of the common expenses someone might need to pay for. Newegg, Tiger Direct, M…

All systems that require adoption are, initially, impractical. Bitcoin is becoming more and more practical as more and more merchants adopt it. Again: 100,000 merchants accept Bitcoin today, and this number is (so far) increasing rapidly.

Do you know where that 100k number comes from? I see it said a lot but the only source listed is an ibtimes story saying "an industry source says 100k". Has anyone figured out how it was calculated?

Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#265

Post by sanswork »

vanzard wrote: post #262
vectorpush wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. Credit cards offer decent but limited consumer protections; bitcoins offer none.

Credit cards enable theft at, or fraud by the merchant because you give the merchant your CC info; Bitcoin fixes this flaw by design as it cryptographically authorizes only transactions of specific amounts to specific addresses. CCs and Bitcoin solve different issues with fraud and theft. I argue that the protection offered by CCs is overrated. For example plenty of people everyday are happy to use a system that does…

>I don't see you running around warning people to not use cash because it offers no protection

People are happy to use cash because in almost all cash transactions they are able to verify the receipt of the product or service immediately or have a known location within reach to access the seller incase it doesn't happen.

>I don't see you running around warning people to not use cash because it offers no protection.

But this is something that is warned against. People/organisations warn against mailing cash for this exact reason all the time.

Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#266

Post by tajen »

joshmn wrote: post #241
cek wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kindel's Law: "Every new payment system rapidly transforms into an anti-fraud system."

Even lower-level, anything consumable by, well, anyone, quickly transforms from add-to-cart, checkout, and ship (whether digitally or physically), to add-to-cart, checkout, make sure they're actually the cardholder and legitimately authorizing the purchase, ship. I have seen far too many places -- whether they're side projects, smb, or even enterprises -- completely miss the antifraud step. There are companies like M…

Sorry for my ignorance but what are possible anti-fraud rules for, say, a flower merchant?

Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#267

Post by tajen »

mbesto wrote: post #246
ethanbond wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal didn't start as an anti-fraud system? It was a payment system that developed a pretty novel anti-fraud system and which was the foundation for a different company that does a ton of anti-fraud.

It most certainly did. "Confinity Inc. is best known as the creator of PayPal. It was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and _cryptography_ company. Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal in late 1999." [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity

In the book "Founders at work", there is a chapter about Paypal's founder and half his interview is about how banks told them they'd be crushed by fraud, then how fraud was probably eating up 10-30% of their transfers, then how they built such an incredible alrogithm against fraud that they had to build a room around the server to protect their trade secret.

Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#268

Post by tajen »

voltagex_ wrote: post #207
josho wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Canada is ahead. On the other hand that email money transfer incurs a transaction fee from most banks. What pisses me off is that we have a nearly ubiquitous way to send money in the physical world--a cheque. Yet, in the digital world we stumble to achieve the same. I blame the profit driven corporations as each solution incurs a transaction fee and/or a proprietary solution with no interop with other systems. M…

I'll be staying in BC for a while this year. It's the first time I've seriously looked at Bitcoin to transfer money from Australia. The problem I have is the fees are from both sides - the Australian bank and the Canadian one. Has anyone tried TransferWise?

I've used OzForex for $20k. Deeply satisfied.

Re: Send Money to Friends in Messenger

#269

Post by espadrine »

tajen wrote: post #266
joshmn wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even lower-level, anything consumable by, well, anyone, quickly transforms from add-to-cart, checkout, and ship (whether digitally or physically), to add-to-cart, checkout, make sure they're actually the cardholder and legitimately authorizing the purchase, ship. I have seen far too many places -- whether they're side projects, smb, or even enterprises -- completely miss the antifraud step. There are companies like M…

Sorry for my ignorance but what are possible anti-fraud rules for, say, a flower merchant?

Depending on how often the merchant is bitten by fraud, they can require to see an ID card for certain types of transaction (such as cash or check), or raise prices to cover the fraud costs.

Generally, they try to ensure that the liability shift is on the bank's side, by using an EMV capable system for most payments. Of course, that usually requires them to have a specific contract; banks, on their side, perform a risk assessment to ensure that they won't be covering too much fraud.

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