Bitcoin Forum

http://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-says-it-will-stop-accepting-visa-cards-in-canadian-stores-1465592845

This is the most surprising news I've read in a long time. I had always thought that with so many people hooked on cards in America, retailers had no choice but to accept them whatever the conditions, but I'm pleased to be wrong.

OK, this isn't BTC related, but it shows that if a payment system isn't satisfactory, companies are open to the idea of dumping it. So they may as well be open to new payment systems. Let's see, could there be another payment system, cheaper than Visa, and that people could use at Wal-Mart?

What's the specific problem with VISA in Canada? WalMart operates all over the world, and so Canada must be singled out for a reason. Does the article mention this ? (prefer not to drive any traffic to Wall Street Journal if I can help it)

It is likely to be extended to all sites.
While the fees charged by Mastercard and Visa to most customers are similar, Mastercard offers discounts to large retailers.

It's the fees that  Walmart Canada said are too high, but it also said it remained "optimistic that we will reach an agreement with Visa". There's only one store that will stop accepting Visa on 18 July, then a slow roll out of that policy to other stores across Canada.

Visa was charging unacceptably high fee's before, so much so that it nearby became a point that the canadian government needed to intervene.
visa agreed to lower its rates to 1.5% average across canada, obviously high fees for smaller retailers
(this is old news. related but separate from the more recent walmart decision)


but large companies have the power to negotiate extra discounts on fee's. sometimes as low as 0.5%.
but it seems walmart is not happy with the offer it is getting with Visa

which kind of goes to show. if a monolith of a business such as walmart can stop using visa for an unacceptable deal of (somewhere between 0.5%-1.5%) then bitcoin payment services such as bitpay and coinbase need to cut their fee's below 1% to atleast have any chance of these monolith companies accepting bitcoin.

for instance walmart love fiat. but even so they are willing to stop accepting a method of accepting fiat due to the fee's, even when those fee's are lower then most other retailers anyway...

so even if they started to love bitcoin. the merchant fees(using payment processors) or the exchange rate fees(independently swapping) need to be low or nothing

oh lol at corporate fascistas in hair pulling girl-fight. Peak civilization has left the big fish with no lunch money left to extort, so now they're turning on each other

I always liked MasterCard over VISA anyways. I never heard any problems about MasterCard but always hearing full of shit with VISA and some of them i experienced myself.

VISA is not accepted worldwide, that's a lie. They have many problems.

with Visa cards equating to 40% of those sales($9.2B) then the easy maths is that visa gets:
$138M @ 1.5%
$92M @ 1%
$46M @ 0.5%

so canada have alot of power to say "we dont want to give you $138M, we want to give you $46M, if you dont like it, youll get nothing, zero, ziltch"
and then put a deadline of a month for visa to change their mind before walmart starts reducing visa's income, one store at a time.

i think Visa will give in. after all who can say no to atleast $46M.
and this is what coinbase and bitpay should be doing too.. not having a fixed 1% fee, but realise that anything is better then nothing, especially when low percentages with large retailers can amount to ALOT of income.. compared to higher percentages for small retailers

I thought you were strongly against centralised Bitcoin payment services, and yet you insist on repeating-repeating-repeating the BrandName^TM centralised services you approve of? Or is it only the ones you can understand? Once again, Franky is full of shit (and dry/boring beyond belief)

I am wonder that why they stopped it for the citizens of Canada, as it is allowed for all over the world and visa is working the same for all over the world, and if they have some doubt about the Canadians m, then everyone know that Canadians are more legit in their businesses.

lemming you do realise that corporations have to do things legit, and have payment records. so ofcourse monolith retailers are going to use other corporate payment processors. even overstock which the CEO is highly involved personally with bitcoin. is not doing exchanges to fiat privately. but instead using coinbase.
not due to any belief that coinbase or bitpay are actually value for money or any good.. but because of the legality of the payment records. i would have atleast thought you would have done some research into the "legality"/"illegality" of doing private trades vs trades with registered businesses, especially with your rant on BurtWs scenario.
imagine the headache a corporation would put on anyone trying to do localbitcoin trades with overstock.. or the headache overstock would get for explaining where who how and why all of these payments were done with individuals
think outside the box.. please

