Because some people insist on waiting for the payment to settle before actually providing the services, although it's not nearly as common as it used to be.
This is just completely unrealistic with credit cards where settlement times are far longer than with bitcoin, days or months.
>Wherever you want to lay the blame (anywhere but bitcoin) it's a problem for anyone using bitcoin, making it more useless than (not "immensely superior" to, as claimed) using a credit card or Paypal, which makes it a problem for bitcoin.
I don't know, I use bitcoins to pay for things regularly and pretty much everyone accepts zero-confirmation transactions nowadays (which is pretty much the same as accepting credit card payments, except the settlement will most likely take less than an hour).
> A lot of small tech-related web shops do take Bitcoin though- so if I think I can trust them (and if Bitcoin is an option) I will use that instead.
So you will replace a payment method that has a method for recourse when you get fucked with one that is completely irreversible? That doesn't make any sense at all.
Even if Paypal or your CC isn't perfect, at least you have some form of recourse. With bitcoin, when you get fucked over, you are completely shit out of luck.
>I don't know, have you tried to buy plane tickets with a credit card? It takes me a solid half hour every time
Funny, because the times I have used Bitcoin it has taken a solid hour, or more, for the payment to 'complete' due to the confirmations required. This for pathetic, tiny payments (like $10 or so), When using a card for airline tickets, for thousands, it takes seconds.
> The only reason it is not occuring more often is because most people are honest, that's all.
Well that, and the fact that it's fraud, which is a crime, and if you get caught then you will get in trouble.
> I demonstrated to you that accepting bitcoins is safer than accepting CCs in most scenarios [...] when the merchant waits for enough confirmations
Even waiting for 1 confirmation can still take 10 minutes, which is a long time to wait for a lot of transactions, especially in-person transactions. That alone makes it extremely difficult to use Bitcoin for "real-world" transactions as opposed to online transactions.
> actually using bitcoin (that you already have) to buy things is a better experience than using credit cards
It's just not. It's not easier than swiping a magnetic strip and signing something, or typing in sixteen digits (or using autofill or the site's previously saved CC info) and pressing buy.
It's not good that I can't demand a return or have recourse in the event of fraud. And it's not a benefit that with bitcoin I have to spend the money first (to buy bitcoin) and wonder if it will hold its value, versus just buying stuff when I feel like it on credit and covering the transaction within 30 days at no interest cost.
I know there are a lot of people who really want your above quoted statement to be true. But, for now and the forseeable future, it isn't.
Wow! A VPS! Something that 99% of the population has no use for. How about paying rent, medical bills, utilities, phone bill, groceries, tuition, gas, car payment, car insurance, car maintenance, tolls, daycare, taxes... you know, the kind of things that real people actually care about.
> just like I have bought them by unsafer payment methods in the past
Bitcoin is by far the most unsafe method of payment for 99% of the population. Credit cards offer comprehensive fraud protection; bitcoin offers zero protection and zero recourse if your money is stolen or lost due to a crash/virus/hack/forgot to backup my wallet before formatting (and when this happens, the user is always blamed, duh, you should have bought a trezor!). With a credit card none of this happens, and if money is somehow stolen from your credit card, the card is quickly deactivated and the victim is fully reimbursed for any fraudulent charges.
This straight up LIE about the safety of bitcoin relative to credit cards is infuriating.
> in which case bitcoin is just a middleman doing no work
So you're saying that, pessimistically, all Bitcoin could do is disrupt the credit/debit card companies? That's very pessimistic, and still a very big deal.
> I have a feeling that traditional cc system are slower than the time user waits for confirmation.
Raising this in response to Bitcoin’s limited throughput is a nonsequitur, as this is latency, not throughout. Yes, the time between initiating and settling a credit card transaction is nontrivial, but that doesn't effect the number of transactions the system can process per second. If the credit card system didn't have the throughput to handle transactions at the rate they are initiated, there's be an ever-growing queue, and there isn't.
> I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off.
Accepting Bitcoin as payments has never been about facilitating payments. It's not rational to go through all the trouble of transferring Bitcoin, paying transaction fees, waiting for the transaction to clear (took over an hour when I tried it a few months ago), and then surrendering all of the protections you'd normally get when using a credit card.
Accepting Bitcoin is about propelling the Bitcoin narrative: The more you can put "Bitcoin accepted here" on everyone's website, the more you can convince other people that Bitcoin is going mainstream and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).
It sounds like you are talking about credit cards and not bitcoin.
Compared to credit cards, bitcoin has extremely low fees and fast payments. The fraud protection for merchants is far superior compared to any credit card payment solution.
It seems pretty obvious that most people spreading this kind of bullshit have never actually tried to use bitcoin, and have instead built their knowledge based on forum posts by other uninformed people.
> There is no reason why the payment processor can't implement some security in case of errors.
Sure, and banks already do that. A lot of it, in fact.
My point wasn't that these things aren't possible with BTC. Rather, my point was that these problems don't go away just because you're not using a traditional currency. Which means the overhead associated with these problems doesn't go away, either.
It's just that BTC is really small right now, and so the cost + difficulty of addressing these problems at scale isn't yet apparent.
> with credit cards you are handing out your details every time you do a purchase.
(1) No one makes payroll with a credit card; (2) BTC transfers -- especially at scale -- aren't as fast as CC transfers without someone assuming some risk; (3) CC companies basically exist to assume that risk and mitigate; (4) if you're going to design a new payment processing technology appropriate for POS transactions, creating a new currency is absolutely not necessary.
