11 ms·

Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

319 points by peter123 13y ago

battani 13y ago
Good to see. Businesses that offer marketplace services should have no objection to integrating bitcoin as a payment option. It does not deteriorate the merchant or consumer experience (regardless of whether or not they use or hold bitcoin), so they have nothing to lose, and all to gain. For Square, it's just an extra payment method that they're hoping will help their merchants (and them) tap into the very small percentage of evangelistic early adopters who have made large gains and are now willing to spend some of their coins. Square is most probably not a supporter of the vision of bitcoin taking over e-commerce payments. Most of their business stems from partnerships with large credit card companies. This is a pure (and smart) marketing play.
- marcell 13y ago
  No need to speculate on their motives, Jack Dorsey explains them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zJe4PUVx3c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zJe4PUVx3c
markhall 13y ago
It's great to see the adoption of bitcoin payments by major players like Square and Stripe! Super exciting
- SilasX 13y ago
  Next milestone: for me to stop confusing the two...
theswan 13y ago
How is Square/Stripe getting around the issue that most exchanges wait for 6 confirmations before a transaction is accepted? Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining?
- Synaesthesia 13y ago
  Great question! Although even 1 confirmation is relatively secure and 3 is quite acceptable, still that's 10-30 min.
- buss 13y ago
  > Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining? After a majority of the nodes have seen a transaction it becomes relatively safe to accept it as valid before 6 confirmations. You wouldn't want to do that for high value transactions, but I think it's fine up to a couple BTC (read: $1000 or less). The Mycelium wallet implements transaction confidence: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xqh51/new_mycelium_wallet_feature_confirmations_within/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xqh51/new_mycelium... and http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/02/13/the-mathematically-secure-way-to-accept-zero-confirmation-transactions/ http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/02/13/the-mathematically...
  - wcoenen 13y ago
    You can't determine what the majority of the nodes thinks in this way because of Sybil attacks. Otherwise we wouldn't need proof of work as a consensus mechanism. Mycelium's "transaction confidence" feature is well intentioned but it is a disaster waiting to happen.
    - hendzen 13y ago
      Agreed, this is a very fragile heuristic. The blockchain exists for a reason folks.
    - buss 13y ago
      I agree with you, but I don't think it would be worth the effort to conduct this attack for such low value transactions. I'm certainly not an expert here, and clearly the blockchain is the only source of truth in the end.
- peter123 13y ago
  They probably absorb the risk of double-spend, which is way harder than stolen credit cards and chargebacks.
tlrobinson 13y ago
A not-insignificant group of existing payment processors / ecommerce platforms are now supporting Bitcoin. Shopify, Balanced (sort of), Stripe, and now Square. Am I missing any?
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  Hey, Steve from Balanced here. Curious as to why you say 'sort of' for us: if it's that we're in beta, so is Stripe. (We're hoping to get out of beta in the near-ish timeframe.)
  - tlrobinson 13y ago
    Last I saw, you accepted Bitcoins only from Coinbase accounts. Until I can directly pay with Bitcoins from my own wallet I consider that "sort of".
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      Ahh gotcha. Yes, we believe that's a pretty important distinction. Fair enough!
      - my_username_is_ 13y ago
        What's the reason for this? Is it part of Coinbase's payment integration? I don't recall any other websites doing this (although there's the possibility that I simply haven't used other sites that also do this)
        steveklabnik 13y ago
        There are a couple of reasons, actually. This will be a short version of something I'm still in the process of writing, so consider this very high level, broad strokes. Consider "Coinbase" a stand-in for any service like it. I also know that lots of Bitcoin enthusiasts won't agree with me, and that's fine. The most important one is that merchants generally want USD, not BTC. Instant Exchange is a really important feature of Coinbase, and so even if we did support bare addresses, they would still be generated through Coinbase anyway, because giving our merchants USD is killer. Since Balanced isn't interested in getting in the business of holding and selling BTC, we'd need to do that through some sort of service, and Coinbase is the biggest and best one. Secondly, the UX for Coinbase-only payment is vastly superior to using bare addresses. People are generally familiar with "sign in via Facebook," and Coinbase's OAuth works the same way. Using a Bitcoin wallet to buy something on a site is very strange until you've done it a few times. Enthusiasts will know what's going on, just like any early adopter will. But for most cases, Coinbase only is waaaay better. Coinbase <-> Coinbase transactions have another special property: they can be off-blockchain. I don't remember offhand if they are for all purchases, but they are for microtransactions, at least. Coinbase can (could?) not wait for the ten minutes to confirm a transaction, since they'd just be updating balances within Coinbase itself. They could build options in that consumers have come to expect, like chargebacks, holds, and other things, that the protocol would not inherently have to support. Next, we feel that Bitcoin is best thought of as cash. Like, physical, printed notes. Websites don't actually accept USD, for example: they accept Visa, which is a financial instrument that happens to be denominated in USD. You can't mail a twenty dollar bill to most SaaS products: that'd be really silly, for a number of reasons. Using bitcoin-qt is like paying with cash, and paying with cash works great in some ways, but is a pain in others. Chargebacks, for example, are an incredibly important part of the advantage consumers see in using credit cards, and nothing like that exists with 'raw' Bitcoin in any significant capacity. I guess that could all be summed up with "Most people don't actually use cash, because it's pretty inconvenient. They use a financial instrument on top of cash, because it offers a bunch of advantages for online purchases. A successful Bitcoin will be no different."
