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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

Will be interesting to see if Shopify (or anyone in general ecommerce) ever reports on the popularity of Bitcoin as a payment method considering there is no sense at all to use Bitcoins to purchase legal items in the vast majority of countries.

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> considering there is no sense at all to use Bitcoins to purchase legal items in the vast majority of countries.

This is quite asinine. I assume you've never tried to purchase an item in country A from merchant A' accepting currency A'', while you are in country B using bank B' with an account denominated in B''. The hurdles, generally, are numerous and diverse. Any lack of hurdles is quite exceptional, and completely dependent upon international agreements between nations, banks, and any number of permutations thereof.

Instead, you could simply transact in BTC.

While I agree that it shouldn't be automatically assumed that someone who has bitcoins to spend will use them for illegal purposes, I'm curious as to what specific hurdles you encountered as mentioned in your post?

In my country at least, if you want to purchase something online and in a different currency than your account and CC's denomination, the conversion is done automatically for you at checkout, at whatever the bank has set for the rate, usually a fair one. Works like this regardless of what store you buy from, could be in the U.S, Europe or somewhere else on the globe.

Most US Companies charge a strangely large "currency conversion" fee for this privilege.

Credit cards work well in the situation you describe (if I understand it correctly).

Credit cards & banking are much less distributed outside the developed world. While in the US, 63% of the 15+ population has a credit card, in Mexico it's barely 13% (in Latin America in general it's only 18%). This is a HUGE obstacle for e-commerce and bitcoin's cash-like, informality (no requisites, no need to register or be approved by a central entity) might allow it to spread where banks have so far been unable to. (Source World Bank Financial Inclusion Data http://datatopics.worldbank.org/financialinclusion/)

Yes, you can see bitcoin is getting much better distributed in less developed countries:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/map

/sarcasm

People in less developed countries don't buy online not because they don't have credit cards, they don't buy because they don't have money. If you make $5/day, bitcoin doesn't suddenly give you the ability to buy brand new iPhone.

Considering that many of the coins are simply generated with electrify calculating hashes (proof for work done) out of nowhere, and a portion of it being generated by hijacking computers and many wallets getting stolen and became unrecoverable, there are still rooms for improvement (which Bitcoin itself couldn't solve unfortunately.) And there is no near instant payment which makes it quite hard for micropayments (sorry haven't followed much lately, does that getting improved?)

Another example: currently there is about 30% arbitrage opportunity between BTCChina and bitstamp. That is, there has been more than $100 difference in the price of Bitcoin between those markets.

If you know how to move money quickly between those locations, you can make lots of money. It isn't easy problem, because otherwise the arbitrage opportunity wouldn't exist.

Right, because rather than copping the automatic forex charge that most cards do for you, it is easier to open an account on coinbase, make a bank transfer that converts your USD into bitcoin (at a frozen rate mind you, that could either double or halve in value in a matter of weeks), and then transact in bitcoin?

Not sure I'm following.

All of the rampant downvoting on this thread and blinkered discussion regarding Bitcoin really bothers me.. it sounds like /r/bitcoin has taken over HN.

Don't get me wrong, I believe bitcoin is the future of payments. I have absolutely no doubt that in the coming years it will become a global payments infrastructure that will destroy the idea of an international money transfer and change global e-commerce and payments forever. But the idea that it is already there is totally misguided. OP is right. There is no sense at all to use BTC to purchase legal items in the vast majority of countries.

You don't need to do any of that if you already are a Bitcoin user. You are speaking nonsense.

Just a point - my bank asks 2.5% commission for automatic currency conversion when buying with credit card.

I've encountered hurdles like that, but most of the time, they aren't strictly due to billing issues, and more likely due to intentional restrictions coming from the seller. As soon as you have a credit card, pretty much all payment processors will happily accept to process your payment, wherever you are in the world.

I've had quite a few bad experiences trying to purchase internationally (if your billing address and your shipping address are in different countries, you're in for trouble), but I don't think BTC solves any of those. BTC doesn't solve the shipping part, and BTC doesn't solve the fact that some stuff isn't internationally available (for example, music/movies/TV shows).

No reason to use Bitcoin to purpose legal items? How about not having to divulge your credit card or bank account details to sellers? This exact same problem is apparently important enough that even the established players are trying to solve it, with things like one-time use credit card numbers and third-party authentication pages.

A bit off topic but is anyone trying to work subscription payments with bitcoin? Is that even possible without something like a prefunded account?

The only way you could do it without a "pre funded" account (online like Coinbase) was if you had a RPC-Client for your transactional wallet, say on your local machine. This client would schedule payments.

Also take a look at: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly-adju...

I would have thought zero fees would be reason enough, 2-3% extra on every transaction from a merchant point of view is very appealing

> ...no sense at all to use Bitcoins to purchase legal items in the vast majority of countries

I'm speechless.

Bitcoins can't be used to extinguish the tax obligations that arise from legal sales.

Should merchants stop exporting too, because foreign currencies can't be used for everything?

If someone holding an opposing view to you leaves you speechless, it generally means you are indoctrinated in your belief and should reevaluate it.

You made the BTC-zealots angry. Be careful; most of them have nothing to lose.

Get it?

It's a pure international currency. That's useful for customers without USD access.

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