Topic: Delete (Read 1307 times)

what happens if you lose the card?

Although there is an obvious issue of IP rights, licensing and proprietary technologies such as the VISA passcode card which can actually hold a password protected wallet on it feasibly, the fact is it doesn't even have to be so complicated.

Once you think the right way to go is a financial intermediary, an additional issues arrises--

Should you further utilize existing technology by merely emulating bitcoin transactions but in reality use USD?

A) agree to use USD and have literally unlimited options for deployment (through banks, credit card companies, etc) and connect all this to a wallet host to update the balance based on USD exchange rates. (not my favorite but absolute easiest to implement in existing financial world)

B) treat it as a gift card and have a protocol/server of its own. (the difficulty of this is entirely dependent on country and method of implementation).

C) have an exchange or e-wallet register as a financial institition and have the ability to have their own bitcoin balance cards.

"You're destroying bitcoin by making it functional because you used the evil banking system! Ron Paul 2012!!!~"

Although there is an obvious issue of IP rights, licensing and proprietary technologies such as the VISA passcode card which can actually hold a password protected wallet on it feasibly, the fact is it doesn't even have to be so complicated.

Once you think the right way to go is a financial intermediary, an additional issues arrises--

Should you further utilize existing technology by merely emulating bitcoin transactions but in reality use USD?

A) agree to use USD and have literally unlimited options for deployment (through banks, credit card companies, etc) and connect all this to a wallet host to update the balance based on USD exchange rates. (not my favorite but absolute easiest to implement in existing financial world)

B) treat it as a gift card and have a protocol/server of its own. (the difficulty of this is entirely dependent on country and method of implementation).

C) have an exchange or e-wallet register as a financial institition and have the ability to have their own bitcoin balance cards.

Definately. Atlas was on here pitching his 'woolong device' a while back that was more or less a USB card. The problem with that though was he was requiring actual USB interaction (which is both impractical and insecure for run-of-the-mill POS). Anything USB is not going to work well for mainstream point-of-sale. In fact, one if the points of this thread is that the smartest thing to do to get bitcoin adopted worldwide is to utilize existing and already implemented technologies.

There seems to be a lot of nerdy initiatives (printing out flyers, hacking credit card processors, etc) which shows heart in our little community, but it's basically the equivalent of trying to sell girl scout cookies to pay for a heart transplant.

The future of bitcoin merchant solutions is going to be a paypal-type service, smartphones and QR codes, and easily implementable payment processing solutions for existing POS.

I'm not a mobile developer personally and the paypal-type site is for a different thread. I'm focused on implementing a datacenter payment processing handler that can be plugged in to existing POS machines just as simply as adding AmEX or a gift card to your accepted payments is (it's all handled server-side, no POS hacking required).

The only yet troubling issue is a bit of a touchy one:

Who should be responsible for the security of a customer's wallet?

Excluding near-field, a debit solution would be to hold the wallet on a card and have an actual transaction take place, but this would complicate things immensely (especially for near-field) and require merchants have a card-writer/reader (unlikely to happen).

An account based service however is quite practical and would allow for instant debit without worry of double-spend attacks. In this scenario, the e-wallet would be the payment processor (what MtGox is planning in Japan).