zabcik 13y ago
Umm... April fools?
- bertil 13y ago
  Too early and not funny — but good catch, trolling will be starting soon.
- oznathan 13y ago
  You should wait until Paypal accepts bitcoin to say that.
- Bootvis 13y ago
  They seem to be pretty serious.
- socmoth 13y ago
  Is not an april fools joke. Was a hackday project that turned cool.
- pyrogyn 13y ago
  https://twitter.com/z/status/450747039131783169 https://twitter.com/z/status/450747039131783169 =)
goeric 13y ago
Curious if they are going to take a lower transaction fee on Bitcoin payments as opposed to credit card purchases. They really should.
- blhack 13y ago
  Why? They are incurring a potentially-substantial risk in facilitating the transaction for you, as well as providing the infrastructure for you. That's why CC fees exist, and that's why people providing bitcoin-related services should be able to charge fees too.
  - foobarqux 13y ago
    Because otherwise people will just stick to credit cards?
- 21echoes 13y ago
  given that bitcoin processing fees are on par with credit card processing fees (http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction-percent http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction-percent), i bet they won't.
jusben1369 13y ago
When Bitcoin's are converted to a fiat currency that's now a taxable event correct? That's when the gain or loss is "realized" So if you pay in Bitcoin and the platform/processor immediately converts it into $US to pay the merchant does that create a taxable event for the seller? I suspect people would like to pay in Bitcoin to a merchant who accepts and keeps it in Bitcoin so that a gain is not realized and no taxable event occurs. But really am curious/scratching head/not sure.
- natrius 13y ago
  I believe the taxable event is exchanging Bitcoin for something that isn't Bitcoin. Even if the merchant holds on to the Bitcoin, a gain has been realized.
  - bendoernberg 13y ago
    Correct
  - jusben1369 13y ago
    Got it. So that makes sense. If I pay someone in 100 shares of Google vs $US for a service I no longer own the shares but have transferred them to someone else and would be on the hook for the gain or the loss.
    - 7Figures2Commas 13y ago
      This is perhaps the most useful way of looking at Bitcoin today. Now that the tax treatment of Bitcoin has been established, using Bitcoin as currency makes about as much sense as using stock as currency. In other words, it doesn't.
      - natrius 13y ago
        Can I transfer stock to you with three taps on my phone? Bitcoin makes far more sense than stock as currency, especially if higher sustained demand reduces fluctuations in value, which isn't typical for stocks.
blhack 13y ago
Looks like this is only for square market stuff right now. Any clues on when this will get pushed out to mobile clients? Because that will be absolutely huge. https://squareup.com/market https://squareup.com/market
johncoogan 13y ago
Does anyone have an opinion on why the price of Bitcoin doesn't seem to move on news like this? It seems significant in my opinion and I would think that wider acceptance would lead to a higher price, but that hasn't been the case over the past few weeks / announcements.
- battani 13y ago
  It's easy for merchants to accept bitcoin, because they always propose it alongside a CC payment alternative. And they never risk anything, because they only ever touch USD. So it's all gain for them. (This is more a marketing stunt to drive traffic to Square Market, more than anything else. Square Market has been having trouble competing with more common marketplaces such as Shopify and Amazon). This doesn't affect consumer adoption though, which is what investors/traders would be looking at. Also, if the number of bitcoin transactions through such methods goes up, BTC/USD is more likely to go down. Any bitcoin sent to a Square merchant will be picked up by Coinbase and sold at the bid price on the bitcoin markets, which will pressure price action down. (Coinbase then takes the USD from that sell and transfers them to Square).
- gnopgnip 13y ago
  It doesn't make it any easier to acquire bitcoins in the first place. When you already have a debit/credit card there is no reason to use bitcoins to shop with square.
- plaguuuuuu 13y ago
  A $10 t-shirt will still cost $10 worth of bitcoins. Whether that winds up being 1 or 1000 bitcoins is totally irrelevant. There's no intrinsic value
  - rpearl 13y ago
    Your statement is useless, which is why it has been downvoted. It misses the essence of what currency is. Volatility makes bitcoin a poor store of value: you should not leave assets in bitcoin that you cannot afford to lose, because those assets may vary in actual value (meaning, might vary in what someone else is willing to pay for it) substantially over time: $10,000 of bitcoin today might be $5,000 tomorrow. Volatility makes bitcoin a poor medium of exchange: if I wish to sell something with bitcoin, I take on large risk that the value of my transaction might change. The t-shirt I sold for $10 today might yield me only $2 tomorrow. So, it is accurate to say that there is no intrinsic value to a bitcoin--but this statement is meaningless. $10 is also not an intrinsic value--currency is only relevant as a unit of account or a medium of exchange. Things only have value relative to each other. We use currency to assign a numeric value to each object.
aledujke 13y ago
