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I think companies like Venmo, Dwolla and Square (or even PayPal) are well-positioned to becoming credit card alternatives.
So: why Bitcoin/a separate currency?
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The irony is he's using a throwaway even though his identity is not concealed. If you visit the website address in the screenshots, click "help" and then take the name listed and google it you have a full profile on the guy...
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It's kinda messed up that you guys outted this guy. Suppose he didn't want his employer to know?
You must admit that the unusual nature of such an anonymous request makes it likely that people are going to dig into it, just for the sport of it.
I hate conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but there are a few basic principles I follow: 1) When people are making money off of something, they protect that method of making money, and evolve if necessary. 2) There are intricacies to our currency that might not seem immediately obvious. People depend on the discreet nature of physical currency - it controls the entire world of corruption (a lot of movies li…
I live in Somaliland. The top telecom company here, Telesom, has a mobile money transfer service here called Zaad. Basically, people setup a Zaad account at their local Telesom office and exchange their physical currency for credit in their Zaad account.
They then buy stuff at shops or send money to folks right from their mobile phone using a USSD interface. The USSD interface works like this:
1. Dial *888# 2. A prompt appears on your mobile phone. The prompts could be a menu, a request for a password or whatever 3. The user clicks reply (a context menu appears on the phone) and types in a reply. 4. Go to no. 2 until the transaction is complete.
Zaad has exploded in growth in the 2 or 3 years it's been around and has freaked out a lot of other businesses here who suddenly got a scary new popular competitor. The best part of Zaad is that you don't need a smartphone or internet connectivity to use it. Literally any mobile phone works with it. Even an old-school Nokia 3310.
Telesom isn't the first country to come up with this idea. If I'm not mistaken, the first company was a Kenyan company called Safaricom and their product is called M-Pesa. It has 6 million subscribers using it.
Imagine 6 million folks sending transactions and getting a tiny cut out of every transaction. M-Pesa is huge.
I agree that credit cards are going to be displaced, but what is the rationale that the solution requires its own currency? Most transactions are very much within national (or European) boundaries. I think companies like Venmo, Dwolla and Square (or even PayPal) are well-positioned to becoming credit card alternatives. So: why Bitcoin/a separate currency?
Yes, you read that correctly.
There are laws that state that anything that can be used to facilitate money laundering OR threaten the US economy is illegal.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm one of the most active Bitcoin fans I know, I think the concept is unbelievable. I just wanted you to know that there might be some additional legal barriers as you can gain traction.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Transferring bitcoin funds is already easy with the GUI. Sure a wrapper around it might make it slightly more user friendly but it's trivially easy to implement. Not to mention the fact that Bitcoin is illegal in most developed countries.
One thing people sometimes don't realize about financial services apps is it is not just the quality of the app that matters, it's how they deal with fraud (chargebacks). This alone destroy most early starters. PayPal succeeded where others failed because they started out trying to solve the problem of online fraud and then pivoted to become an e-wallet.
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Paypal, Stripe, Square etc all use credit cards which cost 2.x% plus 30 cents. Bitbank uses a digital currency with low or no fees. It's more competing with Visa/Mastercard than with Paypal, Stripe, etc. Those companies could become partners actually if they decided to support it as another payment method.
But from my POV (consumer), I get a 30 day float (assuming I pay my bills on time). Whats in it for me to not use a credit card?
Who pays that? The merchant. (Well, the merchant adds it to the price that everyone pays, but I digress).
Now given the option. Pay $100 with your credit card or pay $98 if paying with bitcoin, which are you going to choose.
Stripe and PayPal both are at 2.99% + $0.30, Square is at a flat 2.75%. So giving the customer the 2% discount for paying with bitcoin still yields the merchant more than had the customer paid with a credit or (signature-based) debit card transaction.
I hate conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but there are a few basic principles I follow: 1) When people are making money off of something, they protect that method of making money, and evolve if necessary. 2) There are intricacies to our currency that might not seem immediately obvious. People depend on the discreet nature of physical currency - it controls the entire world of corruption (a lot of movies li…
Without commenting on your first 3 points, I'd argue that a 3rd world country could potentially be an excellent place to gain mass adoption. In the U.S. we have credit cards and fixed addresses to mail bills. There's probably a billion people who don't have this. There is absolutely an opportunity in 3rd world countries to leapfrog credit card systems, which for a variety of reasons don't work in these environments.…