I'm not impressed. I don't see a point in this. If you have a visa/mastercard card, you have a bank account. If you have a bank account, you can just wire money on an exchange and buy bytes with reasonable 1-3% fee. Instead of working with high volume exchanges to list bytes, Tonych and team developed this rather bizarre way of buying bytes heavily subsidizing a private company in the process with undistributed funds.
Tell me what's so cool about it?
What a strange way of looking at things. People having bank accounts or not doesn't have anything to do with it.
The purpose of a fiat on-ramp is to reduce the amount of steps you have to take to purchase Bytes, make it simpler. You can't "just wire money to an exchange", you have to register an account, sometimes verify your bank account (small transaction to prove ownership of account) and when you want to withdraw you sometimes have to get your identity verified first. Trading costst fees and withdrawing costs fees, plus you have to learn how any particular exchange works. For new users this isn't particularly easy so why not try to improve the process?
Making it simpler is easier said than done but you have to start somewhere. First step is to establish an identity that you can use again and again and is trusted by banks/exchanges, that's why we have the Jumio attestation. This is a way bigger deal than people make it out to be, the fact that we have this now means that the Byteball platform is
trusted to be secure!
Now that you are trusted (i.e. replaced the proven to own bank account step + the proven identity step in one go) it's still pretty hard to find a party that allows direct crypto purchases but Tony managed to do just that: Indacoin. So now attested Byteball users can purchase Bytes through Mastercard or Visa without creating any extra accounts or having to verify anything extra. The fees on a site like Indacoin have to be huge because they run the risk of CC fraud/chargebacks, this risk is mugh lower for people being attested on Byteball so they naturally reduced the fees. This means Indacoin also
trusts the Byteball platform! I guess once they find out fraud/chargebacks are almost non existant the fee could be lowered again, let's see.
So the big deal is not that people who already trust Byteball and jumped through a lot of hoops to get attested can now finally buy Bytes with fiat directly but the big deal is that Tony managed to convince outsiders that the Byteball platform can actually be
trusted.
This paves the way for many more partnerships and improvements, these are the
anchors to the real world that you need to become a succesful platform.
Now the subsidizing through undistributed funds also makes perfect sense because otherwise noone is going to use the service and that would be rather discouraging, also for Indacoin and Jumio. Getting all of this off the ground is a huge feat that will be appreciated in due time.
