So you buy bitcoins with dollars, Bitpay exchanges the bitcoins back into dollars, and then they hand the dollars over to Steam.
And this is meant to be a good thing?
And this is meant to be a good thing?
There are not many people specifically acquiring bitcoin just to pay for steam games with it, where it will be converted right back. Maybe some to test. Questioning the value as a result of the "usd -> btc -> usd" transfer isn't really applicable because it just generally doesn't apply anymore.
No, that's your only measure of success. In order for Bitcoin to succeed as a viable payment platform, businesses also need to adopt it wholly, which means actually conducting business in Bitcoin rather than converting it to a "real" currency as soon as possible.
Basically, if they are treating it as hot potato, that means they see it as too unstable and risky.
I don't understand the need to require a business to hold the bitcoin in order to consider bitcoin a "success". In this scenario bitcoin has succeeded as being a cheap method of transferring value.
Eh, I'm not so sure. You are probably right, but at the same time they probably want USD for the same reason they get USD from Paypal or their merchant bank when someone pays in a different currency.
Is Paypal not a viable payment platform?
There are two parts to Bitcoin - some folks think it's a great store of value. I do not. I think it's an amazing decentralized transaction system that can replace VISA/MC - not replace the US Treasury.
Why is that so hard for Americans to understand?
I live in Pakistan, and happily and easily use a visa debit card for buying steam games.
You may even use Visa, still doesn't mean that you are dealing with US dollars. Why do you think is it completely normal to have Visa as being a global country dealing with the cross-country transactions, but not Bitpay?
If you have access to the international banking system, great. It is not a bad thing. Just like it is not a bad thing to have bitcoin as an alternative.
The one thing that I don't get, anytime that Bitcoin comes here, is that people seem to think that it is an either/or proposition. That for Bitcoin to be usable it needs to completely replace the Almighty US Dollar or any other sovereign currency.
Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain are just tools that are being explored and developed as a way to bring trust to transactions and accounting without a central authority. What is bad about that?
We don't need to have Central Banks. "Us non-Americans" don't need to use American Institutions to participate in a global economy.
This idea of "I can pay with Visa, therefore Bitcoin is useless" is short-sighted.
You framed it as "I can pay with Visa..."
I think you may have projected your argument onto his statement with no real correlation.
First, it's not the country that is being used as an argument. So the point is moot.
Second, this is not about "Developed/Underdeveloped Countries". That would be incredibly backwards. It was to show that not everywhere has unrestricted access to international trade, and that cryptocurrencies can help with that.
Just as an example: despite the crisis, Greece is a developed country, yet (because of the crisis) they are also applying very strict capital controls.
So, despite being "able to pay with Visa in his/her country", a Greek could also benefit from something like Bitpay.
The point still stands. The point is that by accepting bitcoin, even if through a broker, Steam (an American company) now can reach a good number of people who are have nothing to do with the American Financial system.
The US may be the center of the world, but it is not the whole world. Bitcoin (or any thing that can be fungible and free of control by one central institution) can be used by anyone outside of this.
A better system would be direct payment, but thats a problem that society hasn't figured out yet. How to easy transfer money, without a middle man, in a safe, private respecting, and cost-free way.
Is that really an issue?
You don't have to buy bitcoins directly, you can mine them.
And that's before they even learn about the deep security issues, how hard it is to protect, how most Bitcoin services cannot be trusted, etc.
"Be your own bank" implies "be your own security division", which very few people are qualified to do.
You implied there were deep fundamental flaws in BTC security, but your response shows nothing of the sort. Your 'deep flaw' is 'you have to protect your private keys'. You are describing a UX flaw, and I would agree with that. Objectively, you have exposed no 'deep security issues'.
Bitcoin's non-physical nature (as compared to paper and coin currencies), I think, makes it more of a metaphor to a bank account or debit/credit card than a currency. This likely is a UX flaw, as you state, but it's a pretty big flaw.
And credit cards, in most jurisdictions, have lots of protections against theft and fraud, as well as consumer protections like chargebacks and transactions are reversible, of course.
Bitcoins are a form of digital cash.
You store Bitcoins in a wallet. If you lose your Bitcoin wallet you lose your bitcoins. In a similar sense, if you lose your wallet containing notes/coins, you lose your notes/coins. The security risk is the same.
Because of this, it's better to compare Bitcoin to other forms of "digital/virtual representations of currency", like debit cards and credit cards. And that's where Bitcoin's mass-adoption-type use-cases tend to fall apart.
Exactly. This is why, where there are trusted and easy to access alternatives, people generally don't possess and carry around large amounts of cash.
That means that any security breach is catastrophic. Whereas the routine security breaches of credit and debit cards, and online banking systems, are not catastrophic.
Physical cash is of course not subject to instant theft from anywhere in the world - the theif has to be in the same place as the cash. Whereas it's basically not safe to use bitcoin on any computer connected to the internet - to do so is equivalent to leaving it in the street - rendering it hilariously unsuited to ecommerce.
Not to mention that the most convenient ways of actually getting money in and out of the bitcoin system, the exchanges, tend to have frequent security breaches and exit scams of their own.
(I should just point out that in this discussion generally the anti-bitcoin side uses 'bitcoin' to refer to 'the totality of systems needed to do normal useful things with bitcoin', while the pro-bitcoin side limits it to only the protocol and possibly the reference client implementation.)
This is simply incorrect. I fail to understand why so many people believe bitcoin transactions are untraceable, we are talking about a public ledger.
I understand the gap between how supporters and non-supporters discuss bitcoin. It's just that if you give all your USD to a scammer, we don't say there is a fundamental flaw with the USD.
However, even with this difficulty, it's still easier than tracing cash payments to a particular entity. If I pay someone in cash, under the table, good luck proving the cash was ever mine. I would wager the government would prefer criminals conduct their business in bitcoin.
If you don't like cryptocurrencies, thats fine, don't use them. I'm just asking that you do not misrepresent them with half truths in some fruitless attempt to show they are flawed when compared to cash.
https://stratechery.com/2015/21-inc-and-the-future-of-bitcoi...