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Comment by hujokilom | Hacker News Reader

God forbid you attempt a donation to a party PayPal doesn't like, they will just seize your assets.

I can only talk about Paypal from the payer side it's virtually frictionless in my experience and transactions can be disputed via Paypal or my bank. Buying and using bitcoin adds a number of extra steps as well as transaction costs in moving dollars into bitcoin as well as giving me no dispute mechanism.

Paypal is pretty frictionless, but it still takes ~15-20 sec to do the 3 clicks through 3 slow-to-load Paypal pages (1: paypal button, 2: page to specify amount, 3: confirmation page). By contrast, a click on the Bitcoin address opens my local Bitcoin wallet which opens up instantaneously, and clicking send is also instantaneous. Total ~3 sec. The difference between ~15-20 and ~3 sec is enough to make me prefer BTC over Paypal.

I don't need the ability to dispute: I am not going to change my mind later about this donation.

I don't need to buy BTC: like many bitcoin users I already have some in my possession, ready to be spent at any time.

How long does it take for the payment to go through ? What's the fee ?

For a donation transfer speed doesn't matter, but for actual purchase it's a lot more than 30 s last I've tried

The payment is broadcasted instantly (1-2 seconds). Fee can be as low as $0.10-0.30 (eg. these donations to the VLC address https://blockchain.info/tx/99ee82b2b8f33ee22c6c51ff4ba198141... https://blockchain.info/tx/d056b36bdb81f70cf344d4489ba337ad1... https://blockchain.info/tx/445ba8e7559a4f83bcd7fd7adac30cf9f...).

It's important to understand the difference between a broadcasted transaction (tx received by most Bitcoin nodes, "0-confirmation", 1-2 seconds) versus the transaction being included in at least 1 block ("1 confirmation", ~10 minutes). Some merchants accept 0-confirmation tx, while others require 1 confirmation. But in almost all cases it's fine to accept 0-confirmation transactions:

• ordering physical goods online (an order takes more than ~10 minutes to be shipped & delivered anyway)

• ordering virtual goods/services (eg. paying for VPN: the vendor can simply cancel the service if the tx is never confirmed)

• any low-value real-world transaction (eg. paying for groceries... no one will bother with a double-spend attack to steal groceries)

• etc

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