Bitcoin Forum

MasterCard has been feeling the heat of Bitcoin for over a year now. Bitcoin has become big enough worldwide so that it can no longer be ignored as a viable payment option and currency. In a state-of-the-business interview with the International Business Times, Ann Cairns, president of international markets for MasterCard was asked directly about Bitcoin and how it compares to MasterCard.

Here is what he said :


Full article : http://cointelegraph.com/news/115390/mastercard-exec-bitcoin-doesnt-really-work-in-todays-environment

Come on guys , tell me what you think about this  ::) Pretty sure you have a lot of stuff to say .

Transactions are instant and for small purchases confirmations are not really necessary. Besides once we have things light Lightning Network and such confirmations are going to be very fast as well. What are they going to say now? Bitcoin doesn't really work because it is now complicated?  ::)

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What are you talking about?

Well businesses can set up some sort of internal transaction system instead of relying on the actual blockchain for quick micro transactions.

OPERATIVE PHRASE: "...in its current carnation"

I don't get why Mastercard has such a beef with it. Visa has barely made a squeak and a lot of their former people, when they speak freely, are all for it.

He is totally correct, though. And it also emphasises that they're not comparable at present.

And this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1202180.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1202180.0)
Flip flop city or just same idea different context? I bet there are all sorts of ideological/technical wars going on in the boardrooms offices and labs over at master card (and every other cc)
Bitcoin. We divide and conquer!

Lol they don't know which way to run!

I don't have time for this exec right now. I am dealing with my corporate master card, which has been duplicated and used to buy groceries in Texas. And he says bitcoin does not work? Oh please, the ancient credit card system is completely broken and plain unsafe to use.  

There is no Bitcoin 2.0, and not even Bitcoin 1.0. However, it is not because of the reason that you listed. Bitcoin is currently v0.11.0 meaning quite far away from 1.0. We can't really know when it will reach 1.0. For this to happen there would need to be a drastic change or improvement of the architecture/something else of great significance.

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The development process could go faster though and thus we could shatter their "reasons for which Bitcoin is bad" more quickly.

the bitcoin really work when my father can understand and use it without worrying of some aspects that for "us" (more or less young, good education, internet user by a lot of time) are easy and simply...
likewise time for confirmation, no regulation, download tons of giga chain....
More and more these aspetc are regulated and solved more bitcoin can go everywhere, "really work in today's environment".

He is talking about Bitshares guys and their new plan that they will have 1000 TPS and 3 second block times, thus they will be able compete with Visa and Mastercard.

I don't even know what to think about this Bitshares thing, they have changed their plans, supply, block times, TPS, etc at least 3 times in history so far. There is no wallet for Bitshares over a year, yet they keep promising and not delivering anything!

Well the way I feel is that this mister hasn't really lied, he is telling the truth. Bitcoin at the moment can't really compete with Visa and Mastercard. Will it scale through block size increase or some other solution we will see. Will we be able to speed up confirmation times through some other 3rd party add one is left to see as well. There are people that claim all this is possible, I sure hope so. Bitcoin need to progress a lot more in any case scenario.

I have a MasterCard credit card that has been replaced five times now in the last three years due to security compromises and hacks (only once due to an error on my part). Credit cards don't really work in today's environment.

Credit cards are geting copyed and spent by anothers persons besides the owner soo saying bitcoin confirmation time that last some minutes isnt proper to the actual time is just an amazing history to tell to childs.
Mastercard are feeling what bitcoin came to do,low fees,more safe then any other processor,and well i guess we cant copy any adress and spent any ammount of the account ,hacking the account will mean know password,2fa and the second password,what mastercard has to offer to us realy?A 4 digits or 6 digits protection and our card can be cloned anywhere? ;D ;D

He hasn't figured out yet that it's not feasible to double spend on small amounts! Foregoing the confirmation on small amounts like train fair allows for instant transactions with almost no risk. However, Bitcoin is an online currency and using a brick & mortar comparison really is hurt. Bitcoin has an edge with online transactions, I guess that's why he had to stoop to make his case even then it's a flimsy one at best.

That is possible. However, Bitshares is not Bitcoin 2.0. There is no such thing as Bitcoin 2.0 it is just a marketing scheme.

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Exactly. They are not even nearly as secure as they should be. There were countless hacks and whatnot. Interestingly these cases are rarely in the mainstream media. I wonder why?  ::)

Today sure...but no one knows what is going to go on tomorrow.

Spoken like a true tunnelvision-ist

Quite funny how they take this defensive stance against bitcoin, while they probably know they will lose a significant market share in the future just because of it.

Personally, I have never had to wait for any confirmations on any purchase I did at any local shop ever. Just scan the QR, press pay and walk away. Not that time consuming imo.

