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First bitcoin was insignificant. Then people made fun of it. Now current institutions will have to choose between embracing it and fighting it. Some of them d

First bitcoin was insignificant. Then people made fun of it. Now current institutions will have to choose between embracing it and fighting it. Some of them do one thing, apparently VISA chose another.

doktrin 9y ago
VISA most likely cares above all else about making money for VISA. Likewise, Steam probably doesn't care how people pay for their games : they just want to be paid. If they move away from bitcoin, it's probably because they deem it unviable / unprofitable / too much of a pain in the ass. Not everything is a grand ideological battle, and there's no need to go looking for complicated explanations when the simple and naive interpretation makes eminent sense.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  It's part of the general problem that bitcoin isn't really fungable for goods. Maybe it was back when the value was more stable or grew slowly, or the transaction fees were cheaper. But you're totally right. Currently it's barely worth the effort compared to traditional payment system in many contexts.
saalweachter 9y ago
Eh, some people still mock Bitcoin as insignificant. (As a currency/asset store/technology.)
acdha 9y ago
Or watching it collapse under its own weight: why does Visa even need to care as long as their transaction rate is 4-5 orders of magnitude better and their fees aren’t a whole multiple of most transaction amounts?
- sametmax 9y ago
  We have ligthning comming up, anx 600+ altcoins to test.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    Imagine that you are a business that operates in Bitcoin and pays employees in Bitcoin. How does Lightning solve that? It doesn't. Lightning falls apart if the graph has heavily asymmetric connections, and the only solution is to have banks, which is what these crypto enthusiasts want to get rid of in the first place. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
    - nybble41 9y ago
      > Imagine that you are a business that operates in Bitcoin and pays employees in Bitcoin. Then you use a single, non-Lightning transaction with an output for each employee, and the fee for that transaction is most likely less than half a percent of the total amount being transferred[1]. [1] Actually just 0.35% ($170 fee / $48k wages) assuming a fee of 520 satoshis/byte, 34 bytes per output, 140 bytes of fixed overhead, $15k/BTC, 60 employees, and an $800 after-tax biweekly paycheck per employee ($20k/year). The ratio improves for higher wages since the fee is unaffected by the amount being transferred.
      - lern_too_spel 9y ago
        You've ignored how the business got the Bitcoins to begin with. Its customers have to pay the transaction fee to send the Bitcoins to the business. The business's wallet is therefore fragmented, so the number of bytes in its transactions to pay its employees is higher than your estimate. Or they could pay you via the bank and accept payments through their bank like every other business. Then the transaction fees are negligible. The Lightning network did not help at all in this scenario.
  - acdha 9y ago
    … and perhaps that'll work out but a huge business like Visa isn't going feel threatened by an untested marketing pitch. A very small percentage of people are ideologically committed to cryptocurrencies but everyone serious is going to be looking for proven yes answers to “Does it work at production-level volumes?”, “Is it cheaper than a credit/debit card?”, and “Can my customers use it?”. For Bitcoin, the answer is no for all three but even if the first and last question were true for something else, the real question is whether #2 could be true: Visa is making a lot of money at 2-3%. If something else started making a serious play, what are the odds that they'd a) give up and go bankrupt or b) lower their fees and be slightly less profitable?

doktrin 9y ago

VISA most likely cares above all else about making money for VISA. Likewise, Steam probably doesn't care how people pay for their games : they just want to be paid. If they move away from bitcoin, it's probably because they deem it unviable / unprofitable / too much of a pain in the ass. Not everything is a grand ideological battle, and there's no need to go looking for complicated explanations when the simple and naive interpretation makes eminent sense.

djsumdog 9y ago
It's part of the general problem that bitcoin isn't really fungable for goods. Maybe it was back when the value was more stable or grew slowly, or the transaction fees were cheaper. But you're totally right. Currently it's barely worth the effort compared to traditional payment system in many contexts.

saalweachter 9y ago

Eh, some people still mock Bitcoin as insignificant. (As a currency/asset store/technology.)

acdha 9y ago

Or watching it collapse under its own weight: why does Visa even need to care as long as their transaction rate is 4-5 orders of magnitude better and their fees aren’t a whole multiple of most transaction amounts?

sametmax 9y ago
We have ligthning comming up, anx 600+ altcoins to test.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  Imagine that you are a business that operates in Bitcoin and pays employees in Bitcoin. How does Lightning solve that? It doesn't. Lightning falls apart if the graph has heavily asymmetric connections, and the only solution is to have banks, which is what these crypto enthusiasts want to get rid of in the first place. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
  - nybble41 9y ago
    > Imagine that you are a business that operates in Bitcoin and pays employees in Bitcoin. Then you use a single, non-Lightning transaction with an output for each employee, and the fee for that transaction is most likely less than half a percent of the total amount being transferred[1]. [1] Actually just 0.35% ($170 fee / $48k wages) assuming a fee of 520 satoshis/byte, 34 bytes per output, 140 bytes of fixed overhead, $15k/BTC, 60 employees, and an $800 after-tax biweekly paycheck per employee ($20k/year). The ratio improves for higher wages since the fee is unaffected by the amount being transferred.
    - lern_too_spel 9y ago
      You've ignored how the business got the Bitcoins to begin with. Its customers have to pay the transaction fee to send the Bitcoins to the business. The business's wallet is therefore fragmented, so the number of bytes in its transactions to pay its employees is higher than your estimate. Or they could pay you via the bank and accept payments through their bank like every other business. Then the transaction fees are negligible. The Lightning network did not help at all in this scenario.
- acdha 9y ago
  … and perhaps that'll work out but a huge business like Visa isn't going feel threatened by an untested marketing pitch. A very small percentage of people are ideologically committed to cryptocurrencies but everyone serious is going to be looking for proven yes answers to “Does it work at production-level volumes?”, “Is it cheaper than a credit/debit card?”, and “Can my customers use it?”. For Bitcoin, the answer is no for all three but even if the first and last question were true for something else, the real question is whether #2 could be true: Visa is making a lot of money at 2-3%. If something else started making a serious play, what are the odds that they'd a) give up and go bankrupt or b) lower their fees and be slightly less profitable?