"I do not accept their fees, they’re way too much high for the quality of service they give to you." So to fight this the author is paying Cashila.com/BitWage.com transaction fees and CryptoPay fees and takes on the exchange rate risk.
"I do not accept the concept of “trust”"
Right Cashila.com/BitWage.com are operated by magic trustworthy unicorns.
> sending $40 [with MoneyGram] costs $10, which is, you know, crazy
Yes, that's crazy. Send $40 to your brother, and he only receives $30.
But it's even more crazy than that. On top of the $10 fee, MoneyGram then skims more money with an unfavorable currency exchange rate.
> if there’s only one guy in your town exchanging Bitcoin for regular cash, he can gouge you worse than MoneyGram
If this one guy gives you a Bitcoin rate worse than MoneyGram, then you'll just use MoneyGram.
The local MoneyGram agent only keeps a small slice of the 25% fee. If a Bitcoin entrepreneur could make more profit with a 10% fee than he would with MoneyGram, the recipient could keep $36 of the transfer instead of $30.
Eliminate the rapacious middleman, everybody wins.
> no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor.
This is the realm of the social layer, not the technology. You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto.
> It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments
Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction).
> and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that.
Problem statement: you are a software company in the UK and you want to contract a developer based in Argentina. She wants to receive (in Pesos) the equivalent to 500GBP.
Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%.
> since if you add the bureaucratic costs of international money transfers it will be more expensive
That is plain, utterly, provably wrong. You have no idea of what kind of fees a bank will charge to exchange a wire of tens of thousands of dollars.
> it would make absolutely no sense to use crypto if you followed the rules.
Some of the rules are very specific at about the source and means of the funds. E.g, some taxes in Brazil are applied only for purchases done through credit cards. Others apply for financial operations between different banks. It is not illegal (and much less immoral) to know about the loopholes that allows you to avoid paying the exorbitant fees.
> I reduced a portion of my ecommerce store checkout fees to <1% by using a crypto payment processor > stripe's highway robbery of 3% per sale.
This is misleading because it moves all of the costs to other transactions: Your users have to get their money into exchanges (credit card fees occur here if using a card), buy the cryptocurrency (exchange fees), transfer it to you (transaction fees), and then you need to transfer the cryptocurrency somewhere else (more transaction fees), and exchange it back to another currency (more exchange fees).
It ends up being far, far more expensive than Stripe’s checkout payments. It’s just misleading because the expenses are spread out across so many different touch points.
A good reason there is a lot of work being done to separate the two offerings from each other. I'm supporting all sorts of features, but to pay, you gotta send Bitcoin with a client - not my site. Safest that way. Also, see Counterparty.
Edit: From the site in question: "Nowhere do we store or request any personal information." https://xbet.io/why_use_xbet
Another thing: It's not a forgone conclusion that Bitcoin technologies will get better over time, but there is a large amount of pressure to make that a reality. People like their money, above all.
>You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto.
I don't understand how this follows at all, the only thing you've added here is that you can't get your money back if the "cheap and fast content" turns out to be a scam. I can't understand why anyone would want this to be optional.
>Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction).
This would be any virtual currency where you buy it to spend directly with the market operator, the kind you see on prepaid cards in retail stores. That's in the context of a vendor like OnlyFans that runs a marketplace of sorts; if you consider that to be a middleman and you only want some completely peer-to-peer solution then that's a different question with different risks from what we were originally discussing, and most cryptocurrency doesn't fit that definition anyway.
>Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%.
I'm not really interested to search around for every exchange I can find and make a comparison, but I would be very skeptical of any crypto-based solution claiming they can lower fees here. The costs of doing bank transfers are the same regardless of whether you use crypto as the medium to move the money. There's probably something else they're doing.
This is getting towards my main problem with these crypto conversations, we're moving away from what the technology actually brings and instead we're getting into only comparing fees without considering any of the other details of what we're actually doing. I find this to be a pointless angle to take; there isn't going to be a period where we use cryptocurrency and we can totally avoid fees, because an explicit goal of every cryptocurrency I've seen is actually to make it so participants can't avoid paying fees. And when you get into smart contracts, every participant can now start acting as a middleman and charging more of their own fees in addition to the transaction and gas costs you pay to the network.
>Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free
Then use a cryptocurrency that has 0 (or very tiny) transaction fees?