Yes, shoppers can register with the service provider and deposit their bitcoin first then use the bitcoins. Mastercard can also be part of the game. They can treat bitcoin as a currency, not just a monetary system.

Trust me, he's talking about Bitshares but he is just using analogy that the,  will be next Bitcoin 2.0. They are screaming all over the places lately with these 3 sec blocks and 1,000 TPS things.

It does work, as I have purchased several items online for which I would normaly use my creditcard. Payment was instant and confirmed as being recieved, not confirmed in the chain, but at those relative small amounts it would be futile to wait for confirmation or go in lengths for me to try and double spend it, it does not give me insurance on the stuff I bought, but the security of the blockchain is incomparable to the flawed creditcard which has a whole workforce working to handle creditcard fraud. Bitcoin does not need that workforce, for it is more secure. it does lack some other things, like the insurance, but that just goes to show we need more trust in this world, or rely on trustlessness of networks and marketplaces.

Bitcoin is slow? What the hell is this guy talking about. The transactions are almost instantly. It's the settlement what needs 6 confirmations. Mastercard will experience in the future how it feels to become obsolete. It will not happen tomorrow or next year but it is inevitable if they do not adapt.

Nice, more bs from MasterCard.
And well, although using BTC avoids some transactional taxes, in the end we need fiat to live, so its a bit regulated for itself.
We don't need and don't want a BitLicense to make something so great to become another useless tech because it got banned.

It remembers me all of that Uber stuff, everyone likes it, except the ones that are afraid of competition.

but mastercard doesn't authenticate instantly..
infact most people dont see funds disapear from their bank account for upto 3 days..

what mastercard does is guarantee the merchant upto $100 when customers use contactless technology.. so it doesnt matter if there is no funds in the bank account of a customer. mastercard just hits the customer later on when they get their statements, with charges if funds were not available.

these days it is not cheap to buy a ticket at the turn-styles and alot of people pre-buy tickets or even buy season tickets. even bitcoin can buy these without issue and the customer can store the receipt on their phone which turn-styles then reads. so i see it as a non-issue. unless you just dont care about costing yourself extra money, in which case stick with mastercard and be afraid of card cloning or NFC readers (21st century pickpocketers)

bitcoin is bitcoin. anything else is just an altcoin (using different ledger/chain) or is just a third-party service treating certain satoshi's as a representation of an asset. but that does not make anything a bitcoin 2.0

Hardly a shock that Mastercard aren't feeling positive about bitcoin, why would they? Bitcoin is a threat to them, they're not going to promote it ;D

but by talking about it. they are promoting it..

EG if you didnt care about an invasion of ants.. you would not talk about it. it just wouldnt be something that even came to mind to mention. but by mentioning it even negatively, people will want to seek out ants. and be on the look out for them

Well i didnt used bitcoin at some store yet because there isnt yet one,and its amazing to know that you scan pay and keep walking the same way you would do with a card or fiat.Mastercard is loosing their control on the industry and there is nothing they can do about it,rejecting and trying to ignore bitcoin make it just bigger,its funny there isnt a position of visa company ,i guess they wanna to keep bitcoin hidden.

This guy's right. If you want to buy a train ticket, a credit card transaction is faster than anything with BTC. But BTC is way better if I want to send money to some guy on the other side of the planet. A credit card doesn't even compete! Credit cards can only handle consumers to business transactions, whereas BTC doesn't even make a difference between a consumer and a business. That alone makes it better.

I hope it will be really October 14th, since last new client, Bitshares client, not Bitshares X client was supposed to be out by the New Year's 2015, so you are about 10 months late already!

Right now it's correct. Bitcoin doesn't really work good enough for today's environment.

Bitcoin is a wonderful project. Altcoins are - some of them - another wonderful thing: they bring (even more) innovation.
At some point bitcoin will implement some of the best innovations of the altcoins (it will have to, in order to survive). And then it will surpass easily all the current payment systems.

Long ago I dreamed that the payment systems will see the opportunity in bitcoin and will use it. Then I woke up. There's the saying "if it's not broken, don't fix it". The current payment system with fiat is - for now - good enough for normal people. Also it's protected by the governments, which protect their own currency they can play with. So bitcoin has to evolve (even more) to match them.

I hope that it's only a matter of time and this will happen.
I already found my ways to avoid the use of the silly PayPal in most cases. Maybe some day I will be able to also avoid Visa, Mastercard and the banks.

What we lack in tps, we make up with more important features, eg. Online security & efficiency for eCommerce. I gave up on using credit cards for online transaction for more than 3 years now. It just got too

risky and I lost just too much money using it. Your info get stored in a centralized location.. they get hacked, and you pay the penalty.

