BITCOIN

HCIMbtw

Section62 said:

DannyCarey said:

In the end it neither matters if the shop owner takes Bitcoin or fiat currency, what matters to them is paying less of a merchant fee every time someone comes into their shop.

HCIMbtw said:

They vary based on the contract for company I think and the format of card, they are either a % of transaction value either 1-3% or minimum transaction value, hence why you get shops applying 50p charge per card 

lots of articles about people moaning that visa have them over a barrel, paying thousands a year and for a small business that can be material... you even have the biggest companies in the world weighing into this as an issue - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/17/amazon-visa-resolve-credit-card-dispute-global-deal-payments - I don't need the 'detail' to know that it's an opportunity 

Visa market cap $500bn, to help one person pay another when software can do it for $0..

Paying less of a merchant fee isn't the most important thing.

Businesses pay the fees (not withstanding the grumbling) because they want as much certainty they will get paid for their goods/services with the least admin overhead.

Card payments through the Visa/Mastercard system represent a sweet spot between cost and certainty of getting paid the value of the goods/services.  Businesses also need reliability, so when a customer wants to pay they can pay.

Saving a transaction fee (I'd accept somewhere in the 1% to 3% range) doesn't make any sense if it means using an alternative system whose characteristics are such that by the end of the day the £1-equivalent you took in the morning could be worth 5, 10, 20, 50% less than when you accepted payment.

You can't know whether something is an opportunity without having a good understanding of the detail of the thing you aim to replace.  Lord Sugar would be excoriating of a candidate whose brilliant idea was based on a lack of understanding of how the current business arrangement works.

If there were a massive opportunity for some kind of alternative to Visa/Mastercard then the market would already be flooded with those alternatives and/or we'd be crushed in the retailer stampede to adopt crypto payments.

The reality is the current system - as expensive as it is - ticks the important boxes for the people using it.

HCIMbtw said:

Also note my comments aren't bitcoin related, just generally about crypto opportunity, it is disruptive to traditional finance.. so you can conflate points around bitcoin and coffee, but your missing the point

I wasn't missing the point. Paying for a coffee (or pizza) is a shorthand for utility.  Technology can't be disruptive if it doesn't have utility.

Cash is a very simple way to avoid merchant fees 

The transfer of crypto can essentially be the digital transfer of cash, keys in your wallet, no greater level of security required.. you have the keys you have the currency

This can happen with stable coins, pegged to currency and no volatility 

This could also theoretically happen with central bank digital currencies if a country was to create one 

Amazon made 485bn in turnover last year.. if 0.75% of that turnover was merchant fee's, that is $3.6bn in missed profit.. that can literally be circumvented with cryptography and coding 

"If there were a massive opportunity for some kind of alternative to Visa/Mastercard then the market would already be flooded with those alternatives and/or we'd be crushed in the retailer stampede to adopt crypto payments."

its almost like we are in early stages of adoption for a disruptive technology? oh wait... 

Adyinvestment

The biggest companies in the world are investing billions into blockchain

Section62

HCIMbtw said:

Cash is a very simple way to avoid merchant fees

Cash is also a very expensive way to accept payments.  Which is why organisations are rushing to find alternative methods of accepting money (e.g. cashless parking)

That is one of my points - if you focus on avoiding merchant fees you miss the bigger picture.  It can cost more to use an avoidance method than it does to just stump up the fees.

HCIMbtw said:

The transfer of crypto can essentially be the digital transfer of cash, keys in your wallet, no greater level of security required.. you have the keys you have the currency

This can happen with stable coins, pegged to currency and no volatility

This could also theoretically happen with central bank digital currencies if a country was to create one

So why not wait until a central bank launches a digital currency, rather than being an early adopter of a dead-end method? 

HCIMbtw said:

Amazon made 485bn in turnover last year.. if 0.75% of that turnover was merchant fee's, that is $3.6bn in missed profit.. that can literally be circumvented with cryptography and coding

If Amazon could literally make an extra $3.6bn a year with "cryptography and coding" then why didn't they do that last year?

Bitcoin has been around 13 years, if a disruptor like Amazon hasn't cracked it in that time, why not?

HCIMbtw said:

If there were a massive opportunity for some kind of alternative to Visa/Mastercard then the market would already be flooded with those alternatives and/or we'd be crushed in the retailer stampede to adopt crypto payments."

its almost like we are in early stages of adoption for a disruptive technology? oh wait...

Is 13 years still "early stages"?  If so, this isn't a very disruptive technology, is it?  Why so glacial?

Type_45

Canada has brought in limits to how much crypto citizens are allowed to have.

Canadian citizens are allowed as much BTC, BCH, ETH and LTC as they like (which might say, if one has discernment, that these coins are not considered a threat).

But other coins have restrictions.

Frequentlyhere

I've just been reading about Ethereum's forthcoming switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Probably as a result, ETH is +7% this month whilst BTC is -8%. 

