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Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

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Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#71

Post by tw04 »

jstanley wrote: post #56
throwaway5752 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it was a very bad business idea in the first place, and I'm surprised it wasn't cancelled sooner. Before you downvote me consider the business model of credit card processors, and how volatility and rapidly deflating currency would effect their cash flow.

> how volatility and rapidly deflating currency would effect their cash flow. Not at all? You obviously don't understand what a bitcoin debit card is. It's just like a normal debit card, but you fund it with bitcoin. The company you get the card from sells your bitcoin for fiat currency at the time you make a purchase (or at the time you top up the card, depending on how they do it). The properties of bitcoin are com…

>The properties of bitcoin are completely irrelevant to the mechanics of the card.

On what planet? If the price fluctuates the way bitcoin has been, Wavecrest could literally be bankrupt before Visa even knew about it to pause any further transactions. At which point VISA is responsible, you think they're going to risk billions of dollars on a currency that is clearly a bubble at this point?

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#72

Post by clemenspw »

Only Wavecrest issued cards. For example, TenX will have Wirecard as a new card issuer until they get their own banking license.

"Visa have today instructed us that we must close all WaveCrest issued Visa Prepaid Cards."

This is Wavecrest specific, nothing to do with crypto.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#73

Post by etr-strike »

oelmekki wrote: post #33
doktrin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For online payments bitcoin works quite well Bitcoin payments could , theoretically, work well - but that's not currently the case given the prohibitive transaction fees.

Indeed, didn't think about it, but fees are a problem as well. Also, if bitcoin had to manage the throughput of VISA (or even a fraction of it, at this point), capacity issues would probably worsen dramatically. It's probably best to stop hoping it will be a currency altogether (unless some radical changes occur). Best shot would be to see it as saving/investment accounts, with smart tricks like prepaid visa cards as…

Lightning Network exceeds the throughput of VISA. The scaling problem is being addressed -- just not in the naive "let's throw away decentralization and increase the blocksize" way.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#74

Post by jstanley »

tw04 wrote: post #71
jstanley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how volatility and rapidly deflating currency would effect their cash flow. Not at all? You obviously don't understand what a bitcoin debit card is. It's just like a normal debit card, but you fund it with bitcoin. The company you get the card from sells your bitcoin for fiat currency at the time you make a purchase (or at the time you top up the card, depending on how they do it). The properties of bitcoin are com…

>The properties of bitcoin are completely irrelevant to the mechanics of the card. On what planet? If the price fluctuates the way bitcoin has been, Wavecrest could literally be bankrupt before Visa even knew about it to pause any further transactions. At which point VISA is responsible, you think they're going to risk billions of dollars on a currency that is clearly a bubble at this point?

No, that is wrong.

1.) Wavecrest assumes absolutely no exchange rate risk as they don't deal with the BTC, a company like Xapo does

2.) Xapo make a very big margin on the bitcoin sale

3.) The companies that perform the sale at topup time rather than purchase time work out how many GBPs you get after they've sold your BTC, so they assume no risk at all, and the companies like Xapo that perform the sale at purchase time structure their operations to minimise the risk of losing money, and they're aware of the risk, and they're far from the first company in the history of the world whose operations require them to adequately manage risk.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#76

Post by etr-strike »

dagw wrote: post #27
repomies691 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For online payments instant payments are actually not that important requirements. The process needs to happen just fluently from customers perspective. If the merchant is dispatching physical items, he can just wait for the transaction to confirm and dispatch the items after that. The customer won't see much difference because the biggest issue is the shipping time. For online payments bitcoin works quite well. Stil…

For online payments bitcoin works quite well Many people who tried to buy stuff on Steam with bitcoin seem to disagree. In fact Steam recently stopped accepting bitcoin since they apparently couldn't make it work.

As they should -- Lightning Network is the correct technological solution for small frequent payments such as game purchases on Steam.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#77

Post by lagadu »

etr-strike wrote: post #68
lagadu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin effectively froze when Blockstream decided against increasing block size. The way I see it, bitcoin only stands as the flag-bearer, as (much like bitcoin cash) the transactions are too slow and still cost money. As the ecosystems grow and stabilize I imagine we'll be having some of the more full-featured, specialized cryptos carve out a spot within their specific domains (Dash or Raiblocks effectively taking…

> Bitcoin effectively froze when Blockstream decided against increasing block size. You mean when the Bitcoin Core implementation of the Bitcoin protocol decided decentralization was an important feature of the currency and transaction compression should be the prioritized means of scaling.

That's the "glass is very half-full" way of putting it :)

They could've easily gone both ways: block size increase to 2mb, segwit and lightning network. Hell, Litecoin is well on its way to becoming the de-facto transfer currency between exchanges because it iterates so much quicker (and those 2.5 minute blocktimes sure help).

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#78

Post by etr-strike »

wmeredith wrote: post #69
tobiaswk wrote: post #48

Bitcoin is currently not what Bitcoin was when it was created. Slow peer-to-peer transactions and high processing fees. Average fees are hovering around 30 dollars. That's an average. Unconfirmed transactions has been at over 100k for months. The mempool is also hovering around an ATH. The Bitcoin is crippled. Sentences like "store of value" are now the term used to describe Bitcoin. Very far from what the Bitcoin us…

"death spiral of the blockchain" or death spiral of Bitcoin? There's an army of alt coins waiting to take its place. A lot of them are garbage, most are OK, but a handful of them are brilliant. Bitcoin was the proof of concept and it was very successful in that light, but as a consumer product it is quite flawed. The survivors of the current bubble will be the ones that change the world. I'm not sure Bitcoin will be…

All coins built upon PoW suffer the same scaling issues as bitcoin. Since Bitcoin is the most popular, it hit the limitations first. Second layer technologies such as Lightning Network and Rootstock do solve various problematic use cases. Bitcoin is the most widely held cryptocurrency and is the only cryptocurrency with second layer technologies being rolled out into production as we speak.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#79

Post by logfromblammo »

thisisit wrote: post #67
ablation wrote: post #49

> We're being oppressed! Oh dear. I hope that was said with tongue firmly in cheek, because anyone who truly believes that their Bitcoin Visa card being cancelled is a form of "oppression" needs a reality check.

I am sure when the card was introduced these same people would have said - See, bitcoin is so great it is now accepted by Visa and Mastercard. Now we get this. Sometimes it seems the thought process has evolved to - Heads I win, Tails you lose.

Huh. I didn't know Bitcoins could be flipped.

Re: Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

#80

Post by lawlessone »

tobiaswk wrote: post #48

Bitcoin is currently not what Bitcoin was when it was created. Slow peer-to-peer transactions and high processing fees. Average fees are hovering around 30 dollars. That's an average. Unconfirmed transactions has been at over 100k for months. The mempool is also hovering around an ATH. The Bitcoin is crippled. Sentences like "store of value" are now the term used to describe Bitcoin. Very far from what the Bitcoin us…

Bitcoin cash is fraud.
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