The same rule-abiding corporations who structure their tax affairs to avoid any tax burden at all? Shut up Franky, do everyone a favour, yourself especially

exactly, doing trades on localbitcoins or OTC could leave a corporation having to declare each transaction as private contracts with individuals, which is were it can be wrongly declared as income to the recipient(without complex explanations) and then corporations need to pay the state and federal income tax on every localbitcoin trade.

so yes corporations will avoid headaches/explaining payments. and instead use another corporation that is registered so its not considered as income/profits to avoid taxes.. aswell as avoiding headaches

my personal belief is that bitcoin should be open to anyone. if people want to do X they can if people want to do Y they can. but when you want to have FIAT retailers in the bitcoin ecosystem then there are fiat rules that need to be considered when traversing the borders between bitcoin and fiat.

im not saying everyone needs to use coinbase. personally i think people should avoid coinbase, but due to the fiat world corporations need things like coinbase/bitpay, etc.

if you really think that overstock, walmart, starbucks will do OTC trades or localbitcoin trades to stay "decentralized" then you have no clue, maybe its best you go play with your monero with you best friends icebreaker and maxwell

Don't include me in your assumption.
For me, Franky's frank writing beats your rhetoric hands down.

Franky is part of a campaign to distort the facts about Bitcoin so that companies backed by major banking corporations (like his beloved Coinbase and Bitpay) can transform Bitcoin into something they can take complete control of. Believe his bullshit at your peril

Franky tends to state what he believe's and why, backed with some figures/evidence.
He is not always correct. Who is?
Sometimes my opinion may differ from Franky.

But I can make my own mind on what is presented.
(as franky says, do your own dd)
What do you ever bring?

carlton is part of the monero/sidechain campaign to distort facts about bitcoin so that campanies backed by major banking corporations (like his beloved blockstream) can transform bitcoin into something they can take complete control of.

by the way although i personally hate coinbase, corporations like coinbase are just a fringe industry at the borders of bitcoin.. however blockstream are at the heart of bitcoin and can do more damage.
eg blockstream:"we are removing malleability".... blockstream:"but we are adding RBF"
eg blockstream:"we dont want big blocks"... blockstream:"so come over to our sidechains or LN where you are not personally transacting on blocks directly"
eg blockstream:"we dont want corporate control from banks"... blockstream:"we have just signed a $55mill deal with PwC who are affiliated and paid by banks"

i know you want monero to be one of the sidechains as thats the only reason i can think of that you are defending blockstream. hoping your pennies turn into dollars when your altcoin becomes useful to corporations

.. hypocrit

I can't believe this frank guy is a Legendary user of the forum and has thousands of posts and has been here for years, and he still fails to understand how the Lightning protocol works (a protocol that's open source and several private companies are working on it which is always good news) and has no notions in how scaling a system like Bitcoin works. Is this guy for real or just trolling at this point?

One problem: the people you have such a big issue with (Greg Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, Peter Todd etc) HAVE BEEN AS MUCH IN CONTROL AS ONE CAN BE OF BITCOIN FOR MANY YEARS ALREADY. Your argument is idiotic.


Franky, you're a poorly disguised member of the XT/Classic takeover attempt, as evidenced by your attempts at "subtle" undermining of the proven Core team and carefully chosen bolstering of anything that supports the takeover. And the contradictions are sssssssssso obvious, name-dropping Coinbase multiple times while claiming to "hate Coinbase". Your propaganda is so blatant, I expect your wages are frequently docked for being so unconvincing.

This, this, this.

You can only charge high fees if you monopolize payment systems and the merchant has no alternative. If alternatives exist, business simply migrates to whoever charges lower fees.

You're 100% wrong, Alyssa.

