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BitPay and PayPal

blog.bitpay.com

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Re: BitPay and PayPal

#41

Post by DINKDINK »

[deleted] wrote: post #23
tonyhb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

>Bitcoin addresses are intended to be single use, disposable keys rather a long term method of identification. A portion of Bitcoin's address design is intended to minimize publicity of EC public keys if at all possible.

A potential work around is to just BitAuth with a HD wallet? Thereby negating any address-reuse issues.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi...

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#42

Post by natrius »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #35
awt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

A, until B has FDIC protections.

You don't have to hold bitcoins to spend bitcoins and take advantage of the network's properties.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#43

Post by highercenter »

More choices in how people create value, share it, buy, sell and trade it – that’s exactly what PayPal is all about,” said Scott Ellison, Senior Director, Strategy, PayPal.

That's amazing! And me thinking PayPal was all about our money!

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#44

Post by andrewfong »

syntern wrote: post #38
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 see a few places where bitcoin is accepted as donation. How is that taxed if/when spent?

Not a tax lawyer, but assuming the donations are small and no one is trying to write it off on their taxes , I think it's treated as a gift. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_tax_in_the_United_States.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#45

Post by notahacker »

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…

Bitcoin doesn't render Western Union obsolete until the day remote Burkinabe villages can walk to their local store and pick up the US-resident cousin's salary earned in CFA Franc banknotes. A highly volatile intermediary currency is hardly an advantage there.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#46

Post by martindale »

[deleted] wrote: post #23
tonyhb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

You might be thinking of BitID, which tightly couples payment addresses to identity: https://github.com/bitid/bitid – BitAuth does not use Bitcoin keypairs.

We created BitAuth as a way to avoid coupling payments with identity, which is why the keypairs are independent and include a different prefix (0x02).

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#47

Post by jarek »

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/

> BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems:

For values of "rocketing" approaching "down 6% on the week, 13% on the month"

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#48

Post by fragsworth »

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…

> That's $8.7B worth of market cap that bitcoin obsoletes.

That logic doesn't really follow. It takes over all those things even if its market cap is only $1 billion. Bitcoin's market cap not related to the industries it replaces.

If it takes over rare metals, though, as an investment, it might end up worth something close to the market cap of Gold.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#49

Post by danbruc »

sanswork wrote: post #37
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its free if you have bitcoin and your friend wants bitcoin. Once you bring other currencies into the mix it is often more expensive to comparable services and just as slow if not slower.

And it is only free as long as mining new blocks covers the costs of running the network, after that you will have to pay fees.

Re: BitPay and PayPal

#50

Post by joshuaxls »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #36
joshuaxls wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bitc…

Except you're susceptible to physical robbery unless you store your money in a bank with FDIC protection. This is one reason Satoshi chooses to remain anonymous.

We're in agreement. Since USD is a physical store of value, it suffers from problems like robbery. Hence the need for banks.

With bitcoin, you don't need a bank. I have a 24-word passphrase in my head that can be converted to my private key—a "brainwallet". I know it, and my parents do. It's not written down or stored anywhere. It simply isn't physical.

With those 24 words, you can unlock all of the value I have stored in bitcoin.

It's utterly amazing.

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