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mass goldbug delusion, mostly
and lol if you think that marketcap means anything with how low actual purchasing volume is
fun Bitcoin fact of the day:
As of today, the bit-coin network has processed 100 million transactions in its seven years of existence. In comparison, Visa did 100 million transactions in less than 12 hours yesterday.
bit-coin: doing what Visa can do in half a day, in only 6 year's time
currency of the future
Bitcoin is a distributed, imposible to censor payment method, a savings account (see Greece and Cyprus for more details), and a money transfer service.
It doesn't have a 25% share of the payments (yet!) but the payments that are sent through it are secure and irreversible, thus it makes sense for any merchant to accept it even if the amount paid through it is still relatively low.
The interesting comparison is, how many transactions did Visa do in its first seven years of existence? ^_^
Things take time to catch on.
First you said nobody needs Bitcoin, now you've moved the goalposts to surpassing Visa. Nice one.
Actually I'm just pointing out what a joke it is
visa had 3 million credit cards in user's hands by the end of the second year, and while i can't find hard numbers on transaction counts, even if every card was used an average of once it would be impressive consider this was in 1958, before the internet was around and computers were still primitive and mostly educational
bitcoin has had 7 years to grow up in a world with the internet and still can't reel in anyone besides a few hundred thousand users, many being scammers or their victims
impossible to censor? an isp blocking access to the bootstrapping nodes would wreck that ' decentralized' network, hell even throttling bitcoin traffic would cripple bitcoin as it is choking up enough not having to transfer a whole goddamn megabyte every 10 minutes
yeah, despite all the bitcoiner hype and hopes about greeks/cyprots fleeing to bitcoin, it never happened, its too much of a pain in the ass for almost everyone
Not impressive. According to wikipedia, they were just spamming cards to everyone, no signup was required (this practice was outlawed in 1970). Their "adoption" by this metric was basically limited only by the amount of plastic they could print.
bitcoin taking 7 years to do 100million transaction (most of which are automated) is even more unimpressive
Bitcoin was the first thing of its kind. Credit cards already existed before Visa. Bitcoin was launched by some programmers with virtually no advertising. Visa was launched by a major bank with a massive opt-out spamming campaign. For these reasons, it's not really a fair comparison, regardless what adoption rates you want believe about the early stages of Visa. Also, we haven't yet seen actual figures on how long Visa took to reach 100M transactions.
The difference is that credit cards, debit cards, and charge cards add value to the transaction - and it was easy to use them almost right from the beginning. There was an incentive for practically everyone to start using, issuing, and accepting cards.
When I swipe my credit card, I earn points that (depending on card) becomes airline miles or points towards discounts, and get automatic insurances (including travel insurance and health insurance while travelling). With some cards, I can call a concierge to get tickets to sold-out events, short-notice table reservations at restaurants, and other forms of preferential treatment.
Worst case, I can also raise a chargeback to get my money back. This protects me from malicious merchants as well as theft (physical and digital).
By spending bitcoin, value is lost. To buy with bitcoin, you have to first buy bitcoin. Why you would exchange real money for bitcoin only to spend real money is a mystery no one has solved yet, but a handful of enthusiasts do it anyway. There is a loss of value when exchanging for example USD to BTC and a second loss of value when the BTC becomes USD so that the merchant can accept the payment.
I do since few years and I preffer Bitcoins payments over other methods.
Yeah, this about sums it up, bitcoin is effectively a way for a bunch of people to vecome middlemen who suck a lot of value out of payments processing, while adding none to it
Might not want to start down this argument of what transactions are 'real' or not, because most of Bit-coin's are fake/automated
I use BTC as a payment method for most things these days. It seems to be much easier!
So, who do you think pays for all that? The merchant who accepts a credit card has to pay fees to the CC company. That's value lost for the parties in the transaction. If you were to calculate how much goes to the bank in fees over one year of CC use, you would be less impressed with the points you accumulate that will eventually allow you to claim a free tote bag.
Trading fees for bitcoins are typically a few tenths of a percent:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_real-time_trading_exchanges
Charge fees for CC are at minimum 1.51% plus $0.10 "interchange fee" (plus 0.13% "credit assessment") and a whole bunch of other optional charges. This is when you have the volume to benefit from a real merchant account:
http://www.cardfellow.com/credit-card-processing-fees/#basefees
When you don't have such volume, you must deal with PayPal which charges 2.9% plus $0.30.
Thus even if you double-count BTC exchange fees it is still well below what banks are charging to settle transactions.
so? the merchant gets business from customers - convenient business.. credit card fees are cheap considering how much value merchants get out of CC providers
But water is even cheaper "considering how much value we get from it".
Ignoratio elenchi.
