Bitcoin Is Not the Future of Payments – A Glimpse from China’s Digital Wallets | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Is Not the Future of Payments – A Glimpse from China’s Digital Wallets

visualcapitalist.com

13 pointsthisisit4 comments

I don't think comparing Bitcoin to Ali/Wechat Pay is fair. One could build the same payment experiences (qr codes, ride hailing, red packets, etc.) on top of a Bitcoin wallet app. Bitcoin is a "layer" apart from the payment experiences the Chinese wallet apps enable.

Building an ecosystem of services and checkout experiences is not an incredibly hard problem for a company like Coinbase to solve. The reason why Coinbase (and other Bitcoin wallet apps popular in China) aren't aggressively cloning the Ali/WeChat Pay experience is probably because a majority of their userbases hold Bitcoin for investment and speculation — not to make day to day payments. These wallets and exchanges are better off spending a majority of their time building for these investors / speculators.

Huh, I don't understand. If it's so easy why don't they do it? Oh the "value of store" goalpost pivot. Right!

Let me add some reality checks here. Irrespective of the fees problem - I know Segwit, Lightning network etc will solve everything, the real reason they don't is because Bitcoin/cryptocurrency is difficult for people to understand and use.

Most of the discussions about bitcoin et. al forget at the end of the day your system should be able to cater to a layperson. Currently, looking at Bitcoin discussions reminds me of this scene from Silicon Valley TV series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml92QEqE-RQ

Bitcoin is an asset (or a currency). Not a user experience. I think you should distinguish between the UX of a Bitcoin wallet app (which is analogous to Alipay and WeChat Pay) and the "asset" Bitcoin (which is more analogous to CNY or a stock you hold).

Bitcoin can be made user friendly with a user friendly Bitcoin wallet app. Coinbase could streamline KYC by partnering with banks / regulators, request Uber rides in-app, or enable QR based merchant payments (basically make it's app exactly similar to Alipay/WeChat Pay).

None of that has anything to do with the success / failure of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is failing because it is not a good store of value for consumers at the moment. It's too volatile and too hard to acquire. It's more of an investment class asset than a stable store of value I can purchase and not worry about.

The Alipay vs. Bitcoin comparison doesn't make sense — you're comparing apples and oranges.

The killer feature IMO for block chain technologies is their trustlessness. Mobile payments in China had the benefit of an extremely well built out cultural infrastructure of QR codes and also because the incumbent method of credit cards did not have a strong hold. It will be interesting to see if trust reduced systems translate into powerful global cultural infrastructure.

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