I know this is offtopic... but I recently emailed the squareup's support over an issue that got me really mad at their development team (or whoever is reponsible). I was trying to buy some elementary OS stickers as I've been using it for over a year now and I'm extremely happy with it. Turns out you cant order anything from squareup if you are accessing outside of US. What made me write to their support is that there is no notification about it when you try to buy a product. It just shows you "add product to list" button but hides "buy" or add to cart button and does not display any info on why the buttons are missing. I mean... if you implemented a solution that detect non us ips and made an effort to hide the buy button... at the very least put some notification in there. Sometimes I really cant understand stuff like this >.> My first post here is a rant... dang it.
huslage 13y ago
This has to be an April Fool's joke.
rdl 13y ago
Sort of starting to feel like all the crappy Bitcoin-specific businesses are about to get replaced by their "normal" equivalents who will just suddenly start taking Bitcoin. Much less disruption than new privacy/security/anonymity focused companies who were early Bitcoin adopters replacing old institutions, but much more likely to actually work. Kind of the equivalent of NYT becoming a major website for news, rather than something organic to the Internet becoming the main news site of record.
- tych0 13y ago
  I don't really think this is a problem, though. The point of bitcoin is not to distrupt businesses, it is to disrupt traditional currencies. That traditional businesses are accepting it is a sign of good, not bad.
  - rdl 13y ago
    I agree that it's a sign of maturity and success for Bitcoin itself; it's just not a great sign for people who invested in Bitcoin-specific businesses. A great position right now would probably be "products and services to help service providers integrate bitcoin into their core products". Simple merchant integration is one thing, but more in-depth integrations would be interesting.
fyresite 13y ago
Companies like Square and Stripe making it easy to pay with Bitcoin will have a huge affect on whether the general population accepts the cryptocurrency.
kimonos 13y ago
I find it cool!
abalone 13y ago
This is a strange case for bitcoin, competing with credit cards. Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none), more protections (the ability to dispute bad merchants over defective goods). It's not a bad idea for Square to add it, since some people have bitcoins obtained through speculation, mining, cheap money transfers, and so forth. But even so, they would be a little better served paying by card, due to the extra consumer protections they'd enjoy. Where bitcoin makes more sense to me is in replacing cash. But that mostly makes sense to me in the real world where you can inspect goods and whatnot in advance of cash payments. (There's maybe some potential for it online in the form of micropayments, where trust and protections don't matter so much.) But for online sellers that already accept cards, I have yet to hear why bitcoin reflects a better choice than cards for the consumer. Anonymity maybe? For the average consumer, not worth the tradeoff in lack of ripoff protection. Sellers would be better off, sure, but don't forget it's a two-sided market and consumers are heavily incentivized to use cards. Most of those "high fees" are funneled back to the consumer's pocket in the form of benefits and rewards. It's a form of lock-in to the CC system.
- meowface 13y ago
  > I have yet to hear why bitcoin reflects a better choice than cards for the consumer. I think security would be an obvious answer. Credit cards are like symmetric cryptography: there's only one secret (a number), which you must share with everyone you ever want to send or receive money from. Any malicious actor who gets that number can then use it to extract money from your card. Sure, it's probably FDIC insured, but they still make out with some of your money. With Bitcoin, you only ever share your public key. It operates entirely on public key crypto. You can safely share your Bitcoin account public key with anyone and everyone to send and receive funds. Plus, anyone can verify any time you send or receive a payment very quickly. That way you can't lie and say you paid when you didn't (no checks in the mail). You also can't do chargebacks or otherwise recall your funds, like you can easily do to scam with credit cards or Paypal.
  - sillysaurus3 13y ago
    Any malicious actor who gets that number can then use it to extract money from your card. Sure, it's probably FDIC insured, but they still make out with some of your money. Actually, you lose none of your money. The credit card company completely refunds you. Someone once stole my card and got some gas with it, and the next day I got the transaction refunded and a new card issued within 10 minutes. Bitcoin is far less secure than a credit card. The best way to lose thousands of dollars is to invest it into bitcoin and then trust any webservice to hold onto your coins for you. It's what happened to me. If I had experienced credit card fraud instead of bitcoin fraud, I'd still have my money. Now I don't. What you're describing is security for a merchant. Preventing chargebacks sounds great... for merchants. But security for consumers is obviously more important, because consumer adoption is the single most important factor.
DigitalSea 13y ago
It'll be interesting to see if this announcement actually helps increase the price of Bitcoin which has taken a few hits over the last few months due to countless exchanges being hacked and collapsing (one of those being Mt Gox), to the IRS's announcement proclaiming Bitcoin is property not currency and other bumps in the road. Initial indications seem to suggest this far the announcement has done little to raise the price of Bitcoin. Time will tell and I personally think this is a great step in the right direction, eventually even Paypal will allow you to accept Bitcoin, it is only a matter of time.
finnn 13y ago
So has the Square app been banned from the Apple App Store yet? EDIT: I guess if its just the square market, which is just a website (I think).