> In an online marketplace it's far far easier to accept bitcoins than credit cards because you have no fraud risk, which is a HUGE problem in online retail.
I currently work for a large online marketplace. A very typical fraud scenario (maybe the most common) is someone collecting payment for an item that they don't actually possess. This would only be harder to deal with and correct if the payment were disbursed to an anonymous seller in bitcoins.
> The only advantage is guarantee's that credit card companies offer. But what tells you a company can't introduce the same for Bitcoin?
Unlikely in a system where transactions are irreversible by design. If a credit card transaction is suspicious, the banks will hold the funds, or refuse the transfer. The only way to have this work with bitcoin would be if you paid the bank rather than paying the seller - in which case you're just reproducing the existing credit card system with extra complexity.
> Isn't it kind of the same as a debit card? If you put your monthly allowance, or weekly allowance in your pay wallet, what's the problem? If you have a huge amount of bitcoins in 1 address that's made for paying people & isn't in cold storage, you are doing it wrong. Same with regular cash.
Sure; my point was that there's no advantage for bitcoin here, not that it's any worse than the other options.
> Bitcoin wasn't designed for criminals only. Sure, it has certain advantages for criminals. But it has a lot of other pros too. International transactions take days compared to bitcoin transactions, and are a hell of a lot cheaper too.
That's the judgement we have to make. My view is that the advantages for criminals are much bigger than the advantages for non-criminals, and so a world with a thriving bitcoin economy is, on the whole, worse than a world without one.
> For online payments instant payments are actually not that important requirements.
When the exchange rate fluctuates as much as it does, instant payment is an important requirement.
Suppose BTC is worth $15,000 today. I want to buy a widget for $150.
I want to see 0.01 BTC deducted from my balance. The merchant wants to get paid $150.
If the transaction happens instantly, everyone is happy.
If the transaction does not happen instantly...
Let's say I transact 0.01 BTC to the payment processor. It will clear tomorrow. The merchant will get paid when it clears. Tomorrow... The payment processor has 0.01 BTC in their possession.
... Except that by then, BTC went down to $13,000. The merchant still expects to be paid $150. The payment processor has 0.01 BTC on their books, which is worth $130... and a debt of $150.
That's the problem with using BTC as a currency. You either need to pay through the nose for fast confirmation, or you expose yourself to volatility risk.
This is, incidentally, why Steam has stopped accepting Bitcoin. You can't use it as a currency. [1]
> Bitcoin charges something like $4 per transaction lately, and they take on the order of a day to process. It's unstable, and it's confusing to most people.
Bank transactions take that or longer to fully settle. The merchant and bank are just giving you credit to bridge the gap when you use your card at the checkout line. Your bank sends a best guess that you actually have the funds but won't know for sure until the daily batch job is run. If you look at the actual mechanics of bank transactions you'd find it much more confusing than BTC - everyone just papers it over for you in exchange for a fee which you probably don't know your paying.
You could do the same thing with BTC, look at the source addresses balance since everything is public and make a short term credit decision.
One of the big problems with using bitcoin for something like this is you're not just sending money. Your converting to a different currency, sending money, and converting it back. It would be akin to me wanting to send money to my Dad by converting it to Euro first, sending it, and him converting it back to USD. Neither of us have any interest or use for money in Euro or bitcoin. We both have/need USD.
You also get the volatility of bitcoin. If I send $10 to my Dad in bitcoin, it might be $9 by the time he gets around to converting it to USD. Or $11. Bitcoin could plunge in value (for seemingly no reason that I can tell) and be worth $5. I have no way of knowing what the value of that will be for him when he gets it.
If I want to send my Dad $10 on PayPal, he gets $10. He gets it instantly in his PayPal account as $10. If he transfers it immediately to his bank, it'll be $10. If he transfers it next week, it'll still be $10. It's guaranteed in value.
Also, I don't know if this is still the case but dealing with bitcoin is a pain. If I want to buy bitcoin at Coinbase and I don't have a credit card linked to my account (until recently, you couldn't even use Mastercard), I have to wait a few days for my BTC to arrive, even though they are directly linked to my checking account. I have no idea what the value of my BTC will be when it finally arrives a few days later. I have to send it to my Dad, he has to sell it back to USD (at least at Coinbase, at a lesser rate than buying it). The value could change dramatically at any of those steps.
And if you want to add a card at Coinbase, yeah, that's fun. When I added my card, my bank immediately kicked the attempted authorization out for fraud reasons. 10 minutes later my bank called me about it and I approved it, but the Coinbase told me I couldn't try again for a week. So I had to wait another week before trying to add my Mastercard again.
Bitcoin has a lot of usability issues for non-tech people. And using it for a simple USD->USD money transfer is like using a jackhammer when you need a scalpel.
Because some people insist on waiting for the payment to settle before actually providing the services, although it's not nearly as common as it used to be.
This is just completely unrealistic with credit cards where settlement times are far longer than with bitcoin, days or months.
>Wherever you want to lay the blame (anywhere but bitcoin) it's a problem for anyone using bitcoin, making it more useless than (not "immensely superior" to, as claimed) using a credit card or Paypal, which makes it a problem for bitcoin.
I don't know, I use bitcoins to pay for things regularly and pretty much everyone accepts zero-confirmation transactions nowadays (which is pretty much the same as accepting credit card payments, except the settlement will most likely take less than an hour).
reply