Now, longtime readers will know I'm deeply sceptical at present about the value of Crypto as a whole to society, so this isn't me bigging up ETH exactly, but if I was forced at gunpoint to invest in Crypto, it seems to me that Ethereum is actually making 'useful' progress in becoming significantly less environmentally damaging through this change. 

Moreover, It's actually being led by somebody, being changed, whilst BTC seems stuck exactly where it has been for a decade. As a result, It seems to me that ethereum is by far the better bet for ever evolving into anything of actual use, simply because it actually is significantly evolving whilst the only thing Bitcoin people ever tell me is about lightning network, which seems quite a flawed concept in itself.

Maybe it'll all go disastrously wrong when they do make the change, but I'd still say the capability of changing is a significant advantage. Despite the noise from bitcoin fans, I'm just not seeing any significant change/enhancements.

Agree? Disagree?

Type_45

Frequentlyhere said:

I've just been reading about Ethereum's forthcoming switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Probably as a result, ETH is +7% this month whilst BTC is -8%. 

Now, longtime readers will know I'm deeply sceptical at present about the value of Crypto as a whole to society, so this isn't me bigging up ETH exactly, but if I was forced at gunpoint to invest in Crypto, it seems to me that Ethereum is actually making 'useful' progress in becoming significantly less environmentally damaging through this change. 

Moreover, It's actually being led by somebody, being changed, whilst BTC seems stuck exactly where it has been for a decade. As a result, It seems to me that ethereum is by far the better bet for ever evolving into anything of actual use, simply because it actually is significantly evolving whilst the only thing Bitcoin people ever tell me is about lightning network, which seems quite a flawed concept in itself.

Maybe it'll all go disastrously wrong when they do make the change, but I'd still say the capability of changing is a significant advantage. Despite the noise from bitcoin fans, I'm just not seeing any significant change/enhancements.

Agree? Disagree?

Isn't ETH more expensive than other crypto to send?

DannyCarey

Frequentlyhere said:

I've just been reading about Ethereum's forthcoming switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Probably as a result, ETH is +7% this month whilst BTC is -8%. 

Now, longtime readers will know I'm deeply sceptical at present about the value of Crypto as a whole to society, so this isn't me bigging up ETH exactly, but if I was forced at gunpoint to invest in Crypto, it seems to me that Ethereum is actually making 'useful' progress in becoming significantly less environmentally damaging through this change. 

Moreover, It's actually being led by somebody, being changed, whilst BTC seems stuck exactly where it has been for a decade. As a result, It seems to me that ethereum is by far the better bet for ever evolving into anything of actual use, simply because it actually is significantly evolving whilst the only thing Bitcoin people ever tell me is about lightning network, which seems quite a flawed concept in itself.

Maybe it'll all go disastrously wrong when they do make the change, but I'd still say the capability of changing is a significant advantage. Despite the noise from bitcoin fans, I'm just not seeing any significant change/enhancements.

Agree? Disagree?

Hard disagree - Ethereum is rather centralised, it's actually heavily ran off AWS servers, it's roadmap is forever messy and they always miss deadlines.

"The merge" has split many core ETH developers, and some are making fork coins to stay on POW. 

I think they will find a way to screw it all up to be honest. Might take time to really show, but I don't think it will ever top the king that is Bitcoin.

Also, Bitcoin and Etherum are two very different things. ETH is a platform for "decentralised apps" or "decentralised smart contracts" 

Bitcoin is decentralised money, and it is actually decentralised. It's extremely easy to run a BTC node and verify what's what. 

Ethereum is a dogs dinner and in time it will be shown to be just that. 

Hexane

Hackers steal crypto from Bitcoin ATMs by exploiting zero-day bug 

(by Lawrence Abrams)

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-steal-crypto-from-bitcoin-atms-by-exploiting-zero-day-bug/

"Hackers have exploited a zero-day vulnerability in General Bytes Bitcoin ATM servers to steal cryptocurrency from customers. When customers would deposit or purchase cryptocurrency via the ATM, the funds would instead be siphoned off by the hackers"

"It is unclear how many servers were breached using this vulnerability and how much cryptocurrency was stolen. BleepingComputer contacted General Bytes yesterday with further questions about the attack but did not receive a response."

DannyCarey

Inside job, probably with whatever custodian runs the ATM software... 

Malthusian

Type_45 said:

Canada has brought in limits to how much crypto citizens are allowed to have.

Unsurprisingly, no they haven't. 
Some exchanges in some Canadian provinces are imposing annual buy limits (not limits on how much you can hold) in order to secure registration with the local financial regulator. 
Canadian sovereign citizens living in the provinces affected can still buy as many scatcoins as they like from exchanges registered outside those Canadian provinces. 
(As in the US, each Canadian province has its own financial regulator, so it is incorrect to say "Canada has" when we are talking about regulation on the provincial level.)