319 points by peter123 13y ago

Good to see. Businesses that offer marketplace services should have no objection to integrating bitcoin as a payment option. It does not deteriorate the merchant or consumer experience (regardless of whether or not they use or hold bitcoin), so they have nothing to lose, and all to gain. For Square, it's just an extra payment method that they're hoping will help their merchants (and them) tap into the very small percentage of evangelistic early adopters who have made large gains and are now willing to spend some of their coins. Square is most probably not a supporter of the vision of bitcoin taking over e-commerce payments. Most of their business stems from partnerships with large credit card companies. This is a pure (and smart) marketing play.

marcell 13y ago
No need to speculate on their motives, Jack Dorsey explains them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zJe4PUVx3c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zJe4PUVx3c

markhall 13y ago

It's great to see the adoption of bitcoin payments by major players like Square and Stripe! Super exciting

SilasX 13y ago
Next milestone: for me to stop confusing the two...

theswan 13y ago

How is Square/Stripe getting around the issue that most exchanges wait for 6 confirmations before a transaction is accepted? Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining?

Synaesthesia 13y ago
Great question! Although even 1 confirmation is relatively secure and 3 is quite acceptable, still that's 10-30 min.
buss 13y ago
> Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining? After a majority of the nodes have seen a transaction it becomes relatively safe to accept it as valid before 6 confirmations. You wouldn't want to do that for high value transactions, but I think it's fine up to a couple BTC (read: $1000 or less). The Mycelium wallet implements transaction confidence: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xqh51/new_mycelium_wallet_feature_confirmations_within/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xqh51/new_mycelium... and http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/02/13/the-mathematically-secure-way-to-accept-zero-confirmation-transactions/ http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/02/13/the-mathematically...
- wcoenen 13y ago
  You can't determine what the majority of the nodes thinks in this way because of Sybil attacks. Otherwise we wouldn't need proof of work as a consensus mechanism. Mycelium's "transaction confidence" feature is well intentioned but it is a disaster waiting to happen.
  - hendzen 13y ago
    Agreed, this is a very fragile heuristic. The blockchain exists for a reason folks.
  - buss 13y ago
    I agree with you, but I don't think it would be worth the effort to conduct this attack for such low value transactions. I'm certainly not an expert here, and clearly the blockchain is the only source of truth in the end.
peter123 13y ago
They probably absorb the risk of double-spend, which is way harder than stolen credit cards and chargebacks.