>in case this e-book author has hidden a recursion bug in their version to drain your ethereum wallet of all your life savings
An ethereum smart contract can't take ethereum from anyone. It can only take what you've sent it. Also I'm not sure why the author didn't add in that you still have to trust the author to serve you the ebook. The smart contract would only give you an NFT that the site would check.
>yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to independently verify that his vote has been counted? Or will he rely on the mobile app of a trusted third party — like the nonprofit or open-source consortium administering the election or providing the software?
>Let me dispute it then. Try Wise (formerly Transferwise). It is cheap, fast, and easy.
Just checked it out, sending $5 costs at least 13% (they receive $4.33) and doesn't transfer until tomorrow. Some currencies cost far more. Sending $5 to my friend in Brazil would cost a whopping 28% (they receive $3.54). Some currencies don't allow you to send $5, but have minimums that are higher.
Sending $5 of litecoin costs me about .75% (they receive $4.96) and takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes.
And although I haven't tried the service, I'm sure they block payments to people and organizations frowned upon by the banking system and the US government. Would my payment to Wikileaks go through? Or the Julian Assange defense fund? I find it highly unlikely.
Finally, individuals like myself who in the past played online poker are blocked from using transfer services like Moneygram and Western Union for engaging in blacklisted behavior. Why would I struggle to enter the walled garden when it is cheaper, faster and easier to use crypto?
>FWIW, I know many people working abroad (from expats to domestic helpers), and none of them use crypto for remittances, as far as I know.
I know dozens of people who work here in New York who use crypto for remittances. In fact, although I don't use it, there is a nearby laundromat with a bitcoin machine that is almost entirely frequented by migrants from South and Central America. Search for "bitcoin machine" in the NY metro area and you will find a huge number of them are located in landromats and bodegas frequented by immigrants who use these machines to send and receive funds.
> The premise that bitcoin frees you from normal legal requirements is the problem here.
This is misleading, because majority of coinbase's job, the part that is their most difficult task, is to deal with correctly handling fiat currencies (dollar, euro.)
Try using something like shapeshift.io (which doesn't handle fiat currencies) and you'll find a much more pleasant end user experience there than with either paypal or coinbase.
>>Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free.
Is the author really unaware of the horror stories of Venmo and PayPal freezing customer accounts?
Articles like this want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own money, in a form more useful than physical cash.
> Which payment methods do you accept?
> We accept cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, Swish, Giropay, Eps transfer, Bancontact, iDEAL, and Przelewy24.
> Can I really pay with cash?
> You bet, and please! Stay anonymous all the way. Just put your cash and payment token (randomly generated on our website) in an envelope and send it to us. We accept the following currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, SEK, DKK, NOK, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD.
Let's say I am the type of person who needs a cheap loan, and I decide to use Coinbase. My understanding is that money into Coinbase and money out of Coinbase is going to cost me 1.49% (at least) in each direction, and that's before the additional $1-$10 gas fees in each direction. So 3% + currency risks + whatever other fees + the risk of fat-fingering my crypto and losing it to the ether forever, and also trying to figure out if I have some kind of tax liability, BEFORE the actual interest rate itself.
Or I choose a well-regulated provider to do a money-transfer[0] to and pay a one-off fee of 3-4% for several thousand pounds for a year or longer loan, even if my credit isn't perfect, and I do that with the full protection of the legal system, including bankruptcy protection, easy resolution if I type the wrong account number in, etc. Those are the rates for if I need cash too, if the thing I need to pay for can be paid for by credit-card, the rate falls to closer to 2%...
>> Transferring money internationally without additional costs.
>nope
It costs between $70 and $90 to send $1AUD from Australia to Iceland. Bitcoin transaction fees have _never_ been that high, and they're currently somewhere around $1AUD.
$50-$70 of that fee is taken out of the transaction instead of charged seperately, which means it may be impossible to pay a bill accurately via SWIFT.
I tried to pay for a tent via SWIFT from Iceland to the USA recently. Because the US bank used a customer support system that required you to log in via a wells fargo account that I didn't have, I was unable to ask whether they charged fees to receive swift transactions. I added $15 extra to the SWIFT payment as a hedge against any extra fees from wells fargo. I guess that was enough, because the merchant sent me the tent.
If you think that the SWIFT system is better than bitcoin you haven't used SWIFT much.
"I do not accept the concept of “trust”" Right Cashila.com/BitWage.com are operated by magic trustworthy unicorns.
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