Love hearing the phrase "Let's face it. Today, it is still ridiculously difficult to spend Bitcoin in the real world."
I love Bitcoin but I can't integrate it into my life because it is just way to complicated in most of my transactions, not due to my lack of understanding of how to use it.
The issue really is that bitcoin isn't suited for retail transactions.
I work in the payments industry and we took a long hard look at integrating bitcoin payments into our point-of-sale and determined that it was effort we would get no reward for.
Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold.
Working with risk levels and calculations around zero confirmation transactions work but they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit.
On the processing side, we're scared to death by anti-retail thinking and things like replace-by-fee which, in our opinion, would outright kill off retail transactions using bitcoin. There's just way too much uncertainty that someone will decide a patch like that is needed and start deploying it even if it isn't in the core.
It's the upside and downside of decentralized systems really.
> Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold.
A guarantee isn't what you want. Cash and card isn't guaranteed either — the cash might be counterfeit; the credit card might be stolen.
What you want is to reduce the rate of fraud. So let's compare the rates of fraud between bitcoin and cash/card. Credit card transactions are fraudulent around .1% of the time. [1] But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions. Have you?
You seem to be afraid of the wrong thing, and you don't seem to be basing your opinion any facts or statistics. It sounds like you're just untrusting of new technology. Yet you're on hacker news? This confuses me. How did you get here?
Similarly, your fear of replace-by-fee is very strange — that proposal is never going to happen. You don't have any faith in the bitcoin community, but you have faith in credit card companies not to raise fees or block your business? Why is that? Do you only trust old boys' clubs? Are you from the east coast? Are you a luddite?
It seems to me that this is the wrong question to ask. What you should be saying is "Thank you so very much for bringing us your prospective. How can we go about better informing people like you in the payments industry?"
What litaph91 described is a very real fear. Sure, all of us on Hacker News know that the fear is unfounded, but the general public doesn't know or understand everything that we do. Instead of arguing with one person, let's try to solve the wider problem, shall we?
> But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions.
Then you are simply not very well informed. Problems with BTC transactions have happened repeatedly. Here is a great example of a successful 10k double spend during a chain fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956
It was was made possible buy slightly different behaviours in the different client versions. The core developers had to get on IRC with the miner using the 0.8 version and talk them into giving up their (correct) chain to resolve this problem. Currency of the future!
This incident had nothing to do with zero-conf txs. In fact okpay did wait for multiple confirmations, and was still hit by this $10k double spend!
This whole thing was possible because of an accidental fork of the chain which lasted a few hours. This is the only accidental fork that occurred in the last 3 years.
> they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit.
The element of risk is ALWAYS present with cash and credit. You could be handed counterfeit bills. You could be hit with chargeback fees (even when the CC processor will let you keep the money because it was a card-present transaction). But somehow merchants accept these risks... so why not Bitcoin?
Is it possible to read the amount and currency type from the NFC terminal rather than typing it manually? I think that would be a sticking point for credit-card users who are used to just sliding and having the proper amount deducted without user input.
I like the product. I just want to offer you feedback that some of the copy reads awkwardly.
Consider replacing "Tap & pay anywhere where there are credit-cards. Interested in early access?" with "Tap & pay anywhere credit cards are accepted. Interested in early access?"
I sincerely wonder why companies are wasting their effort on the contactless market, especially smaller companies.
This product will be stillborn in the U.S. as NFC terminals are fairly rare and even after the education delivered by Google Wallet and ApplePay, 43% of people who attempt to use ApplePay at a terminal that supports it fail and the clerk provides no meaningful assistance.
If they won't support ApplePay, they won't support this.
It may not be big in the US market yet, but I can tell you for sure - here in the UK, it's huge. Almost all transactions I do in chain stores are done with contactless.
I'm not hopeful that contactless will take-off in the US either.
The USA is finally moving to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of using smart cards rather than the archaic mag-stripe, as the liability shift that took place in Europe 10 years ago is swinging into force now.
