Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathancahill | Hacker News Reader

Does Bitcoin think you exist?

How's that relevant? The problem that the op is presumably attempting to solve is: "I want customers to pay me using a credit card".

It's very relevant. Square is just another broken implementation of a broken system.

Until we accept that centralized payment systems only benefits the central entities, we're going to be stuck with these problems.

I don't know about that, chargebacks are a pretty nice thing.

Why do you need them? With Bitcoin, your credit card can't be skimmed or stolen, you can't be charged twice or for more than you authorized.

As far as not shipping a product you paid for, economics takes care of that. Not delivering purchases is a bad business model.

Are you sure about that? If you get 1000 people to pay $100 for your "product" that you don't ship to them, that's a pretty good profit. You can just walk away with the money, never to be seen again (under that name at least). How the economics would take care of that is anyone's guess.

And precisely because of this the we have chargebacks.

As a merchant it would be lovely to accept payments only via bitcoins. As a customer I'll avoid purchasing anything if I cannot issue a chargeback. So the only way to get me to actually buy anything via bitcoins is to remove all alternatives.

> Not delivering purchases is a bad business model.

Even if this were true, there are still X number of people who got ripped off with no recourse.

> With Bitcoin, your credit card can't be skimmed or stolen

No, but your private key can be stolen/lost, and in that event, you don't have the benefit of fraud protection.

If your private key is lost or stolen, you have bigger problems.

Correct. However stolen credit card numbers are a much smaller problem than that.

@nathancahill http://xkcd.com/325/

@kevinchen http://www.icanbarelydraw.com/comic/2565 ;)

The ending says that "any recipient" can initiate a payment, but of course that's not true; see OP's complaint.

"Build a new financial system" is not a relevant answer to "How can I accept payments from the majority of Americans?".

No need to build a new financial system, the new financial system is already in place. It needs wider adoption.

In the time it took him to write the post complaining about Square, OP could have integrated BTC payments via Coinbase. He could even offer a BTC discount, since he's saving 2-3% on processing fees. If his product is in demand, customers will find a way to pay for it, even if they haven't used Bitcoin before.

There's no bitcoin equivalent for the experience of being able to have someone physically swipe their credit/debit card in your phone for point of sale payment. Bitcoin cannot replace all point of sale transactions that Square enables.

NFC via bitcoin wallet apps.

And once more the crowd asks, "who's going to use it?".

There is a very, very tiny competitive advantage to supporting Bitcoin. There is a catastrophic competitive disadvantage to not supporting the basic method of Internet transactions.

Who says you have to stop taking cards? But physically, there's very little difference between an NFC swipe and a card swipe.

The entire context of this discussion is regarding a person who cannot accept cards. It is pointing out that Bitcoin is a non-solution because the user base is so small and most people pay with credit cards. You need to keep in mind the context in which you are responding.

The guy can't take cards and this thread is nattering on about how Bitcoin is the answer and you're asking that question when I point out that Bitcoin NFC apps don't replace that he can't take cards?

QR code payments phone to phone are even easier. I'm seeing street fair vendors who started taking square last year taking bitcoin now with QR codes on phones without much resistance. I don't know what their volumes are like.

Or someone will recreate it, support credit cards, and eat his lunch because that someone can actually do business with people who don't know what SHA1 is.

...only benefit the central entities...

The "central entities", whatever they may be, are certainly not the only parties that benefit. To be successful, we must broaden the appeal of the changes we hope to see.

> Until we accept that centralized payment systems only benefits the central entities, we're going to be stuck with these problems.

That's beyond ridiculous. The main reason here is that they are trying to prevent their service from being used for fraudulent purposes. How would Bitcoin change that? Realistically, there would still need to be some form of identity verification. The actual problem here is that it's really hard to verify a person's identity over the Internet. The questions in the article can be answered by a determined attacker, so it's clearly the verification system that's broken.

I'm sure your comment will get bashed plenty...

But, I'll admit to thinking the exact same thing. 2-3% transaction fees and the BS admin overhead that comes with accepting CC payments is ridiculous.

Oh yea, and merchants are (usually) liable if they accept a stolen credit card. What a crappy system...

Bitcoin is only "no or low fees" because it has no regulations and protections. It'll need those to get broad government, consumer and merchant adoption. And then it won't be fee free.

Why would it need regulations and protections?

it's also free because the payment processors, the "miners", are payed by freshly-made bitcoins. once we hit the max number of bitcoins, they'll charge fees to run the "mines".

OK, I'll bite.

In your opinion, what regulations/protections are required that don't currently exist?

For me to start using a mechanism to pay on the internet, there would need to be a way I can get a refund if it doesn't arrive, or is broken, or the company goes out of business, or if my computer was hacked to make the payment. I would have to be confident that I could call up and get a refund even without having kept careful documentation of the interaction. And there would have to be history/legal precedent backing that up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com