Bitcoin Forum

Apart from 'accepting' bitcoin in places like Germany and Denmark, given the Euro money processing / transmitting laws I can see Europe being the hub for bit businesses.

AFAIK, if your business is regulated in one Eurozone country (via Payment Services Directive) then you can exist and expand into other member countries seamlessly.

Couple that with the UK being the 'lax' financial capital of the world and I reckon that's where it will all head.

Given the US stiffed Germany out of its gold, I could see this.

Not much of a point to Bitcoin in Europe though. With SEPA you can get money anywhere in Europe for free decently quick, and I can already withdraw money anywhere in Europe from any ATM machine, buy from every store in Europe, as well as pay any online merchant through my bank with no fees almost instantly.

Perhaps it'll be the centre of operations to run stuff in the US and elsewhere though, because the UK, especially the Isle of Jersey, is sortof a financial free-haven. But Europe itself hasn't got nearly as much trouble with its banking system compared to the ancient infrastructure they use in the US.

It seems like that's how this is playing out. Little early too say for sure though.

Hard one to call.  The UK government don't have any clue about technology.  They still think they can switch off anything undesirable on the internet.  Bitcoin included.  Pirate Bay is banned but still seem to work for me.

On the other hand, the ZipZap thing starting next month is going to be interesting.  25,000 retailers selling bitcoins over the counter for cash.  Did someone forget to tell the government this was happening?  Surprised there hasn't been an outcry from The City.  Maybe there has, I dont know.

I'm more interested in what the EU's stance on Cryptos is.  They must make some kind of ruling sooner or later.

What about retailers?  UK retailers have to put up with high credit card fees.  Card payment is very popular in the UK.  Germans don't seem to use cards much.  Not sure about elsewhere.

I didn't know the UK had many credit card users. I'm used to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, and most people get by without any credit card at all.

It's true though that a lot of retail merchant fees on their payment gateways are excessive, especially things like credit cards and PayPal, and especially in the US. In the Netherlands we have a somewhat cheaper alternative called iDeal, around 30 to 60 cents per transaction depending on what bank you pick. Bitcoin is certainly cheaper than PayPal, but you have to take into account other costs as well. Bitcoin needs a payment system like BitPay because you can't allow yourself as a merchant to have funds that are incredibly volatile and change 10-20% in value daily. BitPay asks 1% for their transactions, or a monthly fee, which is still pretty competitive, but not so much in countries where credit cards aren't widely used.

Also, Bitcoin isn't as cheap as it used to be. Heck I made some charts recently and wrote an article analysing Bitcoin transaction fees so I might as well expand on that a bit.

The black line shows the average Daily Bitcoin transaction fee per transaction in US Dollars, calculated on the basis of blockchain.info data. The second chart shows a close-up of this year:
https://i.imgur.com/Qst9HLT.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/VGbXzu1.jpg

Basically, this year miner fees went from $0.01 to, on average in December, $0.27 cents. Now that Bitcoin prices are dropping, I'm expecting miner fees to also fall. This is, actually, a good thing for Bitcoin as a payment system, because had prices kept going up, miner fees would've most likely gone up as well.

It's difficult to say though whether miner fees are more dependent on transaction size rather than Bitcoin price or vice versa. When someone pointed that out I made a chart looking at average transaction size, price, as well as average daily fee per transaction: https://i.imgur.com/ot98Uz5.jpg

It looks like transaction size is more important than bitcoin price for the average transaction fee, but I'd need to have a look at more minute data to see whether fees of small transactions, say $1, have also had to deal with rising transaction fees. They might not have gone from $0.01 to $0.27, but a rise from 1 cent to 10 cents on a dollar is relatively already quite a hike. That's a lot of detailed work on blockchain data though so I'm procrastinating on it. Also, that work becomes redundant when Bitcoin falls in price and miner fees drop again anyway  :)

Edit: Also, I realise I really need to check who pays the miner fee in BitPay transactions. Does BitPay take on that fee? The merchant? The customer? I couldn't find anything about it on the net and I really don't like not knowing things when I research stuff.

The person sending the bitcoins pays the fee. thats how the system works.

transaction fees are in bitcoin. the minimum fee is set so it cant go lower unless enough people on the network change their default settings. Since people dont change them, you can consider the minimum fee rules mandatory. As a result of the bitcoin fee not changing, when the USD value of bitcoin changes so does the USD value of the bitcoin fee.

Periodically the bitcoin client is updated to account for this and adjusts the minimum bitcoin fee to be lower. (it used to be .01). They must do this carefully so they dont make the fee too low in case the bitcoin value swings up and down.

One of the things the devs are currently working on is implementing a system where the fee floats so it wont have to be updated in each client. ie. it will have a steady value in other currencies.

Yes tabnloz these days bitcoin is facing tough times in many countries especially china but as far as Europe is concerned then it’s not a victim of European central bank due to which there is little scope for it to prosper their but in long run I guess it will be victim of central banks of entire world including European Union. So a big risk for bitcoin exist ahead