What is more important... waiting at a turn-style for 1 minute? or losing all your credit in online fraud or credit card skimming? .... Their technology did not evolve with the internet and Bitcoin did.  ;)

That is just something very dumm to say... and it only proves that this guy doesn't even knows what bitcoin is, and what is this industry all about. Or is just he protecting his interessests?

mastercards tps is actually less then you think. this is because their databases are separate. not only based on currency but also country.
now if we were to say BTC was for america, feathercoin for UK, litecoin for europe and another 200 coins for each country of the world.
then you will see that the total tps potential of blockchain technology vs individual mastercard databases are the same. if not blockchain tech surpasses mastercard.

That's exactly what would happen with sidechains.
I don't know about the rest o the community, but I'm pretty "happy" with 2 TPS for now.

side chains does not help anything.. a tx on bitcoin with a 32mb limit is the same as 32 sidechain coins of 1mb limit..
the only reason the sidechains are even being considered is by the altcoin army trying to get they penny per coin alts to suddenly be worth $200+.

bitcoin itself can handle more tx's but its the miners that want to limit the dataload out of greed,
its actually 7tps and if allowed to do 32mb per block, that would be 224tx per second potential.

bitcoin does not have to overtake mastercards dominance of 1200tps. even if 10% of the world used bitcoin compared to fiat/mastercard, bitcoin will revolutionize the world

Guy from Master Card said something,that is all,what is to compare btc with mastercard,if MasterCard want to integrate btc it is fine if not i dont care

They have to integrate bitcoin in the future if mastercard wants to stay in business.

Mastercard wont adopt bitcoin ,they have the credit card meaning you can spend something you dont have ,the bill comes next month.With bitcoin these at the moment is impossible and cant happen since is decentralized,soo bitcoin to avoid big fees and your name exposed on their database will be a new market ,and mastercad and visa will keep their business of credit cards,with less people using their cards,as people know bitcoin ,but they will stand alive .

You can also borrow bitcoin from (bitcoin) banks to spend then repay it back. There is no difference to fiat.

Bitcoin is affecting banks and some companies but well that wont be enought to make the companies a long time present in the market,bitcoin is new and may become the most used currency coin worlwide besides fiat.

I don't think he has compared everything on overall wider scale. Yeah he does have a point to focus on some areas where bitcoin will find it tough to compete but if he's looking at different angle like for instance cross border payment, that is where bitcoin will stand out. At least 30 to 40 percent taken from existing market share already means a lot.

MasterCard have global network with so many bank ATM machines, that any new operation can be costly, and also very difficult to implement  ;) ATM machines belong to banks, not MasterCard  ;D

Credit cards and debits mooves much more money then atm be sure of that.Bitcoin has several projects becoming live every day,we have already and exchange that allow to trade convert instant the money into other crypto,and we will get soon the market to sell and buy ,openbazar soo its a question of time to bitcoin is full developed ,bitcoin has only 6 years and a long road on the way...

Bitcoin is getting momentum slowly. There are more usage of bitcoin now. The price is also rising slowly.

That is what it looks like but everyday a new project is getting live and have their costumers soo its raising slowing now.

Those new start-up companies will attract some new users of bitcoin. The more user of bitcoin, the higher the value of bitcon.

I partly agree on that since it is pretty clear that it takes several minutes before a certain transaction be confirmed in the network then be available for spending. That is quite a hassle for users who are finding a way to have faster transactions even on the go. Bitcoin fulfills the mobility problem, but the speed? I think not. The only edge of bitcoin is that it is decentralized and is secure, and I like that more than having a fast tx on the go but controlled by greedy capitalists.

Whatever they say, it won't matter.
Bitcoin will win in the end and catch really great shares from these guys.

It had made it already ,some people avoiding their cards.. they keep with their market but some users just stoped ,and more will do as they know bitcoin and what it can offer,and well the image of pyramid or other scam project get out of people mind.

I've got to say, after using contactless payment for a while, I really can't believe how convenient that is, and compare that to using QR codes n what not for Bitcoin payment, then waiting for confirmations, it really is a world of difference. Obviously, we can always argue that banks are the middle men that make the contactless payments work so seemlessly and they can go down as well as take your money whenever you want. For most use cases  however, I really can't advise using bitcoin as a method of payment for everyday use. Transferring larger amounts may have some merits as my bank limits me to a certain amount of cash withdrawal per day, and bank transfer usually goes through the scam and AML checks.

it work far better than their scam with high fee, there is nothing mastercard can do that bitcoin can't do better

as i said many time, poeple are only accustomed more to credit card now, how much time has passed between cash and being accustomed to credit card?

the same time will pass for bitcoin

If banks integrate the bitcoin into their banking system, then you can also use contactless payments.

Well that happened with paypal ,now they lead the market but in the past they had to fight to stay online.I agree bitcoin is just only starting our community is growing raising and talking about bitcoin with others.