Awesome!
Thanks CNN for the free schematics of Dwolla's office.
Such a shame, a great business model run by complete morons.
I feel bad for that restaurant owner, little does he know Dwolla can take any of his money without him realizing and *poof*
So, are there negative implications for bitcoin due to Dwolla's growth? As I see it, there are a few primary uses for bitcoin *right now*:
1) Sending any amount of money anywhere in the world for free or cheap, legally.
2) Same as #1, but for illegal stuff.
3) Speculative store of value.
4) Seeds of being a replacement for broken fiat currencies (this is obviously a nice design characteristic of bitcoin, but not a primary use right now).
Seems to me that Dwolla has huge potential to seriously cut into #1, and a little into #2 (though they'll try to play nice with authorities to prevent #2). There are lots of people who have a use for sending money anywhere in the world quickly and cheaply who don't necessarily care (or think) too much about anonymity and reversibility. Sure, the folks who *do* value those features of bitcoin will never transact through Dwolla, but the ranks of ordinary people who don't care so much are orders of magnitude bigger, and represent one very nice potential means for bitcoin to gain some wider adoption while growing into its true potential.
Yes, but your forgetting the huge point.
Dwolla is the middle man, the central authority. All your money must come from a bank, and Dwolla controls price, limits, fees ect. They can ban you if they want, its not anonymous.
Dwolla is a good example of why to NOT trust companies like them. TradeHill has lost over 100k to Dwolla and is in arbitration with them. MtGox has lost more. Us at Bitinstant have caught Dwolla multiple times.
Last week, a customer tried ACH'ing funds into his Dwolla account, he then used his Dwolla Balance to make a Bitinstant transfer. It turns out, the customer removed all the money from his account AFTER Dwolla credited him and he sent us the funds. To cover their losses Dwolla tried pulling the funds from MY account with no email, no notice, nothing...just a lower "Account Balance" to cover their loss when the customer scammed THEM.
We downloaded the statements after every transaction so we were able to catch them in the process. I then called Dwolla (Phone call was recorded, I have it) and caught them in a bunch of lies which they tried to cover their asses.
We had to build our own verification system on bitinstant- not to protect ourselves against scamming customers, but solely to protect ourselves from Dwolla.
-Charlie
