Topic: Time to stop the focus on buying coffees and start focusing on remittance! - page 2. (Read 1522 times)

a bank could of course. but crypto usurps their business model. all that free cash and qe and charging exhorbitant interest rates on loans, cc on their free money
think about it. WU would be out of business if banks had took on their model, albeit they are hand in hand in some format
add to that banks are wholesale closing branches, globally
plus most of the people needing it are unbanked! so not much use. OR are travellers, students needing emergency money pronto

add to that banks don't like taking gambles. holding crypto they could lose on swings. maybe when they have fully rigged markets then they would partake

crypto is still very much smallfry to them currently
it does however really offer a solution to refugees, migrants sending money home, criminals. ordinary people that want to change system and so on

but, yes, to op, THIS is biggest area that needs addressing. not stock linked exchanges, floats etcetera

Well it seems some people want to turn Bitcoin into an elitist asset that only rich people would use anyway. I think thats a guaranteed failure. We NEED to both take care of small transactions and huge transactions too. Cash going away is a reality in the following years and we need a solid system to counteract the e-fiat closed source crypto that the gov will drop on us.

Well - I don't think your coffee purchasing is going to save BitPay is it?

Agree that should be definitely the main market to focus on.That is a market of more than $500bn each year. Bitcoin owning a nice piece of that cake would be awesome. But what is hindering us?
I mean we do have some services out there. But it all seems to take way more time and acceptance it seems.

And just to let you know... sig campaigns let you buy several more cup of coffees and not just one per month.

all these 'banks' and their ponzi schemes make it impossible to start a new bank according their regulations
sue you need to be legal, have good record etc but even someone like Richard Branson couldn't open one in UK
he had to buy an existing failed one

people like WU have a monopoly really, on remittances, for now
but they have been so greedy

any new remittance service for bitcoin or any other crypto would have the initial age old problems.
the app is the easy bit, having the way to buy the crypto and sell it for fiat, which most migrants and those they send to , family, is the tricky bit
still having to use banks, and many are unbanked

so, with 'law enforcement' etc. using entrapment etc. on local bitcoins it is scaring people off using
and really, local bitcoins is bigger in places like US

the places where it's really needed, eastern europe, africa etc doesn't really have a footprint

I think for this to get momentum, it will rely on street traders. the currency changers that are found everywhere you go where they are most trustworthy and cheaper than the banks. ever travel to Ukraine, Myanmar, Thailand, wherever

so if they have apps are are happy to cash out bitcoins when someone sending to them stood next to them this is a way
it's down to whether this is how things move forward

otherwise any app that wants to be a remittance service would need to have some office in these countries, lots of expense, jump through all the leagl hurdles, plus be happy to hold the crypto if price slumps after trading, again, they can use the crypto they hold to trade

We are seeing a large number of startups with barely any results and various names and it seems that not a lot of people are using bitcoin for buying stuff.When more people adopt bitcoin and use it as a real currency it will for sure mean we are going to see much higher percentage of money coming into the startups.

They had over 30M in VC funding (from what I had read) so if the loss of 2M causes them to sack nearly everyone then what happened to the other 28M?

If "business was booming" then I very much doubt they would have needed to sack so many employees (and also it wasn't that recent - it happened last year from what I read).

Since the next century will be one of global mass migration I think the remittance market is going to be huge also. However I think BitPay is scaling back to recover the financial loss they suffered from a recent large theft.

Yes - they take an *obscene* amount of fees from migrant workers (often as high as 30-50% when you are talking small value transfers).

I have actually some inside knowledge of some new remittance businesses based around the technology (although unfortunately they are not keen to use Bitcoin itself - it seems that Ripple is actually making more inroads now).

As I think this really is the ideal area for Bitcoin I would be willing to offer my help to any serious business wanting to work on getting this happening.

agree with all you say

I am pretty staggered the amount of cash being pumped into btc startups that have virtually zero results

seems a lot of people giving themselves fancy titles, like president, vp, coo all this crap and are overseeing bitcoin startups that effectively do nothing but sizzle through tons of cash

another problem is a lot of the people involved have tons of cash in the first instance, lets use the winklevii as examples or the huge queues of corporate investors. they are not HUNGRY. most have priveliged backgrounds

I would love to see some of the very talented people on this very forum take on the mantle. but rather than anything get rich quick or illegal focus on something like remittance
it is a very hard market to get into and will require some infrastructure

have a look at startchat, based for bitcoin and startcoin. so secure messaging AND direct transfer of funds using both cryptos
I think will be huge with enough eyeballs. could go viral
https://twitter.com/start_chat

I think that the BitPay announcement (reducing their staff by a large percentage) is perhaps proof that Bitcoin is not being used by large numbers of people to buy things.

It isn't surprising to me (as I've been pointing out for weeks before this happened) as pretty much no-one is being paid their salary in BTC and the hassle (and fees) to purchase BTC does not make it attractive to then want to go and spend it for usually no discount (as most people allowing BTC payments are using BitPay or the like and do not offer a cheaper selling price - it's just a different payment option).

Sure we have maybe hundreds of ad-sig posters on this forum that earn enough to pay for 1 coffee per month but a new world economy that hardly makes (I really can't see Starbucks franchises being keen to train their staff for a few coffees they might be able to sell per month for BTC).

Until people are being paid in BTC they are simply not going to be using it to buy things (apart from the "early investors" most of which have already bought whatever toys they wanted to already).

What I'd like to see the focus being on is remittance (the main reason why I actually started using Bitcoin back in 2011). Compared to other methods Bitcoin should "kick ass" in this area but unfortunately it has made virtually no impact in a market that is worth billions in profits per year.