My point is when considering the "value" of something we have to look at the market value, not ask ourselves how important it might be if we didn't have that type of thing at all. Visa can't charge merchants up to the entire value of the business that would be lost if they couldn't take CC payments at all because there is MasterCard and American Express as well. Visa isn't a great deal, it's market value at best. In fact, it is questionable whether it is even at market value. There has been a price-fixing lawsuit against major CC companies:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303919504577525284273006706
It's still ignoratio elenchi as the argument is whether cards are better for the consumer than Bitcoin or not.
Can you produce a quote demonstrating this? Initially, it was about whether anyone needs bitcoin at all, then about adoption rate comparisons between bitcoin and visa ...
As a consumer (which is the topic at hand here), rest assured that I don't care who pays for it.
As a merchant (which I am and I have worked with many merchants on specifically this), cards are so much better than any other payment method at this point in terms of cost, security, and consumer demand. (For specific markets or niches, local/alternative payment methods are also a necessity, of course. For example PayPal, Alipay, and a number of European methods.)
I know exactly how much money issuers and the card schemes make for each payment. For large merchants, the fee isn't so much of an issue. For smaller merchants, the fee is a small fee to pay relative to how many potential customers you get.
I agree that a tote bag isn't much to tout about, which is why I mentioned other benefits such as insurances and airline miles which can be greatly beneficial depending on your lifestyle. I know that the card issuer makes many times over more on me than they ever dish out in rewards, but the comparison here is cards vs. bitcoins, right?
If I throughout a year spend 50,000 USD in credit card purchases, I get a lot of value back for my purchases, not to mention all the security and consumer protection that comes with a card.
If I spend 50,000 USD in bitcoin on the other hand (a downright miracle in and of itself assuming I don't buy drugs, assassinations, or DDoS attacks), I get absolutely nothing in return. In fact, value is lost to me as consumer (as mentioned above) since I spent probably hundreds of dollars extra just for the privilege of paying with bitcoin. I have zero recourse in case of fraud, other than litigation and leaving bad Yelp reviews.
In the EU, Australia, and (to a lesser degree) Canada, the interchange has been forced down by regulatory involvement, to the point where for example debit cards cost well under half a percent (with all fees included).
But in the end, to every single consumer out there - bitcoin solves no problems and offers no advantage over existing payment methods. Again, no one needs bitcoin (for legitimate uses). It doesn't benefit consumers in any way whatsoever - not even a little bit.
I'm not saying the technology is useless. Blockchain as a technology separate from bitcoin has great potential for a number of uses.
Well, you should, because, as a consumer, you ultimately pay for everything. Transaction processing costs are always reflected in the market price, even if it appears superficially that the merchant is the one paying the fees.
This is like saying as a VPS customer, you don't care about IP address leasing costs. Sure, it's not something you pay the bill for. But ultimately it will drive up the market price of VPS, and the service you do pay for will cost you more than otherwise.
Security? Like when the merchant's card database leaks and you have to waste hours calling the bank to get fraudulent charges taken off your card?
The "zero recourse" feature of Bitcoin also potentially allows lower prices as the merchants don't have to deal with charge-back fees or other efforts to handle fraudulent customers.
We're not talking about the entire financial ecosystem here. I'm explaining why bitcoin is still so far from mass adoption. As a customer paying with cash or card, I don't care how much the merchant pays. I pay what it says on the price tag and I can shop around for competitors if I am very price conscious, but ultimately payment processing is indeed something people end up paying for.
Hours? I have done it a few times and depending on bank, it usually comes down to pressing a button in the banking app, sending in a form (which they sent to me, postage paid), or sending a couple of emails.
That is if the bank doesn't stop the transactions on its own after failing to have me verify the payment over phone.
It's a hassle, no doubt, but mostly for setting up recurring billing again. I find that takes more time than getting my money back (which isn't my money to begin with, if it's a credit card).
Still better than relying on bitcoin. There are countless cases of people losing their money from hacked/lost/vanished/stolen wallets, exchange accounts, and even entire exchanges. And while the same happens with cards and banks, there is at least a recourse there to get your money back.
There is zero evidence of merchants lowering their prices when offering payment by bitcoin. Lower fees just means higher profit margin for merchants. Why would someone want so badly to surrender all the benefits of using cards just so that the person they are buying from can make 0.5% to 3% more revenue? Are consumers altruists?
Again - nothing wrong with the technology. But its implementation as a mainstream consumer method is significantly flawed and unlikely to reach mass adoption, barring massive changes to the way bitcoin payment works and consumer attitudes.
Are merchants? Why would they want to give all that money to CC companies? Give it some time for merchants to figure out how to give some of this value back to consumers (and get ahead of their competition that way).
The implementation will get better. And keep in mind, while the POS implementation of CCs is really convenient (you just swipe the card and sign), the implementation of CC for online payments is not ideal. The customer has to type in all the card data, or spend time tuning a form filling software, or shop only from a few merchants that have stored their card data.