tlrobinson 13y ago

A not-insignificant group of existing payment processors / ecommerce platforms are now supporting Bitcoin. Shopify, Balanced (sort of), Stripe, and now Square. Am I missing any?

steveklabnik 13y ago
Hey, Steve from Balanced here. Curious as to why you say 'sort of' for us: if it's that we're in beta, so is Stripe. (We're hoping to get out of beta in the near-ish timeframe.)
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  Last I saw, you accepted Bitcoins only from Coinbase accounts. Until I can directly pay with Bitcoins from my own wallet I consider that "sort of".
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Ahh gotcha. Yes, we believe that's a pretty important distinction. Fair enough!
    - my_username_is_ 13y ago
      What's the reason for this? Is it part of Coinbase's payment integration? I don't recall any other websites doing this (although there's the possibility that I simply haven't used other sites that also do this)
      - steveklabnik 13y ago
        There are a couple of reasons, actually. This will be a short version of something I'm still in the process of writing, so consider this very high level, broad strokes. Consider "Coinbase" a stand-in for any service like it. I also know that lots of Bitcoin enthusiasts won't agree with me, and that's fine. The most important one is that merchants generally want USD, not BTC. Instant Exchange is a really important feature of Coinbase, and so even if we did support bare addresses, they would still be generated through Coinbase anyway, because giving our merchants USD is killer. Since Balanced isn't interested in getting in the business of holding and selling BTC, we'd need to do that through some sort of service, and Coinbase is the biggest and best one. Secondly, the UX for Coinbase-only payment is vastly superior to using bare addresses. People are generally familiar with "sign in via Facebook," and Coinbase's OAuth works the same way. Using a Bitcoin wallet to buy something on a site is very strange until you've done it a few times. Enthusiasts will know what's going on, just like any early adopter will. But for most cases, Coinbase only is waaaay better. Coinbase <-> Coinbase transactions have another special property: they can be off-blockchain. I don't remember offhand if they are for all purchases, but they are for microtransactions, at least. Coinbase can (could?) not wait for the ten minutes to confirm a transaction, since they'd just be updating balances within Coinbase itself. They could build options in that consumers have come to expect, like chargebacks, holds, and other things, that the protocol would not inherently have to support. Next, we feel that Bitcoin is best thought of as cash. Like, physical, printed notes. Websites don't actually accept USD, for example: they accept Visa, which is a financial instrument that happens to be denominated in USD. You can't mail a twenty dollar bill to most SaaS products: that'd be really silly, for a number of reasons. Using bitcoin-qt is like paying with cash, and paying with cash works great in some ways, but is a pain in others. Chargebacks, for example, are an incredibly important part of the advantage consumers see in using credit cards, and nothing like that exists with 'raw' Bitcoin in any significant capacity. I guess that could all be summed up with "Most people don't actually use cash, because it's pretty inconvenient. They use a financial instrument on top of cash, because it offers a bunch of advantages for online purchases. A successful Bitcoin will be no different."

zabcik 13y ago

Umm... April fools?

bertil 13y ago
Too early and not funny — but good catch, trolling will be starting soon.
oznathan 13y ago
You should wait until Paypal accepts bitcoin to say that.
Bootvis 13y ago
They seem to be pretty serious.
socmoth 13y ago
Is not an april fools joke. Was a hackday project that turned cool.
pyrogyn 13y ago
https://twitter.com/z/status/450747039131783169 https://twitter.com/z/status/450747039131783169 =)

goeric 13y ago

Curious if they are going to take a lower transaction fee on Bitcoin payments as opposed to credit card purchases. They really should.

blhack 13y ago
Why? They are incurring a potentially-substantial risk in facilitating the transaction for you, as well as providing the infrastructure for you. That's why CC fees exist, and that's why people providing bitcoin-related services should be able to charge fees too.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  Because otherwise people will just stick to credit cards?
21echoes 13y ago
given that bitcoin processing fees are on par with credit card processing fees (http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction-percent http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction-percent), i bet they won't.

