Topic: Bitcoin isn't worth it for consumers. And that will stop adoption. - page 5. (Read 9891 times)

[1] as BTC goes up they can cut fees to 0.00001 and so on.

[2] BTC is behaving like a store of wealth, though that may mean PPC is the new btc

[3] BTC will be used for things like buying houses, cars, larger items, paying wages, services and perhaps bills etc, where the real money is.

[4] Off chain solutions may arise, though I'm yet to be convinced of how this will work exactly

[5] i can actually touch type now after all theses years as long as I don't think about it while I am doing it.

If you've ever bought something with bitcoin, it is much easier copy-pasting or scanning an address in than filling out those credit card forms (billing address, shipping address, security code, expiration date). After all that work, you have to trust that company not to share or lose all that information, because anyone can use that information to charge money to your card. If you've had a credit card for any period of time, chances are you've run into fraud before. Every time I use my credit card online I'm struck by how antiquated and dangerous the whole process is - the only way it works is because your bank will (generally) incur the costs of fraud, although it's still a huge PITA when it happens.

Also, traveling abroad is huge. I imagine a day when I don't have to call up my credit cards and banks and ask them what kind of ATM I can use in Prague to avoid massive fees, or incur awful currency exchange rates both when I'm arriving and leaving a country.

Source?

Bitcoin is an extraordinary store of value, a frictionless remittance system, and a niche currency, maybe someday a mainstream currency. There's no reason to try to make it something it's not just because many people have the misconception that Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency; one BTC will soon be worth millions of dollars for its store-of-value function alone.

There are systems that can be built on top of Bitcoin that could enable it to function as a mainstream currency, but who cares? Thinking Fretting about this now is premature, other than for niche uses. There's an entire world of wealth yet to be transferred into Bitcoin. Give it at least a few years.

The incentive is huge when you go deeply into the details of it's construction... you can setup escrow transactions, you can create your own contracts, pay anywhere without giving out information.

In the business world it would be most apparent of course, considering all the checking that has to be done and the restrictions as well... try purchasing something from another country. For most western countries it would be no problem to do so within the country, but if your purchasing something from outside the country, your credit card will be checked, the purchases funds will be moved immediately to another bank account to avoid a chargeback... chargebacks happen both ways, they can be innitiated by consumer or merchant.

I've heard and delt with all the horror stories, having worked retail.

customer gets robed by staff who memorize their credit card number
customer gets no products from online store, has to do a chargeback but did not know it was possible.
international customer has to do a money transfer from England to Canada takes a week to do the wire transfer.
South American customer needs to pay for a item, waits a week to get the funds to go through several banks to get to Canadian bank, because communication system are severely faulty.
Customer gets funds locked on a credit card purchase, customer and merchant can't pay for item because transaction won't go through until the lock is removed automatically 3 days later.
customer has to give out credit card information, personal information to online merchant for subsciption... wastes 10 minutes going through the process to read an article.
Merchant has to do back ground checks on international orders for fear of fraud.
merchandise cannot be shipped until funds have been confirmed into the secondary bank account.
etc

all this fear... all the worrying and hard work required just to do a purchase. Why not just pay in Bitcoin, wait 10 minutes, ship merchandise.
If you want faster transactions the Open Transactions library can be used to create off-chain verified instant transactions and if something goes wrong? Got scammed by a bogus company, server went down, hackers stole the coins, the OT servers can implement a multi-signature system for removing the coins from within OT, your coins will be returned to you since no one else can spend them. And the OT servers have no limit on how many transactions can be made... want to make 1 trillion transactions a day? that's fine

The infrastructure to create truly 100% verifiable instant transactions is there, there is just a bit of work to be done to make it more user friendly, but the technology is there.

and also, on the economics side... if you know about bitcoin and you live in Argentina or Zimbabwe, are you going to stand by while you watch all your money lose value? destroying your way of life, not just of yourself but your whole country? This is a voluntary action you need to take, the government doesn't have to be involved to save your money. Some countries have gone directly to the Euro or the USD. on a world wide scale BTC will be accepted by those who fear losing their way of life the most because of inflation, all these small currencies across the planet losing value, how much are they all worth together in dollars?

If a proper infrastructure is created, Safe transactions, good merchant clients, Trust worthiness ratings for merchant addresses, merchant verification signatures, instant verifications... why would we need banks, when everything that a bank provides can be safely implemented from within your own home?

How much is the Bank infrastructure costing the economy? 10 billion world wide? 100 billion? 4 trillion dollars a year!!  that is massive... just imagine the savings. everything you buy could be half price, more movement for the economy, the speed of money will be 1000's of times faster thanks to removing this banking bottleneck to the economy.

and i'm not even getting into the possibilities of the blockchain, ownership verified products, legal document time stamps, open sourced corporations, Decentralized governments, etc.  All we have to do is just get all the features that people want into the software... It's open source, the best fit for your needs is what you will use.

It won't be the first world that sees the true possibilites of cryptocurrencies it will be the poor countries that no one wants to do business with, provide credit or money services that will start to piece the economic infrastructure together, they will finally be able to be part of the world economy and purchase goods from around the world from the safety of their own homes.

