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Comment by aianus | Hacker News Reader

> Small global market share for legal uses.

How do you know? It's currently small because it's currently impossible.

> Most non-US residents can do bank transfers as fast as Bitcoin or will be able to Real Soon Now.

I disagree, most non-US residents in the world don't even have bank accounts. Not to mention, the US and Canada are a huge market with a terrible banking system that refuses to modernize.

> So like 5%?

5% is the entire federal VAT in Canada. Would you really say no to saving $100 when buying a new MacBook? Would you just not bother claiming VAT-exempt status for your business because it's a measly 5%?

A fringe here and a fringe there and pretty soon you have a whole robe.

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> How do you know? It's currently small because it's currently impossible.

I think the reason for my belief about iPhones-in-Nigeria being a small market is self-evident. As for other examples: people tend to buy things locally because local businesses are generally good at recognizing local demand, organizing import if necessary, and reaping the benefits of scale (shipping a container of phones). That this arrangement allows for localization of the product which further increases local demand is just icing on the cake.

> I disagree, most non-US residents in the world don't even have bank accounts.

Yes, but they are getting bank or quasibank accounts faster than they are getting Bitcoin wallets.

> Would you really say no to saving $100 when buying a new MacBook?

No - but as a price-sensitive customer I would buy a couple-months-old, gently-used Macbook and save $200 or more. As a price-sensitive business I would buy a Dell.

> A fringe here and a fringe there and pretty soon you have a whole robe.

Sure. But a robe still much smaller than a mainstream provider like Visa.

> No - but as a price-sensitive customer I would buy a couple-months-old, gently-used Macbook and save $200 or more. As a price-sensitive business I would buy a Dell.

Given the number of successful 1-2% cash-back credit cards, it would seem that even regular consumers care about saving tiny fractions on their spending.

Yes but putting $1000+ on a 1% cashback card every month adds up a lot faster than 5% on a once-every-two-years $2000 purchase.

To add: it's also a lot easier to just tap the 1% card as you would normally. There's no change to what people do normally except you get free money (not strictly, but close enough for most people).

It requires a lot more commitment to decide if the transaction is big enough to warrant a no-chargeback discount and if you trust the retailer. Some people would definitely do it if given the chance but it in no way compares to using a cashback Mastercard to buy your lunch.

Fiat currency is printed on the whim of governments, effectively defrauding the citizens of every country in the world through value dilution. Bitcoin is a technological innovation which allows for a constant and known rate of currency generation. I'd prefer to intrust my pension to maths than to a civil servant with an economics degree. This aspect shouldn't be overlooked or taken lighty because it disrupts the power, ergo the control that governments can wield over their citizens.

> Fiat currency is printed on the whim of governments, effectively defrauding the citizens of every country in the world through value dilution. Bitcoin is a technological innovation which allows for a constant and known rate of currency generation. I'd prefer to intrust my pension to maths than to a civil servant with an economics degree. This aspect shouldn't be overlooked or taken lighty because it disrupts the power, ergo the control that governments can wield over their citizens.

Yawn. If people as a whole cared about 1% of what you just said there'd be revolutions in every country yesterday.

Money is inherently a social thing. You provide goods or services today to earn a social credit and be able to acquire goods and services after you retire. Your pension is useless without an economy made up of ordinary people who don't care about maths and cryptography but feel they owe you something. They only care about power governments can wield over citizens when things go really wrong. And when things go really wrong you can't buy potatoes with a hard drive.

There are numerous examples in history (and today!) of governments wiping out their citizens' savings through hyperinflation, restricting their access to foreign currencies, etc. This is not just an ideological libertarian conspiracy theory.

It is a virtue of Bitcoin that it helps subvert the power of those corrupt governments over the economy in much the same way TOR and proxies help to subvert their power over free speech.

What is Bitcoin but a collectivist agreement that something has value? Those bits aren't reimbursable. You can't get that electricity back for them once it's spent - unlike gold, which holds some real world value by virtue of being the element it is.

Bitcoin advocates rage about fiat, while trading the ultimate fiat currency since it doesn't take too many people deciding they don't want Bitcoin (say: landlords, farmers/wholesalers) before the currency is useless.

Actually, fiat money means something else. According to Wikipedia: "Fiat money is currency which derives its value from government regulation or law".[0] It doesn't mean "currency which derives its value from a collectivist agreement".

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money

Equivocation fallacy. By that logic every other available currency in the world is saving us from the corrupted governments. Hell, the "virtue" of cowry shells can save me from hyperinflation and help protect my free speech!

Except people stopped using cowry shells as a currency, just as people stopped using Bitcoins as a currency. Now people hoard/trade them like digital beanie babies. If liquidity and insurance problems ever get solved, then we might see mass adoption.

When $1 million in cowry shells become as simple to smuggle in and out of Argentina as a signed Bitcoin transaction, you'll have a point.

So only "True" currencies are $1m signed bitcoin transactions now?

That level of No-True-Scotsman shows confirmation bias. How much have you put into bitcoins?

>I disagree, most non-US residents in the world don't even have bank accounts. Not to mention, the US and Canada are a huge market with a terrible banking system that refuses to modernize.

Didn't Nigeria, specifically, just issue national ID cards which are implicitly tied to being Mastercard direct debit cards as well?

I wonder how many merchants are able to accept Mastercard in Nigeria. More likely people are using them simply to deposit or withdraw cash. Remember, before square and stripe it was an expensive bureaucratic nightmare to accept payment cards even in Canada or the US.

> A fringe here and a fringe there and pretty soon you have a whole robe.

I love you

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