To name a few benefits:
- There are no chargebacks
- Funds are available immediately (though transferring from BTC to USD may take a day)
- You can accept payment from anyone anywhere in the world (harder with CC atm)
- Fraud detection isn't as important w/out chargebacks. Granted this is a concern for consumers, which is why they need solid security for their wallets. I think of it like cash transactions. You don't have to worry about someone coming into a store and claiming that someone spent their $5 bill with serial code 123-xyz after stealing it.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and-commerce...
I'm pressed for time at the moment, so I can't provide a link.
You can say "if you are dressed like a clown today we will give you a 10% discount". Point being that there is nothing to prevent you from giving someone a discount as long as it doesn't break any laws and as long as you are offering it to everyone that falls into the same category (or the discount has been negotiated).
In in the fine print it was clear that offering your customers a cash discount was grounds for immediately canceling your ability to take credit cards. If I recall rightly, I noticed because the store I was at did indeed offer a discount. In practice, I'm sure the store was small enough that VISA didn't care. But for larger operations I'm sure it was a serious threat.
I believe they were eventually sued and lost, but since I rarely see discounts like that, I imagine they have some sort of not-quite-illegal trick, like offering merchants advertising credits based on charged card volume.
"Beginning January 27, 2013, merchants in the United States and U.S. Territories will be permitted to impose a surcharge on consumers when they use a credit card." http://usa.visa.com/personal/get-help/checkout-fees.jsp
It's good that governments still have a bigger stick they can use to beat some sense into corporations.
It seems to me like there's three contracts involved: The agreement between merchant/CC, consumer/CC, and consumer/merchant. Since these are all private parties, why does the government even care what contractual arrangements they make among themselves regarding how the form of payment affects how much needs to be paid?
This is a huge negative for the customer, though
I had to charge back twice because the seller kept on charging me on the same credit card number! At least with Bitcoin you're only in for whatever you pay.
Yes, just long enough, like Butterfly Labs. (Credit card purchasers: could do a chargeback. Bitcoin purchasers: SOL.)
Chargebacks and reversibility in general are essential to consumers. If shit goes wrong, it's gotta be fixable.
(This is also why nobody actually wants smart contracts. They know that the plot of Dr Strangelove is literally an irreversible smart contract going wrong. Consumers want fixability, business-to-business wants the option of lawyering out of a bad deal. The only people who want smart contracts are the businesses who currently screw over their customers with mandatory arbitration clauses.)
eg I would gladly take a 2% discount with Amazon, as it would save me hundreds over time.
On the other hand, if I were trying out a new SaaS product I would start with a credit card and opt to use BTC once I trusted the company and their product, much like I wouldn't buy a 1 year subscription for a 10% discount without first using the product for a month or two.
Then as a significant proportion of the population (say 20%) starts paying with bitcoin, other online shops like amazon will start seeing that they are saving a LOT by not paying 2% interchange fees to cover bullshit credit card reward programs and fees. And then the number of stores charging an additional credit card levy will increase as shops are not automatically building the credit card fee into the price, and then the number of people being pushed into bitcoin will increase.
The only thing that can stop this is credit card companies effectively lobbying that shops cannot charge more for credit card payments. this has happened historically in some juristictions, but is really pretty hard to justify for any sane reason so will be unlikely to stick.
This will either really marginalise credit card companies significantly, or really force them to put the screws on their interchange fees (and greatly reduce their rewards programs).
In either case, Bitcoin isn't going to take over the world, but whoever can figure out a good way to deal with the problem of how regular people could easily obtain Bitcoin in the first place has a chance to skim some profit in the interim.
This might be a US-centric perspective. In France, to my knowledge, there are no such rewards, and no chargebacks. Still, there are transaction fees, so merchants would have everything to gain by proposing Bitcoin payment and sharing the savings with the customer.
Last time I booked a flight, I did it with Bitcoin via btctrip.com. It worked out a little bit cheaper.
I'd rather have the ability to do chargebacks if something goes wrong.
For example, Amazon has never screwed me on a single purchase. If I have an issue they fix it, which is a large part of why I often pay 5-10% more for products on Amazon.com instead of XYZ.com. Would you use BTC for a 2% discount with sellers like this?
I wouldn't get anywhere near that site.