Bitcoin Forum

I love bitcoin and have a loaded wallet on my smartphone ready to spend, but it doesn't make any economic sense to spend it.

For example

I bought a new headset today in UK and was quoted £55.97 for it. The bitcoin price at the checkout was 0.2539 BTC. If I spent the BTC and replenished I would have been charged 58.91 for it (+5%), and localbitcoins best offer was £59.40 (+6%)

I paid by debit card, despite me loving the tech, I'm not going to pay a 5-6% tax on every purchase using bitcoin. :(

Hoard with the rest of us greedy bastards

Use Circle and avoid lbc hefty markup.

You're using a service that is notorious for ripping people off with outrageously overpriced coins and complaining that the concept of replenishing doesn't work?

I don't follow that logic.

Use a service where you get your coins at market value.  Obviously.

-B-

It is common sense. If I were you, I wouldn't spent bitcon. I have to say charging 5% markup for bitcoin payment is big amount.

Now is not the time to spend, now is the time to buy coins you can spend when the price is higher.

With localbitcoins you are paying extra for someone to go through the effort of exchanging your money.

Buy through an exchange and avoid the 5-6%.

I spending the Bitcoins I earned. Without the shop offering Bitcoin discount, I dont see how buying Bitcoins right before the purchase can be economical.

The people who accept Bitcoin payments and then charge high fees is abominable

You need to search for better deals, granted there won't be many out there yet, especially for some things, but I've noticed there are stores out there that do 10% off offers if you buy with Bitcoin rather than fiat currencies.

That's why you should buy from vendors that are giving discounts for buying with btc... It's the vendors that have the biggest incentives to push customers to bitcoin instead of cc and pp.

If you are paying for retail services that obviously translate into a loss. Unless you compare it with cross border transactions

Thats what I am doing. Never spent even a tiny amount. Collecting and buying as much as possible.

I do not think it will ever be a successful currency, but will rather be a store of value.

Ha, exactly what I was going to say. Hold your coins for a bit and spend when they've risen in value then you wont have this problem.

Sounds very dangerous to me.
Never put more than pocket change on your hot wallets!

Pocket change is for everybody different, but I would say 1BTC is more than enough for most things.

Yeah I only have 1BTC on there, the rest is in cold storage. I view smartphone BTC in the same way as "cash in my pocket".


Such as? Pretty unhelpful aggressive comment. I'm in UK and I await your recommendation for an economical way of replenishing (not holding my breath).


:D I have been doing this and bought a few computer components with BTC, and I went to buy some more components with BTC and then stopped myself because of the 5-6% premium for using BTC. The UK has a very efficient payments system created by the banks, so the incentive to use BTC here is less than it is in the US. I can transfer money between accounts here for no fees, pretty much instantly, even between different UK banks. I will continue to invest a small amount per month in BTC and just hold it until the incentives change (if they ever do).

Coinbase recently expanded to many European countries and I am pretty sure that the UK was one of them. In the US they generally have a spread of ~1% so you would pay an effective trading fee of 0.5% which is competitive with most exchanges (I would assume they would charge a similar amount to UK customers).

I believe they actually, (at least at one point) offered a service when a customer could pay for something using bitcoin and have coinbase automatically purchase a similar amount to replenish their total bitcoin holdings.

But why i have to go trought all this complicated passages if I have no economic advantage in using btc?

The economic advantage of using bitcoin is the fact that it costs the merchant much less to accept your bitcoin. This should result, over time, in lower prices for people who chose to pay in bitcoin verses people who pay with credit cards

" Over time" , i don't know... as now, buying in btc and replenish have no advantage.  Consider also the exchanger fees, the fees for transferring money to exchanger and then btc to the wallett and finally to the merchant, the fishy legislation  (I have to pay taxes if btc raise in value before I can buy?) and other cons of routinely-using byc

Hold for now...
No reason to spend right now as bitcoin is/is almost at its bottom.

The problem is not the price. Even at 2000 USD, if adoption as technology wI'll be like now, the question remains: why spend and replenish?

It is not Bitcoins fault if that place charges 5% extra

For international transactions Bitcoin is a huge advantage compared to a credit or debit card (and mind you, not everyone owns one) and it is much more confidential.

The biggest gain would come from all those places that only accept Painpal today! How often would I like to buy from Ebay US or UK and many other vendors, but cannot, because the only method of payment is Painpal and I refuse to work with that scamming scum.

You have to jump through a lot more hoops to get a bank account + debit or credit card, or a Painpal account, than a Bitcoin wallet and some Bitcoins.

I don't see any reason why any company would charge extra to someone who is paying in bitcoin ???

A company will end up saving money when they process a bitcoin transaction over the cost of processing a credit card or a fiat based transaction, so I don't see why any rationally acting company would ever discourage people from paying in bitcoin in the way of higher prices