Topic: On a panel with MasterCard and Visa - page 2. (Read 5637 times)

The event started better than expected: The second speaker a partner from Deloitte demonstrated his knowledge of cutting edge technologies by asking the crowd (it was about 150 people) if they heard the name Satoshi Nakamoto. I was one out of 4 who raised a hand. At the end of his speech he had a slide exemplifying Bitcoin as real innovation to watch out for. I talked to him in the pause, but figured that he had only a rather shallow understanding of what Bitcoin is, but who cares, recognizing it as a disruptive innovation is the right first step.

The next talks were rather boring about online-banking innovations and security of banking applications. Innovations they were touting paled in comparison to Bitcoin, but they did not seem to know yet.

The final panel was the one I participated. It was preceded by a talk of the head of regulations department of the national bank (comparable to FinCen that operates within the national bank in Hungary). He spent quite a few minutes explaining why cash is bad for the economy and what benefits more frequent electronic payments would bring on national scale. I used this to catch him in the pause and telling him that cash and electronic payments is not a contradiction but Bitcoin is electronic cash. He got interested, so I have an invite to his office

My panel was with local MDs of Visa and MasterCard and a company launching a mobile wallet in cooperation with them that enables credit card payments via NFC. I managed to go over couple of arguments you shared with me. Let me draft the most notable exchanges:

They called NFC payment a breakthrough innovation, even a butterfly moment. I made the point that changing the infrastructure behind the payments is likely a bigger a breakthrough than the difference between sliding a plastic card into a slot vs. waving the mobile phone over the slot. The MasterCard guy said that the biggest obstacle in introducing a new payment method is gaining trust that they successfully established, I countered that people likely trust even more mathematics than them. They said in 5 years we will have majority using mobile payments with NFC, I said in 5 years we will no longer talk about innovation in payments but settlement of financial instruments and rights via technologies that learned from the Bitcoin network.

Close to the end the audience could vote (with a voting machine) on the question of what they see is future of payments is and a staggering 11% voted for Bitcoin (alternatives were credit card, mobile, bank transfer and cash payments)

I think that is as good as I could possibly get it, considering that only 2.6% new Satoshi's name at the begin of the conference.

They will be collating all the ideas, and releasing their own alt coin shortly!

So, what happened at the meeting?

Don't be intimidated by the banksters. I have spoken to such groups and find them to be very interested. After all, they are basically money geeks.

Good luck
I wish you the best in breaking the stereotypes of bitcoin and bringing serious conversation to it stubbornness lies deeply in the roots of tradition.

they do kind of have 2 form factor..

form one. the card itself which not only has the card details (long number across the front) but also some extra info that merchants would only obtain from having a card present

form two. the pin number(for in person transactions)/ or digits on signature strip for person not present transactions.

the problem is that these 2 'forms' of identity are easy to find/replicate

Given the audience, the most productive approach is (was?) to demonstrate the simplicity of use, security, mention multisig and triple-entry accounting, and insist on opportunities Bitcoin could offer: tapping into new markets (see ArcticMine above), and irreversible, secure, quick, and global payments.

You might also flirt with tracking consumer spending habits based on data mining of the ledger. While transactions generally remain pseudonymous for the outside world, the parties to the transaction can learn a lot about each other.

Be prepared to refute the common myths of anonymity.

The biggest disadvantage of VISA and Mastercard:
Security is a joke. They should have 2 Factor Authentication to accept each transaction.

The security of bitcoin is not so good either since it is really easy to lose a wallet due to theft, deletion or hard drive failure. But bitcoin is new, it is evolving. Visa/Mastercard have been around for several decades, their security still sucks.

Good luck!

Thanks a lot for all the input. The event will take place tomorrow in Budapest. http://www.portfolio.hu/rendezvenyek/reszletes.php?id=163

The audience will be senior banker, fund manager and some regulators. It is a local event but unique that Bitcoin is discussed in such a forum. I will update you.

I already got a follow up invitation to the deputy secretary of state responsible for financial policy affairs.