But it might be too late, and you might be right, the likes of ApplePay may well take over entirely in the USA.
Elsewhere, where Apple have less market share this may not be true, and the US may end up in a ghetto of 1, again, with its own market dynamics and tech that's not applicable in the rest of the world.
Apple Pay and contactless are both the same technology & same standards. If you support one, it's essentially trivial to support the other. Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.
>> Apple Pay and contactless are both the same technology & same standards. If you support one, it's essentially trivial to support the other
Ah, this I didn't know, thanks.
>> Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.
It's different hardware. Historically the hardware has been more likely to support ICC/EMV and not NFC, but if the US is actually ever going to do a big EMV rollout then (were I the I the sort of person in charge of buying the equipment) it makes sense to go for both.
I'm sort-of interested in the Apple Pay thing now. (only sort-of, I find payments tech mostly to be incredibly boring). I've not worked on NFC/EMV contactless kernels but I understand that, unlike with the physical chip versions, you tend to need at least some amount of custom code for each card scheme. This has been put down to the schemes not pulling together quite so well this time around.
What about the advent of current technology that Samsung recently acquired, Looppay (MST), that uses a magentic tokenization to be able to complete transactions? These are useful and readily accessible with 90% of POS terminals that read the magnetic stripe on your credit card. It if different from the RFID-based NFC but it can be used compatible as current POS systems transfer to EMV-updated systems that will also support NFC transactions. This MST technology is mostly srpead to Japan and not neccessarily in the US though our current terminals are already ready to accept these payments.
US is one of the last markets worldwide to adopt NFC. In Australia, 70-75% of all supermarket transactions are now contactless, and 47% of all point of sale card payments:
As right as you are about the American market, it's extremely annoying that the rest of the world doesn't get to use services like Google Wallet and Apple Pay. In Canada, I've been tapping to pay for years, yet there are no popular 3rd party services to use my phone for paying.
So sure, it'll be stillborn in the US. But I don't give a crap about the US, you guys get enough of the cool stuff. This is a sweet deal for every other country with the infrastructure in place. This is a great idea for those countries, and definitely not a waste of effort in my eyes.
I will admit that while scanning through the content on the site again, I missed an important piece of wording that initially formulated half of my opinion here.
It is important to note that it does say World-wide. If they are poised to launch in other countries besides the US then I retract my statement about it being a waste.
However, I've seen much of this financial tech go straight to US for launch. If its NFC it's dead. Going that route, they may be out of business before they can even launch it elsewhere.
I agree that launching in the US is a bad idea for the reasons you mention, and I'm hopeful that more companies try starting outside of the US. The potential is huge, and there is a sizeable market for this kind of thing that is unfortunately overlooked by most.
Wasn't there recently some kind of legislation in the US that encouraged the adoption of NFC-based terminals, which was one of the main drivers behind the release of Apple Pay in the first place? I remember reading about it somewhere in the middle of a Google Wallet vs Apple Pay flamewar.
> This product will be stillborn in the U.S. as NFC terminals are fairly rare
Meanwhile in Australia, over 70% of CC purchases at supermarkets (and 50% overall) under $100 are contactless, signatures have been phased out (PIN is required for transactions), and Chip & PIN cards have been the norm for 5+ years.
Anybody knows who is behind this product/company/website?
Can anybody integrate with Mastercard PayPass or does Mastercard choose integration partners?
You can view their list of apis here https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API but they do require you to go through some exercises before you can get to some of them. With the PayPass program i'm not sure on the specifics but I would assume a fairly strenuous look at your business and what you intend to do.
Isn't that exactly what we shouldn't want, that the credit card companies also record our financial transactions made via a currency created to be decentralized?
This basically ends as a bit of convenience for us, at the cost of them keeping the near monopoly on world-wide transactions...
What's the point of bitcoins if VISA, MasterCard, etc. still know everything we buy world-wide, conveniently accessible in their databases?