jusben1369 13y ago

When Bitcoin's are converted to a fiat currency that's now a taxable event correct? That's when the gain or loss is "realized" So if you pay in Bitcoin and the platform/processor immediately converts it into $US to pay the merchant does that create a taxable event for the seller? I suspect people would like to pay in Bitcoin to a merchant who accepts and keeps it in Bitcoin so that a gain is not realized and no taxable event occurs. But really am curious/scratching head/not sure.

natrius 13y ago
I believe the taxable event is exchanging Bitcoin for something that isn't Bitcoin. Even if the merchant holds on to the Bitcoin, a gain has been realized.
- bendoernberg 13y ago
  Correct
- jusben1369 13y ago
  Got it. So that makes sense. If I pay someone in 100 shares of Google vs $US for a service I no longer own the shares but have transferred them to someone else and would be on the hook for the gain or the loss.
  - 7Figures2Commas 13y ago
    This is perhaps the most useful way of looking at Bitcoin today. Now that the tax treatment of Bitcoin has been established, using Bitcoin as currency makes about as much sense as using stock as currency. In other words, it doesn't.
    - natrius 13y ago
      Can I transfer stock to you with three taps on my phone? Bitcoin makes far more sense than stock as currency, especially if higher sustained demand reduces fluctuations in value, which isn't typical for stocks.

blhack 13y ago

Looks like this is only for square market stuff right now. Any clues on when this will get pushed out to mobile clients? Because that will be absolutely huge. https://squareup.com/market https://squareup.com/market

johncoogan 13y ago

Does anyone have an opinion on why the price of Bitcoin doesn't seem to move on news like this? It seems significant in my opinion and I would think that wider acceptance would lead to a higher price, but that hasn't been the case over the past few weeks / announcements.

battani 13y ago
It's easy for merchants to accept bitcoin, because they always propose it alongside a CC payment alternative. And they never risk anything, because they only ever touch USD. So it's all gain for them. (This is more a marketing stunt to drive traffic to Square Market, more than anything else. Square Market has been having trouble competing with more common marketplaces such as Shopify and Amazon). This doesn't affect consumer adoption though, which is what investors/traders would be looking at. Also, if the number of bitcoin transactions through such methods goes up, BTC/USD is more likely to go down. Any bitcoin sent to a Square merchant will be picked up by Coinbase and sold at the bid price on the bitcoin markets, which will pressure price action down. (Coinbase then takes the USD from that sell and transfers them to Square).
gnopgnip 13y ago
It doesn't make it any easier to acquire bitcoins in the first place. When you already have a debit/credit card there is no reason to use bitcoins to shop with square.
plaguuuuuu 13y ago
A $10 t-shirt will still cost $10 worth of bitcoins. Whether that winds up being 1 or 1000 bitcoins is totally irrelevant. There's no intrinsic value
- rpearl 13y ago
  Your statement is useless, which is why it has been downvoted. It misses the essence of what currency is. Volatility makes bitcoin a poor store of value: you should not leave assets in bitcoin that you cannot afford to lose, because those assets may vary in actual value (meaning, might vary in what someone else is willing to pay for it) substantially over time: $10,000 of bitcoin today might be $5,000 tomorrow. Volatility makes bitcoin a poor medium of exchange: if I wish to sell something with bitcoin, I take on large risk that the value of my transaction might change. The t-shirt I sold for $10 today might yield me only $2 tomorrow. So, it is accurate to say that there is no intrinsic value to a bitcoin--but this statement is meaningless. $10 is also not an intrinsic value--currency is only relevant as a unit of account or a medium of exchange. Things only have value relative to each other. We use currency to assign a numeric value to each object.

aledujke 13y ago

I know this is offtopic... but I recently emailed the squareup's support over an issue that got me really mad at their development team (or whoever is reponsible). I was trying to buy some elementary OS stickers as I've been using it for over a year now and I'm extremely happy with it. Turns out you cant order anything from squareup if you are accessing outside of US. What made me write to their support is that there is no notification about it when you try to buy a product. It just shows you "add product to list" button but hides "buy" or add to cart button and does not display any info on why the buttons are missing. I mean... if you implemented a solution that detect non us ips and made an effort to hide the buy button... at the very least put some notification in there. Sometimes I really cant understand stuff like this >.> My first post here is a rant... dang it.

huslage 13y ago

This has to be an April Fool's joke.

