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But which advantages would this have for me as a user? As far as I know the merchant contracts with the credit card companies require merchants to charge the sa

by gst 13y ago

But which advantages would this have for me as a user? As far as I know the merchant contracts with the credit card companies require merchants to charge the same fee, independent of the payment method. But then, when I pay via credit card I get some cashback from my credit card company, and it's also easy to cancel transactions in case of fraud. So paying with Bitcoin is not only more expensive, but also shifts the risk of fraud to the user. The main area where I could see potential adoption of Bitcoin are some business models, where it's currently very hard to get merchant contracts for credit card (due to the high fraud risk). If I'd found a startup in that area, I'd probably just use Bitcoin (via Coinbase or Bitpay) for the early prototype, instead of spending considerable resources trying to get credit card processing to work.

modeless 13y ago
> the merchant contracts with the credit card companies require merchants to charge the same fee, independent of the payment method That's not true. There used to be clauses in the contracts prohibiting merchants from charging an extra fee for credit card transactions. However, these clauses were recently (this year) removed by the credit card industry as a result of litigation. Also, it has always been possible to give a discount for non credit card transactions. You're right, it doesn't make sense, but it's true. Since merchants usually eat the credit card fees themselves instead of passing them on to the customer, they have a big incentive to encourage consumers to switch to bitcoin. It will lower the fees they pay, which probably means discounts for bitcoin users. Merchants will also like the lack of chargebacks. On the other hand, consumers like chargebacks. There's no reason why a payment processor couldn't implement a chargeback-like system on top of bitcoin. The next Visa might be something like that, in fact.

by gst 13y ago

modeless 13y ago

> the merchant contracts with the credit card companies require merchants to charge the same fee, independent of the payment method That's not true. There used to be clauses in the contracts prohibiting merchants from charging an extra fee for credit card transactions. However, these clauses were recently (this year) removed by the credit card industry as a result of litigation. Also, it has always been possible to give a discount for non credit card transactions. You're right, it doesn't make sense, but it's true. Since merchants usually eat the credit card fees themselves instead of passing them on to the customer, they have a big incentive to encourage consumers to switch to bitcoin. It will lower the fees they pay, which probably means discounts for bitcoin users. Merchants will also like the lack of chargebacks. On the other hand, consumers like chargebacks. There's no reason why a payment processor couldn't implement a chargeback-like system on top of bitcoin. The next Visa might be something like that, in fact.