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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

On a more day to day level, a few years ago a lot of e-commerce pay-by-bitcoin options existed. You would not put this on the checkout next to PayPal because nobody was doing bitcoin then.

What I don't understand is why this never took off. People know bitcoin through the news, it is not new. In this time Apple Pay has come along nicely but not bitcoin.

Bitcoin has gone off on a tulips tangent. This seems at odds with what I thought the purpose was, being able to pay securely and without Visa getting their cut.

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I use it at a small B2C shop and about 1 in 1000 customers does use it. It's a custom implementation I once spend a few hours on, so there's nobody taking a cut except the miners.

At this adoption rate, I won't invest any more time if it ever breaks. The transaction costs are actually higher now than they are anywhere else, and both PayPal as well as credit cards are faster. Next year, the new EU legislation will open the market pretty wide and I'm expecting (almost-)free, instant transactions to be available Europe-wide (our market).

I had actually forgotten all about it until a few weeks ago, when I accidentally started the wallet app, and got quite excited seeing the balance. I got accidentally lucky by speculating in BC for the last three years :)

Are chargebacks a consideration for the non-Bitcoin forms of payment?

I'll take a stab at guessing. I think in order for merchants to be paid in BTC or other crypto, it needs to be instantly converted to cash. Why? Because the value of BTC can swing wildly and retailers can't afford that risk when their margins are low. Also, BTC transactions can take 20 minutes to an hour to confirm sometimes, so that matters too at some level.

I think something like Tether, which pegs its value to the USD, might be a better approach for crypto-based e-commerce. BTC can more easily be converted to Tether, so it would probably work better for everyone involved.

It's just not as well-known yet.

USD fluctuates wildly from my position in the GBP currency zone. But you don't get out of it - for the same reason you don't feel the 18.5 miles per second you're travelling through space.

BTC isn't taken as a currency because you can't live in its zone. Everybody swaps it into the currency of the zone they are living in - unless they are speculating.

You use the currency of the zone you are living in because everything you need is priced in that currency, and everything is priced in that currency because there is a strong taxation authority that demands payment in that currency.

<2% fluctuations/day is not wild. Even Brexit did not have a large impact. Bitcoin has 'Brexit' volatility on a quiet day.

I agree with your other argument. My landlord doesn't accept BTC, and neither does the IRS.

I'm using it in a B2C shop with low-value transactions ($20 to $200) and I really don't care about the sort of volatility that BC has shown.

But, yes, the time to confirm is annoying: 1 in 24h/transaction_time orders miss that day's shipping deadline and are delayed by a day. More importantly, any delay > 1m requires the UI to accommodate for transactions that aren't instant.

But, as a retailer, these are rather small issues. What matters more is simply the lack of demand. We've offered BC as a payment method and its use has always been a rounding error in our statistics.

Due to the limited supply of 24 million BTC, Bitcoin is deflationary meaning it will go up in value as more people adopt it. Govt print fiat currency out of thin air to encourage the population to spend on the economy. Bitcoin as the opposit affect as people use it for a store of value and a hedge against fiat currencies.

That limit will only be hit in 2140.

If it survives that long...

thank you for your trade analysis but since you have $0 in bitcoin, I assume, I would have to take it with a grain of salt

It's arbitrarily divisible, up to the limit of a float though right? So nominal prices can keep "decreasing" in bitcoin for a long time. Maybe that's just too much work to keep the prices reasonable? Edit: they can't actually be using a float for money though, right? So what is the actual limit of divisibiity?

It's divisible to the 'satoshi'[0], but could be changed in the future.

[0]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/114/what-is-a-sa...

Yes, people could increase the subdivisibility -- and break a lot of JavaScript implementations in the process.

It's clear that Satoshi either had some affinity to JavaScript or was otherwise familiar with people who are crazy enough to do financial calculations using double-precision floating point numbers, from the fact that the upper limit of existing satoshis is so close to what fits into a double-precision mantissa.

See my https://trackingco.de for a useful, simple service that accepts payments only in Bitcoin.

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