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All ebay has to do is accept bitcoins. What is stopping something like this? If Ebay uses a service to convert directly from BTC to dollars, there's no volatil
by rthomas6 13y ago
All ebay has to do is accept bitcoins.
What is stopping something like this? If Ebay uses a service to convert directly from BTC to dollars, there's no volatility risk. Is it fear of bad press? Fear of angering existing players like Paypal? Is it logistics? I'm biased, but why wouldn't Ebay accept an additional form of payment for free?
- Nursie 13y agoWhy would ebay switch away from Paypal? ebay own paypal!
- rthomas6 13y agoEbay doesn't have to switch away from anything to accept Bitcoins. They just add another payment method.
- icebraining 13y agoAnd cannibalize itself? Why would they do that?
- waps 13y agoYou're assuming ebay wouldn't take 14% of bitcoin sales. Hell, since they don't owe the credit card tax they could probably make it 10% and still make more per-transaction.
- Nursie 13y agoI reckon paypal probably has enough volume to get a pretty sweet deal out of the credit-card processors compared to your average retailer. But you're right, they could take a cut of BTC transactions, and then the BTC folks would whine about high fees.
- Nursie 13y agoicebraining beat me to it - from what I've read PayPal has historically made up a serious proportion of Ebay's profits, like 40% (though they have bought other payment processors recently so maybe it's been dropping). Introducing non-paypal payment methods would cut directly into their profits.
- etanazir 13y agoWhy not use 'litecoins' or create their own virtual cryptocurrency? That is the achilles heel to bitcoin - bitcoin 2.0 an infinitum.
- rthomas6 13y agoSure, accept all of them. Why not? It's trivial to accept them, the only difficulty is the volatility compared to dollars, which for Bitcoin is a solved problem.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoConfused; Bitcoin remains totally volatile. What was solved?
- rthomas6 13y agoMerchants don't have to hold Bitcoins to accept them as payment. Several services exist that convert Bitcoin payments directly into local currency, allowing merchants to accept Bitcoin without exposing themselves to its volatility. See: https://bitpay.com/ https://bitpay.com/
- dllthomas 13y agoSomeone has to want them, with sufficient reliability.
- acjohnson55 13y agoThat's why I'm convinced Bitcoin's inflation mitigation is irrelevant. If it proves to be a truly useful currency, people will simply mint other cryptocurrencies, which will be nearly-perfect substitutes.