Recording financial transactions has everything to do with centralization, when only a handful of companies control world-wide purchases.
These new electronic currencies are inherently untied from anything. What happens when the same handful of companies control them also?
Wasn't it Russia who was denied its own credit card by the same US companies? That's way too much power to have over the world. If we finally have a chance to decentralize some of these transactions, to remove some of that power they currently have, we certainly should take that chance.
>Isn't that exactly what we shouldn't want, that the credit card companies also record our financial transactions made via a currency created to be decentralized?
Yes, actually. I want my budgeting and spend tracking tools to continue to work.
If you pay in bitcoin, every one in the world can see that transaction. It's not trivial to tie to a person, but de-anonymisation can happen at any time later.
This product helps people who already have bitcoin convert it to fiat more easily and offload the bitcoin->fiat conversion fees onto the merchant.
Is there a market for this? It simply uses bitcoin as a store-of-value instead of fiat in a bank. Unless you're in the tiny minority of people who can acquire bitcoin but cannot acquire a bank account, I don't see the benefit to consumers or merchants. Not to mention with bitcoin's current volatility it is rarely appealing as a store of value.
(NFC seems to be another problem, but other commenters have discussed that well.)
With this scheme, the merchant still has to pay for swipe fees (which are ultimately transferred to the customer through higher prices -- the ultimate hidden fee!). Swipe fees are evil.
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[ 184 ms ] story [ 1786 ms ] thread2. Aren't those Android screenshots in that iPhone frame?
I love Bitcoin but I can't integrate it into my life because it is just way to complicated in most of my transactions, not due to my lack of understanding of how to use it.
I work in the payments industry and we took a long hard look at integrating bitcoin payments into our point-of-sale and determined that it was effort we would get no reward for.
Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold.
Working with risk levels and calculations around zero confirmation transactions work but they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit.
On the processing side, we're scared to death by anti-retail thinking and things like replace-by-fee which, in our opinion, would outright kill off retail transactions using bitcoin. There's just way too much uncertainty that someone will decide a patch like that is needed and start deploying it even if it isn't in the core.
It's the upside and downside of decentralized systems really.
A guarantee isn't what you want. Cash and card isn't guaranteed either — the cash might be counterfeit; the credit card might be stolen.
What you want is to reduce the rate of fraud. So let's compare the rates of fraud between bitcoin and cash/card. Credit card transactions are fraudulent around .1% of the time. [1] But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions. Have you?
You seem to be afraid of the wrong thing, and you don't seem to be basing your opinion any facts or statistics. It sounds like you're just untrusting of new technology. Yet you're on hacker news? This confuses me. How did you get here?
Similarly, your fear of replace-by-fee is very strange — that proposal is never going to happen. You don't have any faith in the bitcoin community, but you have faith in credit card companies not to raise fees or block your business? Why is that? Do you only trust old boys' clubs? Are you from the east coast? Are you a luddite?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud
It seems to me that this is the wrong question to ask. What you should be saying is "Thank you so very much for bringing us your prospective. How can we go about better informing people like you in the payments industry?"
What litaph91 described is a very real fear. Sure, all of us on Hacker News know that the fear is unfounded, but the general public doesn't know or understand everything that we do. Instead of arguing with one person, let's try to solve the wider problem, shall we?
Then you are simply not very well informed. Problems with BTC transactions have happened repeatedly. Here is a great example of a successful 10k double spend during a chain fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956 It was was made possible buy slightly different behaviours in the different client versions. The core developers had to get on IRC with the miner using the 0.8 version and talk them into giving up their (correct) chain to resolve this problem. Currency of the future!
This whole thing was possible because of an accidental fork of the chain which lasted a few hours. This is the only accidental fork that occurred in the last 3 years.
Details: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...
