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Love hearing the phrase "Let's face it. Today, it is still ridiculously difficult to spend Bitcoin in the real world." I love Bitcoin but I can't integrate it

Love hearing the phrase "Let's face it. Today, it is still ridiculously difficult to spend Bitcoin in the real world." I love Bitcoin but I can't integrate it into my life because it is just way to complicated in most of my transactions, not due to my lack of understanding of how to use it.

litaph91 12y ago
The issue really is that bitcoin isn't suited for retail transactions. I work in the payments industry and we took a long hard look at integrating bitcoin payments into our point-of-sale and determined that it was effort we would get no reward for. Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold. Working with risk levels and calculations around zero confirmation transactions work but they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit. On the processing side, we're scared to death by anti-retail thinking and things like replace-by-fee which, in our opinion, would outright kill off retail transactions using bitcoin. There's just way too much uncertainty that someone will decide a patch like that is needed and start deploying it even if it isn't in the core. It's the upside and downside of decentralized systems really.
- toomim 12y ago
  > Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold. A guarantee isn't what you want. Cash and card isn't guaranteed either — the cash might be counterfeit; the credit card might be stolen. What you want is to reduce the rate of fraud. So let's compare the rates of fraud between bitcoin and cash/card. Credit card transactions are fraudulent around .1% of the time. [1] But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions. Have you? You seem to be afraid of the wrong thing, and you don't seem to be basing your opinion any facts or statistics. It sounds like you're just untrusting of new technology. Yet you're on hacker news? This confuses me. How did you get here? Similarly, your fear of replace-by-fee is very strange — that proposal is never going to happen. You don't have any faith in the bitcoin community, but you have faith in credit card companies not to raise fees or block your business? Why is that? Do you only trust old boys' clubs? Are you from the east coast? Are you a luddite? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud
  - etingel 12y ago
    > How did you get here? It seems to me that this is the wrong question to ask. What you should be saying is "Thank you so very much for bringing us your prospective. How can we go about better informing people like you in the payments industry?" What litaph91 described is a very real fear. Sure, all of us on Hacker News know that the fear is unfounded, but the general public doesn't know or understand everything that we do. Instead of arguing with one person, let's try to solve the wider problem, shall we?
    - toomim 12y ago
      You're right. I apologize. Thanks for calling me out.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - this_user 12y ago
    > But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions. Then you are simply not very well informed. Problems with BTC transactions have happened repeatedly. Here is a great example of a successful 10k double spend during a chain fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956 It was was made possible buy slightly different behaviours in the different client versions. The core developers had to get on IRC with the miner using the 0.8 version and talk them into giving up their (correct) chain to resolve this problem. Currency of the future!
    - vanzard 12y ago
      This incident had nothing to do with zero-conf txs. In fact okpay did wait for multiple confirmations, and was still hit by this $10k double spend! This whole thing was possible because of an accidental fork of the chain which lasted a few hours. This is the only accidental fork that occurred in the last 3 years. Details: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...
    - 12y ago
- vanzard 12y ago
  > they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit. The element of risk is ALWAYS present with cash and credit. You could be handed counterfeit bills. You could be hit with chargeback fees (even when the CC processor will let you keep the money because it was a card-present transaction). But somehow merchants accept these risks... so why not Bitcoin? Sounds like your employer isn't as confident/competent as other point-of-sale manufacturers who have been able to support Bitcoin, like point-of-sale giant NCR http://www.ncr.com/news/news-releases/small-business/ncr-silver-offers-small-businesses-payment-options http://www.ncr.com/news/news-releases/small-business/ncr-sil...

litaph91 12y ago

The issue really is that bitcoin isn't suited for retail transactions. I work in the payments industry and we took a long hard look at integrating bitcoin payments into our point-of-sale and determined that it was effort we would get no reward for. Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold. Working with risk levels and calculations around zero confirmation transactions work but they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit. On the processing side, we're scared to death by anti-retail thinking and things like replace-by-fee which, in our opinion, would outright kill off retail transactions using bitcoin. There's just way too much uncertainty that someone will decide a patch like that is needed and start deploying it even if it isn't in the core. It's the upside and downside of decentralized systems really.

toomim 12y ago
> Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold. A guarantee isn't what you want. Cash and card isn't guaranteed either — the cash might be counterfeit; the credit card might be stolen. What you want is to reduce the rate of fraud. So let's compare the rates of fraud between bitcoin and cash/card. Credit card transactions are fraudulent around .1% of the time. [1] But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions. Have you? You seem to be afraid of the wrong thing, and you don't seem to be basing your opinion any facts or statistics. It sounds like you're just untrusting of new technology. Yet you're on hacker news? This confuses me. How did you get here? Similarly, your fear of replace-by-fee is very strange — that proposal is never going to happen. You don't have any faith in the bitcoin community, but you have faith in credit card companies not to raise fees or block your business? Why is that? Do you only trust old boys' clubs? Are you from the east coast? Are you a luddite? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud
- etingel 12y ago
  > How did you get here? It seems to me that this is the wrong question to ask. What you should be saying is "Thank you so very much for bringing us your prospective. How can we go about better informing people like you in the payments industry?" What litaph91 described is a very real fear. Sure, all of us on Hacker News know that the fear is unfounded, but the general public doesn't know or understand everything that we do. Instead of arguing with one person, let's try to solve the wider problem, shall we?
  - toomim 12y ago
    You're right. I apologize. Thanks for calling me out.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- this_user 12y ago
  > But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions. Then you are simply not very well informed. Problems with BTC transactions have happened repeatedly. Here is a great example of a successful 10k double spend during a chain fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956 It was was made possible buy slightly different behaviours in the different client versions. The core developers had to get on IRC with the miner using the 0.8 version and talk them into giving up their (correct) chain to resolve this problem. Currency of the future!
  - vanzard 12y ago
    This incident had nothing to do with zero-conf txs. In fact okpay did wait for multiple confirmations, and was still hit by this $10k double spend! This whole thing was possible because of an accidental fork of the chain which lasted a few hours. This is the only accidental fork that occurred in the last 3 years. Details: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...
  - 12y ago
vanzard 12y ago
> they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit. The element of risk is ALWAYS present with cash and credit. You could be handed counterfeit bills. You could be hit with chargeback fees (even when the CC processor will let you keep the money because it was a card-present transaction). But somehow merchants accept these risks... so why not Bitcoin? Sounds like your employer isn't as confident/competent as other point-of-sale manufacturers who have been able to support Bitcoin, like point-of-sale giant NCR http://www.ncr.com/news/news-releases/small-business/ncr-silver-offers-small-businesses-payment-options http://www.ncr.com/news/news-releases/small-business/ncr-sil...