rdl 13y ago

Sort of starting to feel like all the crappy Bitcoin-specific businesses are about to get replaced by their "normal" equivalents who will just suddenly start taking Bitcoin. Much less disruption than new privacy/security/anonymity focused companies who were early Bitcoin adopters replacing old institutions, but much more likely to actually work. Kind of the equivalent of NYT becoming a major website for news, rather than something organic to the Internet becoming the main news site of record.

tych0 13y ago
I don't really think this is a problem, though. The point of bitcoin is not to distrupt businesses, it is to disrupt traditional currencies. That traditional businesses are accepting it is a sign of good, not bad.
- rdl 13y ago
  I agree that it's a sign of maturity and success for Bitcoin itself; it's just not a great sign for people who invested in Bitcoin-specific businesses. A great position right now would probably be "products and services to help service providers integrate bitcoin into their core products". Simple merchant integration is one thing, but more in-depth integrations would be interesting.

fyresite 13y ago

Companies like Square and Stripe making it easy to pay with Bitcoin will have a huge affect on whether the general population accepts the cryptocurrency.

kimonos 13y ago

I find it cool!

abalone 13y ago

This is a strange case for bitcoin, competing with credit cards. Most consumers would be better off paying with a card: same cost (none), more protections (the ability to dispute bad merchants over defective goods). It's not a bad idea for Square to add it, since some people have bitcoins obtained through speculation, mining, cheap money transfers, and so forth. But even so, they would be a little better served paying by card, due to the extra consumer protections they'd enjoy. Where bitcoin makes more sense to me is in replacing cash. But that mostly makes sense to me in the real world where you can inspect goods and whatnot in advance of cash payments. (There's maybe some potential for it online in the form of micropayments, where trust and protections don't matter so much.) But for online sellers that already accept cards, I have yet to hear why bitcoin reflects a better choice than cards for the consumer. Anonymity maybe? For the average consumer, not worth the tradeoff in lack of ripoff protection. Sellers would be better off, sure, but don't forget it's a two-sided market and consumers are heavily incentivized to use cards. Most of those "high fees" are funneled back to the consumer's pocket in the form of benefits and rewards. It's a form of lock-in to the CC system.

meowface 13y ago
> I have yet to hear why bitcoin reflects a better choice than cards for the consumer. I think security would be an obvious answer. Credit cards are like symmetric cryptography: there's only one secret (a number), which you must share with everyone you ever want to send or receive money from. Any malicious actor who gets that number can then use it to extract money from your card. Sure, it's probably FDIC insured, but they still make out with some of your money. With Bitcoin, you only ever share your public key. It operates entirely on public key crypto. You can safely share your Bitcoin account public key with anyone and everyone to send and receive funds. Plus, anyone can verify any time you send or receive a payment very quickly. That way you can't lie and say you paid when you didn't (no checks in the mail). You also can't do chargebacks or otherwise recall your funds, like you can easily do to scam with credit cards or Paypal.
- sillysaurus3 13y ago
  Any malicious actor who gets that number can then use it to extract money from your card. Sure, it's probably FDIC insured, but they still make out with some of your money. Actually, you lose none of your money. The credit card company completely refunds you. Someone once stole my card and got some gas with it, and the next day I got the transaction refunded and a new card issued within 10 minutes. Bitcoin is far less secure than a credit card. The best way to lose thousands of dollars is to invest it into bitcoin and then trust any webservice to hold onto your coins for you. It's what happened to me. If I had experienced credit card fraud instead of bitcoin fraud, I'd still have my money. Now I don't. What you're describing is security for a merchant. Preventing chargebacks sounds great... for merchants. But security for consumers is obviously more important, because consumer adoption is the single most important factor.

DigitalSea 13y ago

It'll be interesting to see if this announcement actually helps increase the price of Bitcoin which has taken a few hits over the last few months due to countless exchanges being hacked and collapsing (one of those being Mt Gox), to the IRS's announcement proclaiming Bitcoin is property not currency and other bumps in the road. Initial indications seem to suggest this far the announcement has done little to raise the price of Bitcoin. Time will tell and I personally think this is a great step in the right direction, eventually even Paypal will allow you to accept Bitcoin, it is only a matter of time.

finnn 13y ago

So has the Square app been banned from the Apple App Store yet? EDIT: I guess if its just the square market, which is just a website (I think).