The element of risk is ALWAYS present with cash and credit. You could be handed counterfeit bills. You could be hit with chargeback fees (even when the CC processor will let you keep the money because it was a card-present transaction). But somehow merchants accept these risks... so why not Bitcoin?
Sounds like your employer isn't as confident/competent as other point-of-sale manufacturers who have been able to support Bitcoin, like point-of-sale giant NCR http://www.ncr.com/news/news-releases/small-business/ncr-sil...
Consider replacing "Tap & pay anywhere where there are credit-cards. Interested in early access?" with "Tap & pay anywhere credit cards are accepted. Interested in early access?"
This product will be stillborn in the U.S. as NFC terminals are fairly rare and even after the education delivered by Google Wallet and ApplePay, 43% of people who attempt to use ApplePay at a terminal that supports it fail and the clerk provides no meaningful assistance.
If they won't support ApplePay, they won't support this.
I believe it's a similar story in Canada.
The USA is finally moving to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of using smart cards rather than the archaic mag-stripe, as the liability shift that took place in Europe 10 years ago is swinging into force now.
But it might be too late, and you might be right, the likes of ApplePay may well take over entirely in the USA.
Elsewhere, where Apple have less market share this may not be true, and the US may end up in a ghetto of 1, again, with its own market dynamics and tech that's not applicable in the rest of the world.
Ah, this I didn't know, thanks.
>> Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.
It's different hardware. Historically the hardware has been more likely to support ICC/EMV and not NFC, but if the US is actually ever going to do a big EMV rollout then (were I the I the sort of person in charge of buying the equipment) it makes sense to go for both.
I'm sort-of interested in the Apple Pay thing now. (only sort-of, I find payments tech mostly to be incredibly boring). I've not worked on NFC/EMV contactless kernels but I understand that, unlike with the physical chip versions, you tend to need at least some amount of custom code for each card scheme. This has been put down to the schemes not pulling together quite so well this time around.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/tapping-away-at-checkout-with-a...
Edit: I missed that this product requires a smartphone. I thought it was a PayPass enabled card similar to Coinjar Swipe, that lets you spend Bitcoin in Australian stores: https://blog.coinjar.com/2015/02/26/now-every-australian-bus...
So sure, it'll be stillborn in the US. But I don't give a crap about the US, you guys get enough of the cool stuff. This is a sweet deal for every other country with the infrastructure in place. This is a great idea for those countries, and definitely not a waste of effort in my eyes.
It is important to note that it does say World-wide. If they are poised to launch in other countries besides the US then I retract my statement about it being a waste.
However, I've seen much of this financial tech go straight to US for launch. If its NFC it's dead. Going that route, they may be out of business before they can even launch it elsewhere.
Do you have a source for this? I'm honestly interested in reading more about this and where this number comes from.
Meanwhile in Australia, over 70% of CC purchases at supermarkets (and 50% overall) under $100 are contactless, signatures have been phased out (PIN is required for transactions), and Chip & PIN cards have been the norm for 5+ years.
This basically ends as a bit of convenience for us, at the cost of them keeping the near monopoly on world-wide transactions...
What's the point of bitcoins if VISA, MasterCard, etc. still know everything we buy world-wide, conveniently accessible in their databases?
These new electronic currencies are inherently untied from anything. What happens when the same handful of companies control them also?
Wasn't it Russia who was denied its own credit card by the same US companies? That's way too much power to have over the world. If we finally have a chance to decentralize some of these transactions, to remove some of that power they currently have, we certainly should take that chance.
Yes, actually. I want my budgeting and spend tracking tools to continue to work.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/31qlwx/onebit_maste...
Is there a market for this? It simply uses bitcoin as a store-of-value instead of fiat in a bank. Unless you're in the tiny minority of people who can acquire bitcoin but cannot acquire a bank account, I don't see the benefit to consumers or merchants. Not to mention with bitcoin's current volatility it is rarely appealing as a store of value.
(NFC seems to be another problem, but other commenters have discussed that well.)