Transaction rate cannot be infinite, as each transaction consumes resources with a value. The dynamics of access to scarce resources means that a market for the fees will always develop to account for these dynamics. Even if you change Bitcoin so that the cost of the resources decreases, the cost still exists, and must be borne somehow, by someone.

Getting that balance right is what designing decentralised systems is all about. Return to Bitcoin 101, please (or BIP101 if that's what you're angling for, lol)

Wow, I never heard there is an online store to disable visa payment. Disable Visa payment?That is a surprise for me, Maybe for some time, Walmart is considering with visa payment, and it does not show a real statistic and Walmart want to disable it.

seems carlton wants to twist stories to be about blockstream features.... this topic is about corporations accepting/rejecting a payment system

even if lets say LN and sidechains was released.. walmart/starbucks wont suddenly jump on board bitcoin. because as i initially said before carlton began to meander off topic. the problem is the fiat/bitcoin exchange rate/processing fee.
monolith corporations will not do OTC trades even if "virtually free"(saving 1% fee could cost them 20% tax, for instance)
monolith corporations will use payment gateways to avoid the headaches.
but so far companies involved in that border industry between bitcoin and fiat are considered expensive (yes even at 1%)

this topic is not about individual people moving bitcoins to each other (consumer-to-consumer) but about corporations using payment processors(business-to-business)

i have no idea why carlton is trying to turn this topic into an advertisement for segwit/ln/sidechains and anything else blockstream promoted, or even talking about things from a consumers point of view of scaling bitcoin to bitcoin transactions..

the solution to aid things like walmart/starbucks to happily accept a payment method is about having virtually no cost in doing so.
LN/sidechain does not solve the headaches and costs of getting fiat that corporations need.
however those 'features' could help if walmart/starbucks had a loyalty card system where funds were kept as bitcoin and just moved back and forth.(but thats a whole different topic/scenario)

so try to drop the LN/sidechain/segwit promoting. and realise that if bitcoin wants to grow in regards to being able to buy food, coffee, and other real world produce.. then reply about the costs of fiat processing(this topic).. not the usual blockstream promoting.. save your blockstream promotions for another topic

walmart is planning to disable visa at store level one-by-one (not online). i think online removal of visa payments would be the very last ditch attempt after removing it from all the stores. but most of this is just threats and schemes to eventually allow visa payments. but at a cheap rate walmart is happy with (subtle form of blackmail)

Your probably right Alyssa.
I also see problems with Core's "fee market" design.
I thought, maybe incorrectly, that a "fee market" should be a steady and predictable thing, not some wild chase to be included in a block.
Without spare capacity, how can it work this way. (only eternally increasing fees to drive away users)

Without spare capacity, if there is a "rush" of recommended fee paying bitcoin transactions, (maybe more adoption) miners are powerless to process these extra transactions. (in any predictable timescale)
Importantly, many transactions could be left in limbo. (even having paid recommended fees or higher)

If miners had (some) spare block capacity then they could absorb these recommended fee paying backlogs.
Without this spare capacity, it is more an uncontrolled "block space ransom market" - pay more fees than most others or risk your transaction never getting comfirmed.

If wall-mart replaced Visa with bitcoin today, yes fees would skyrocket, but most attempted transactions would never even get confirmed and would finally be dropped from the mempool.

(I'm not too worried. IMO, a sudden HF blocksize increase will prevent this situation getting too entrenched)

It's been suggested that if Wal-Mart chose to accept BTC, it would need to get some service from Coinbase or Bitpay, but I don't think so.
If Wal-Mart has chosen to stop accepting Visa to save millions, this isn't to give millions to another payment processor.

I believe Wal-Mart could get into the exchange business. Run a node in every store? Piece of cake. Get a money transmitting license? Difficult for an individual, but easy to Wal-Mart. I don't think they'll do it, but if it wanted, Wal-Mart could.

