Bluemeanie, you got me convinced, I'll make time and dig into your confidence chains and wrap my head around it. I'll be posting my opinion on it in your topic
Personally I see here an opportunity for gift cards that you can check online for their balance. Through escrow, this could be an instant fiat -> btc txn, gift cards are a fixed price in shops, they have a fixed value at a company. It all comes down to whether you trust the company or not, and here comes the beauty there are so many companies that give out gift-cards that are checkable nowadays.
I thought about gift cards, but the very concept of them has two inherent flaws for their use as money:
1. When you pay $10 for one, it is instantly worth less than $10 is, because you can't use that money elsewhere other than one store. Therefore, this is not fungible at all since most people won't want that value only at applebee's, for instance.
True, however on a exchange it would just find its own price, I totally agree its not perfect. (you would see a big percentage cut) But as you are saying there is nothing perfect in getting fiat to btc instantly.
I've having trouble wording this, but what I'm trying to say, is that people who really get bitcoin at the moment, know that there are very few alternatives, and getting the ability to technically trade usd to btc instantly, I believe a lot of people would be willing to take the extra route. (its easier than meeting someone face to face, especially in most places, current exchanges lack liquidity, imo at the fear of getting bank accounts closed) Also keep in mind that this solution is only as temporarily as it needs to be. (hopefully sooner or later the governments will realize they are on the wrong path, and stop what they are doing)
Last but not least, this is going to be a favorite method of panic selling. Exchange down, bitcoin price dropping, you wanna sell, what do you do, you dump it in gift cards. (will retain their value at the store, and never tried it, but if you return a product bought with a gift card, do they give you cash back?
) It feels like with these you would always be able to convert btc to fiat and back, though at a hefty fee at times. (panic selling isn't gonna be cheap
)
BitPay and Gyft launched a partnership, so clearly they see a business in it, don't see why it wouldn't work on a open exchange.
2. They are generally physical. (There are exceptions, but they aren't the norm.) Who's going to store them? Wouldn't that be viewed as a bank and be seize-able by governments?
Well.. every gift card is issued by its company, until companies start banning giftcards, I think we should be pretty safe. Difference in regions... here every single card, is just a "charge card" for your digital account. (or as they claim it, the card is the account, and you refill your card. (which is card number + pin to pay, card number to verify balance) We only have one left that is entirely physical, and thats sorta the national gift card.
Do some research on gift cards (especially ones that you can balance online) if you can find 5 different ones, you can buy within 15 minutes drive from your home, the availability is there, all that each individual user has to decide, is the fee worth it for them. (free market) You can still choose to go do a central exchange, they also take a fee, and their bank account can be seized... (if they globally ban gift cards, (or digitally checkable gift cards) I'll give up this idea, but until then, I feel there is a market for it, especially now since we have no decent way of instantly transferring USD into BTC.
Sadly I find no way around inventing a wholly new crypto-security to act as Fiat on all P2P Exchanges. Nothing that exists now is going to work, the governments of the world have already squashed those that would.
Case in point.
Agreed, thats why when building a peer to peer exchange, we should seek as many possibilities as possible. And to be honest you and me can brainstorm for a year straight on possible implementations of adding additional funding plugins to the exchange. And within a month after it goes online, somebody will code a plugin to use something as funding we haven't thought of.
So yea to start of I would really like to help seeing what I can do getting a modular designed p2p exchange up for crypto currencies, with the possibility of easy addable plugins, as long as its math is solid. (the core would have to verify the plugin is solid, to prevent people from getting scammed)