Secure transactions that prevent identity theft
No third parties required if a user is trusted
Escrow is the alternative
Trading bitcoins can occur directly between individuals anywhere in the world at lower cost.
Then converted to Fiat saving fees
Bitcoin was designed with the internet in mind
Growing adoption by merchants worldwide as they realize they do not need to pay additional fees to use bitcoin
Distrust of Mastercard and Visa as they force fees on merchants to pay for their premium card programs
Irreversible trades forces trust to be guaranteed.

Guess some of the videos before in this thread might be convenient
Ignore the First one above the line that's just amusement

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2997331

Edit: This one is best http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7LQu-eIOO0
http://www.scribd.com/doc/142758889/Why-you-should-invest-in-Bitcoin-Tuur-Demeester

A post from the Genesis Block still reading it since I reference it now and then
http://thegenesisblock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/TGB-Bitcoin-Mid-Year-Review-and-Outlook-7.pdf?d855e7

There are all very good and valid points already in this thread.  Let me just add my own recent experience:  It seems credit cards are prevalent in the US, but not so much in Europe.  I don't have one for instance, and also don't want to have one.  (Not because of my credit rating, it would be easy to get a card - but I really don't want it, mainly for the reasons listed above already.)  However, I just tried to book a hotel for my vacation, and it just wasn't possible without a credit card.  I even wrote to it and asked them directly whether I could pay in advance using a SEPA Euro transfer, but they didn't even reply.  Very frustrating!  On the other hand, when I went to 9flats, I had booked and paid with Bitcoins in a matter of minutes without needing to worry about banks or my non-existant credit card.

This. This. This and This.

Know your audience.  Those in the audience won't care about ending the Fed, the conspiracy of monetary inflation, the abuse of banks, anything about fractional reserve, or the benefits of anarchy and the power of Bitcoin to defund the state.

Know your audience.  Anyone who has accepted credit cards only and lost money to either identify fraud or so called "friendly fraud" will care about how CC & Internet don't work well together.  IIRC something like 90% of all credit card fraud involves "card not present" transactions.  It was never designed for that any everything in the past twenty years to reduce/control it has been a bandaid at best.  

Painting a picture for the audience about how Bitcoin is better for the merchant
1) no chargebacks --- ever
2) no need for a processors however processors (bitpay) can exist because many merchants want a turnkey solution
3) low/negigible fees (don't say "free")
4) open network, anyone can participate, build value added services, etc.
5) merchants can eliminate the cost and expensive of trying to identify their customers to stop payment fraud.
6) merchants can accepted orders from Somolia with no more risk than New York (use name of city where conference is located).
7) merchants don't need to hold on to cardholder information and thus there is less liability to the merchant (identity theft lawsuit) in the event of a breach of the merchant's servers.

Another vote for bitcoin's utility, security, and low price. For on-line shopping nothing comes close in these areas.

You could also mention that, while not completely anonymous, your use of bitcoin isn't inextricably tied up with personally identifiable information.  You don't need to announce to the merchant who you are and where you live, and it is much harder for companies to collect, store, and sell data about you and your purchases.

You could use these examples to show how incorporating bitcoin into their business would open them up to entirely new markets that they have been unable to tap before, generating new sources of revenue.

True. It would just be complete wallet theft if anyone ever got access to your private key.

It allows people to pay money for services and products, just like the electronic system, except it's decentralized, cheaper, faster, more secure, and you're not needed anymore. Bye!

Visa/MC require you to accept all their cards, regardless of the rate, and now it's illegal for merchants to charge extra to cover their insane fees, so prices of goods are being jacked up to serve their monpoly regardless of what method you pay with http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/business/smallbusiness/visa-and-mastercard-settle-lawsuit-but-merchants-arent-happy.html

Hmm. Great point. I believe I've been viewing the two (digital cash and digital banking) as one, right from the start.

In reality, in the future we may see online sites with options to pay with Bitcoin (digital cash), or Bitcard (Bitcoin-based bank card). We'll have the usual sorts who tut-tut over the danger of holding all that digital cash at home, on your own computers, when it could all be safe and sound in BitBank, or whatever sort of overlaying system crops up on top of Bitcoin.