Oh please with the concern trolling, if it was so important to you, you'd sell your BTC and buy whatever altcoin fits your vision of cryptocurrency.

You can't pretend like Bitcoin Core has no plans to scale up, and you can't pretend that their plan is not the best plan, the HF competition have been proven totally incompetent software engineers in a matter of months. So you'll get your wish, as you present it; the rate will go up, when the actual, credible scaling infrastructure is activated.

So you don't actually refute anything I said about Cores fees market?
(Not even that Wal-mart are clever enough to know they "cant" integrate bitcoin at the moment.)
Just tell me to sell up.

I know Core plan to scale , and no, I don't need to pretend anything. Cores plan is flawed.
Increasing fees will only be a symptom of adoption stifled as we wait for Core to scale sometime never.

And I would think of selling if your vision came close to fruition. But I don't think it will.
(btw, would you suggest Monero?)

(i think) Block size will be increased before segwit. And that is how it should be.
I suspect Core could do this. (technically, if not politically)
segwit needs more time for testing. Bitcoin adoption doesn't.

I would love if WalMart started accepting BitCoin. I would sure as hell start shopping there for almost everything.

I am not sure why it is only in Canada, but I read somewhere that the two companies couldn't come to an agreement so they have to stop accepting visa. Very disappointing.

Why is this disappointing? Personally I fail to understand why people need to pay with credit cards at retailers at all. Wouldn't that be the perfect use case for hard cash? The only reason for the pandemic growth of credit card use is that people are encouraged to live beyond their means by making it more difficult to get an accurate overview on one's spending.

So any rejection of credit card acceptance is good news as it makes excessive spending harder. It's also good news for Bitcoin, because the usability of credit cards is reduced which increases the relative attractiveness of using Bitcoin (even if it is not accepted at the specific market).

ya.ya.yo!

I do. You're describing it using possibly the largest collection of loaded expressions could possibly fit into the description, and sitting in the middle of it is a cleveerly constructed fallcy. And your intention is deliberate, to cast the fee-market in the worst light possible. Allow me to refute your bullshit (if you weren't trolling, you would, of course, have worked it all out for yourself, this is for the benefit of a genuine audience, which does not include you, rizlarolla).


rizlarolla is essentially making the argument for infinite capacity. It's not a reasonable assumption that users of the system will say to themselves: "Hmmm, before I send money to someone, I really ought to check first whether the current blocksize trend is becoming too high to help safeguard node decentralisation....". Not even the most technical users have actually got time for that.

There just is no way to regulate the blocksize to satisfy the decentralisation criteria, because there is no sensible way to measure such a thing. It could be too easily gamed, even using the best-attempt at a solution. So, what we do instead (and THIS WAS DECIDED A LONG TIME AGO, BY SATOSHI) is to use a fee-market mechanism to put a price on space in the blockchain. That's what rizlarolla is arguing against, and it's one seriously moronic argument, that ends in infinite blockspace and infinite transactions.... no, actually it ends in Bitcoin becoming overburdened or centralised ::)


And before "...but Classic has thin blocks to solve this!!!!" CORE HAS A GENUINE THIN BLOCKS SOLUTION. The Classic thin blocks has had several problems identified with the design already, which the so-called developers have shrugged off by suggesting miners do SPV only verification. You "people" don't have even a single leg to stand on, as usual

Ftfy
(You misunderstand Satoshi)

You misunderstand "market".

Forcing people to evaluate the costs and the benefits of using something IS A MARKET. And you're damn right it's uncontrolled, that's WHAT A MARKET IS. Your emotional rhetoric of "driving users away" is total baloney: the users can choose any fee they like, and their transaction will get processed according to how much fee is paid. If you want something of high quality or quick turnaround in this world, YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THAT. Everyone knows: you get what you pay for. Except for rizlarolla, apparently




Now, have you got something else to say?