You`re looking at this from the wrong angle. Consumers can reasonably expect a smooth transaction when they deal with huge, established retailers such as Amazon or Ebay, but there are thousands of other merchants online, aside from just these two examples. If I`m looking for a specialty item or just hunting for a good price on something, I`ll routinely use other online stores, sometimes sites I`ve never heard of before. I can do this because I know that if something goes wrong and I get scammed, my credit card company is going to perform a chargeback for me. Additionally, the site won`t exist for long if they`re routinely ripping people off, because the chargeback is a deterrent to even try.

If we were all to start using only bitcoin, all these smaller companies will go out of business because people will be scared to death to send money to anyone, in fear that they`re being scammed. There are many bitcoin scam sites out there right now that have been operating for months or even years, essentially with total impunity. They can scam people and there`s nothing anyone can do about it. I don`t want to live in a world where I need to perform in depth research on message boards and blogs before making any purchases to check the reputation of a company, and then just pray that they deliver on the goods.

How you can state that paypal and credit cards are higher risk than bitcoin, I have no idea. No offense, but you must be delusional. If you buy something online with bitcoin and never receive the product, you`re completely at the mercy of the merchant. That`s not a good feeling at all. With a credit card all I need to do is talk to the bank and they`ll mark it as a fraudulent charge.

People are already using smart phones to make purchases, but transactions are linked to phone number or credit card - I dont see why anyone would go to any extra hassle to get and fund a btc wallet.

Then you have Scan Inc also for payments with QR codes.

There are lots of alternatives to bitcoin already. More will be developed also. Not altcoins, but new methods all together. And these do offer consumer protections etc.

I was just reading an article about how the Cover app lets customers pay more quickly for the meals at restaurants.  Here is one link to the article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2450089/Cover-app-lets-leave-restaurants-waiting-bill.html

I was thinking that with Bitcoin (and there are some rumors of Square working with BTC soon) that this will be even more effective by leaving out Credit Card companies all together and the companies could pass on the savings to consumers.

There will be endless opportunities for Bitcoin to be worth it for consumers to use.  It is just a matter of time.

Ever actually worked with a company like Bank of America?  Paypal?

Just one taste of how they really treat consumers when there is a problem will let you know why Bitcoin will be adopted.  Once a consumer has an account wrongly frozen or otherwise attacked by one of these companies they will fall in LOVE with Bitcoin.  

There's no reason to even worry about mass adoption as bitcoin can't even support that kind of traffic and will break. Therefore,  it can never achieve mass adoption unless the architecture is reworked from the ground up.

Speaking as a merchant, I can tell you that the "no consumer protection" is actually a good thing. Businesses spend obscene amounts of money on accounting/fraud departments to insure against chargeback fraud (90%+ of chargebacks are fraud from the customer's side). Therefore if this is not an issue, companies will be able to significantly decrease the price of their items.

So you will end up with something like this:
- Buy an item with credit card, the price is $100
- Buy an item with bitcoin, the price is $75

Legitimate businesses will quickly get a reputation for being honest, for example if you walk into Walmart and buy a new TV, they aren't going to outright scam you simply because you paid in bitcoin. Most people don't buy things on tiny unknown sites anyway, they gravitate towards the big sites, newegg, ebay, etc.

Actually, it takes 6 months to "confirm" credit card transactions, if we are using the word "confirm" to mean the equivalent of a bitcoin transaction receiving confirmations. 6 months is the cutoff point after which credit card fraud is no longer possible, however as merchants we obviously can't tell people "wait 6 months before receiving your item" so we just choose to risk it and let them have it immediately - this is exactly the same as letting a bitcoin user take their items before the transaction has been confirmed. I've already implemented a 25% discount on all of my products for customers who choose to pay with bitcoin.

When you say consumer protection, you mean protection from shady internet sellers, right? Well, that's not a bitcoin problem.  Merchants already offer consumer protection for digital payments on the internet.

1. Ebay protects buyers by guaranteeing that you'll get what you pay for or your money back.
2. Amazon protects consumers by facilitating trade between online entrepreneurs and shoppers.

Both of these sites do not accept USD directly, they mainly take paypal and credit cards, which are both digital overlay systems with MORE risk than bitcoin, ironically. But by adding significant fees to compensate for fraud, these companies together with credit card and banking industries have found a way to make it work.



 

imo bitcoin is just the beginning. Anything can happen, and I believe it will.
Its not ready for the average, slave mentality, mouse in a wheel kind of consumers. And I don't think it should be just yet.
Getting ahead of our self is just going to hurt development.

this may be true in the US and other countries with stable money systems, but I think it could be really interesting for the rest.   

I understand most of the responses, but I also agree that there doesn't seem to be anything big enough to power a paradigm change.  At all. There are definitely some minor benefits to the consumer.  

Currently bitcoin has nearly zero consumer protection in place. I raised this issue on the bitcoin foundation forums, and my understanding is that they are working on it. Or rather, it's not even their job to work on it. It's the job of the various companies overlaying the bitcoin protocol, providing services, that should be providing the consumer protections. Something like that.

But if you lined up 100 consumers, and tried to convince them why bitcoin is better than Cash or credit cards, I think you would fail. I don't think they would see the relevance of it, unless they regularly send money home to family in other countries. The ability to use a smart phone to make purchases, might be the only slightly relevant benefit. I don't know if that's significant enough to motivate a worldwide currency change.

It's big enough to get at least one of the core developers investigating (or at least wondering):

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3270483

Really? A spy agency spies on people? That's a socker 
Seriously talking rigged encryption algorithms might be true but the nsa inventing bitcoins is unlikely to say the least, and noone's biggest fear whatsoever.