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Comment by aurelius12 | Hacker News Reader

The trouble is that Visa functionality already exists and it already works really, really well for both consumers and merchants.

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Companies who lose 3% of their revenue to visa may dispute that, as well as companies with lots of charge backs like porn, or politically controversial organizations like wikileaks, or 'morally dubious' companies that are either gouged or not welcomed into the network like dispensaries or porn, or anyone who has had paypal freeze their account for no reason...

Russian carders who make their living off of selling credit card numbers probably agree with you that the system is great.

The Visa fee of 1-3% is too expensive in the internet era. It made sense 50 years ago when cost of moving information was high, but now it's just rent seeking.

It's not just the fees, but the payment processors. You need a contract with them and you need to integrate with their systems at high cost. This is something you normally solve with yet another middleman, like a bank or Stripe.

In contrast, Bitcoin is permissionless. Just install the software and receive payments just like anyone else. That's what something born in the Internet age looks like.

This, we went with Stripe before but apparently hosting is too high risk and (they claim) their banking partners did not want to do business with our little Irish startup. No such issues with bitcoin

> little Irish startup

Are you the owner of Ezfile/Filecloud by any chance? If you are, I'm actually quite curious to discuss payment processors with you. Last I checked, you're using Amazon gift cards and Bitcoin. Have you had any luck getting access to credit card processors? Also, what fee per transaction would you consider to acceptable from a CC processor for your category of website (with the ability to let users pay by subscription)?

Yeah, except BTC transaction costs are skyrocketing due to the blockchain size being too small. So basically, Visa will continue being Visa, and BTC will refuse to compete against it.

Honestly, the proper competition vs Visa is ACH-based transactions like Dwolla.

Can anyone comment with regards to Mike's statment about bitcoins current fees being higher then cc fees. What is the driving factor behind this? Does the cost of mining directly raise the fees?

Consumers like it because they don't see the cost of it because it's baked into the price of goods and services.

There's also chargeback and consumer protection services, which currently there is little market for. You just rely on Visa. With Bitcoin, there is opportunity for a market of escrow and resolution services.

Right now, Visa works better, full stop. As Bitcoin improves, however, that could certainly change.

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