^ now you see why blockstreamers dont want bitcoin real scaling ^
their answer is always
1)if you dont like it go play with monero(by the way carlton, icebreaker, gmaxwell already moved over to the monero ship)
2)if you dont like it go play with LN
3)if you dont like it sell your coins anf get lost

neither of which actually makes carlton look anything like someone who likes bitcoin, or sounds like he wants bitcoin to actually be open for anyone to use without headache or expense. to him bitcoin is just advertising tool to then bait and switch people away from.

i think its time carlton rejoins his friends on the altcoins because its obvious he has lost desire to help bitcoin

Franky, your trolling is becoming excruciatingly bad. You do realise that you don't have to do this, that actually being a decent human being is actually productive and enjoyable? It can't be much fun being you, having to research a topic you're not that interested in and develop ways to subvert and undermine it. And it really shows how little you enjoy doing this  when you post such blatant inflammatory lies, like I said recently, you do realise people can check your "claims" for themselves, don't you? :\

Why not choose a job you can take pride in doing, Franky? You could enjoy your life!

Now that is baloney.


More baloney.
You just said "users can choose any fee they like, and their transaction will get processed ".
Now, "If you want something of high quality.. YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THAT" You shout...

walmart should start taking bitcoin and selling bitcoin. Would make
it so much easier to get bitcoin and they could just charge a middle
fee and make a lot of money with how many customers walmart has

Walmart Canada said,
Well I think fees really high 1% to 2.5% . If Walmart can reduce fees then Canadian people will be lucky enough!!!

Being a bitcoiner, I believe, time for Wal-mart to adopt bitcoins.

what you dont realise is that the reduction from 2.5% down to what walmart are looking for of 0.5%.. does not translate to cheaper goods for customers.

think about it thats 2% of every transaction..
thats 2% of profit gone to visa..

that 2% wont go to the customer, instead it will go to shareholders

go look on walmart. and note down a dozen popular items.. note their prices.. then wait..
when walmart get the deal they like and visa is accepted again in the stores.. go check on the price of those items.. it wont be 2% lower

If Walmart was willing to adopt Bitcoin, how greatly do you guys think this would impact the price of Bitcoin?

Have you tried reading this thread?

It would be huge, but it is never going to happen as long as bitcoin transaction fees keep rising. They want lower costs, not increasing costs.

Alyssa, you betray your anti-Bitcoin propagandist tendencies too easily: the sender pays with Bitcoin trnsactions. That means that even if your misleading framing of the situation were reality, it still wouldn't matter to merchants, as they don't pay a single satoshi to receive transactions.

And so your entire forum persona is null and void, isn't it?

Don't worry  alyssa, he said the same to me yesterday I think.

Smarmy twat.

 
Not when it's the truth. You people are now confined to low-rent sub-6 month accounts with names like "rizlarolla" and "alyysa85" now that bankster shills like Franky1, Trollfi etc have been thoroughly drubbed. And your palpable irritation is totally, riotously hilarious. I laugh at you, frequently. It's funny.

Prepare for a continuation of the same, you can't fight the truth with lies in the information age.

me bankster shill?
sorry but carlton loves his bank funded company blockstream. he loves banks so much he even included a subtle hint to such in his username

its literally in his name

what carlton is afraid of:
isnt that bitcoin would break due to a hard fork
isnt that bitcoin would remain distributed if people had more then one choice of full node to download
isnt that he has failed to give any technical evidence

but is simply that he fears he wont get to merge mine some monero with his best buddies lauda, icebreaker, gmaxwell and luke Jr who all love altcoins.

i kind of feel sorry for him that he has only viewed his promotion featured future on paper. never actually personally using it. never actually realising that the unicorn dreams he read about on them papers have actual limits and have not explained the deeper stuff that actually matters.

i think he should take a week to not play with his altcoins, not play with his friends and finally do some research beyond the glossy leaflets he is spoon fed

but i know he will just reply with insults and bad assumptions to hide his pride in blockstream and their sidechain plans

its people like carlton that doesnt even have 10btc to their name
its people like carlton who has never wrote a single line of code related to bitcoin
its people like carlton who has never helped start up BITCOIN ONLY businesses
its people like carlton who has never even bought an ASIC
its people like carlton who turns everything into a insult match, just to bait others to insult him back. purely to make that person look bad by sinking to his level.

and these people will always only care about their own personal wealth.
only care about how that can screw up the system in their own favour
and only care about the sheep that blindly follow them down that road.

may he have a nice day, but im thinking he is going to be too busy insulting everyone thats not a blockstream cult member.. which is literally everyone apart from maybe 200 cult recruits

True. But do you really think he is human?
I d rather think he is a bot just mixing a bit some phrases but in the end looks always the same 1mb content, hmm
 ;D

change the record Franky, you're doing that thing where you try to repeat-repeat-repeat a load of garbage, straight out of the Saul Alinksy/Edmund Bernays Propaganda handbook.


And it's so borrrrrring to read as a consequence. You really need to find something to do that you're good at, technical propaganda and social engineering are just not your forte.

I don't think that a bunch of illiterate non-entities can hold a candle to my credibility as a genuine human. Mistakes in your grammar and punctuation are unforced and clearly demonstrative of low reading/writing ability, whereas I make deliberate punctuation mistakes so as to make a point (if you ever find yourself on the receiving end of a reply from me without any punctuation at all, think about what it is I'm trying to communicate with such deliberate mistakes :D )

You people can barely string a legible sentence together most of the time, all you do with this kind of talk is harm your own credentials even further.  

thankfully here is someone that likes to stay on topic. :D
using logic i would first say walmart are obviously going to stop it one store at a time(cant bluff a blackmail afterall).. im guessing they already have a hotlist of which stores already have low visa usage per customer. so to minimize bad customer experience. those stores stop first. and probably ensure a well signposted ATM is available for those left over customers to use.
Visa will notice on their systems that the retail store X is no longer processing. then as retail store Y, Z stop processing it may prompt visa to change tact, because they see it was not a bluff.

yes visa is a goliath business but lets say you got $138 and each day you were told unless you sign a new employment contract, your wage will decrease by 1cents a day.
you may think 1cents is not much.. but after a while it adds up.. now multiply that numbers by a million
it may only be a small number in regards to visa.. but anything is better then nothing

visa know they will accept 0.5%, they do it in other countries all the time. they were just milking canada upto 3% for numerous reasons, and eventually they will give in.

Franky loves changing the topic when he has no comeback. Another yawn-fest ensues, naturally. Wake me up when he's fini--s---zzzzzzzzzzz

Oh sorry, next time I will switch on my grammar bot as well and hope I can meet some of your expectations.
BTW, your hair is really good looking!

sinking down to his level:
if you really want some good "come"-back. ask your boyfriend to spit next time

Like I said, no grammar-bot can make intentional mistakes to enhance their rhetoric. Fail.




And Franky? You're becoming irascible, get some decorum man, it's a really unattractive personality trait to be so guile-lessly hateful. The way you behave when the chips are down shines a light on who you really are, and with such alarmingly unrestrained and amoral comments such as the above, you're clearly no sort of man at all.

(nice quick edit BTW, the original comment didn't include the "sinking to his level" qualification)

hateful?

angry?

i just read your last 30 posts. it seems your the one with the problem with the majority of the community. the only people do you talk pleasantly to are the monero/sidechain lovers.

ever thought you are too deep into the cult to not recognize your friends are just circle jerking themselves preaching to the converted, its literally a commune in your little crowd, you even have a bible which tries to make you fail at latin, but still told to use it now and again

one day i hope you will see the light, and i hope it happens before the mother ship takes you away from bitcoin. because planet sidechain is not bitcoinland. sorry to inform you

Cat fighting aside, this is pretty crazy news. All of my cards are visa. Is there some canada only debit card system everyone has that isn't visa? Otherwise they're denying themselves a mountain of business.

Franky, you and your band of shills do not represent the community. Your account is dead, go away