Bitcoin Forum

This is HUGE!!!!  http://mobile.blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/04/01/western-union-eyes-digital-currency-services/

Stopped reading there.  :D

ahah funny one

Could be a joke but I doubt it. Would not surprise me if WU were the instigator in getting FinCEN to get some guidelines published.

Send your bitcoins to WU so they can send them to SR and the transaction will be compliant with money laundering laws?

I'm shorting WU instead.

If this is true..  :o

I have just sent an email to WU requesting confirmation this is true. Will post answer when I get it.

April.

The 1st.

Put the two together.

Bingo.

If it is an april fools joke, its a damn good one. I'm fooled.

Apparently it's a well-researched article targeted at a serious audience, I doubt it's as simple as an April fool's joke.

Some serious reading comprehension fail by the OP. If they introduced something, it would be a competitor to Bitcoin, never says they will begin accepting Bitcoin.

If it is April fool's joke, they should have declared it somewhere/by now?

And even then, I think it would be pretty bad joke. It is not that outrageous thing. And not that funny to 99,9% of the people who don't know what bitcoin is and what's so special about it.

goddamnit, youre right.

edit: actually im not so sure. It's really not clear at all either way. I'm going to see if I can track down the journalists email to ask her.

Sounds like that has not been decided (assuming this is not a joke). We need to be lobbying for them to adopt Bitcoin.

/facepalm

Noooooo, please let him do it. Those are always amusing.

BTC-User: "Hey WU, please take Bitcoins, ok?"
WU: "What is a bitcoin and why should we accept it?"
BTC-User: "It is a new currency that's intended to get rid of banks and other currency transaction providers. It'll be great. Everyone will be one's own bank."
WU: "So what you're saying is we should accept a currency that's specifically built to put us out of business by circumventing us in the first place."
BTC-User: "Yes, exactly. It will be wonderful. Hello? Hellllooooo? SirMadam? Where are you going? FUCKING HATERS. WE'LL SHOW YOU!"

Don't laugh they could be a valid exchange If they take that direction

Yes, they could blow everyone else out of the water and make an incredible amount of money in the process, but only if they have the intelligence and the balls to significantly alter their business model. Large corporations don't have a stellar track record when it comes to that, I'm afraid.

I don't really know how much they would have to alter their business model. They could just add bitcoin payment option via bit-pay to allow sending money with bitcoin, that would be fairly trivial. For the receiving end, they could partner with a company such as Bitinstant.

Again: At what point of that transaction would Western Union even be required?

How often do we see complaints from people having problems buying bitcoins? I think WU has a slight edge over bitinstant.

At the point at which they use their lobbying connections to make it illegal for individuals to buy/sell Bitcoins without them.

OH WAIT, YOU IDIOTS ARE ALREADY DOING A FINE JOB OF LOBBYING FOR THAT YOURSELVES.

zzzz, if only everyone were as smart as you. Illegal to trade Bitcoins without them? That doesn't even make sense.

AFAIK, WU moves fiat around the globe, and handles currency conversion. You give them USD, and they deposit INR in some Indian account you specified, for ex.
They could potentially decrease their costs by using Bitcoin as intermediary currency. That would work particularly well if they were acting as exchanges too. They could do it incrementally, for example, at a first moment, only use BTC as intermediary for (some) USD<->EUR transactions, since the liquidity of these markets (BTC/USD and BTC/EUR) is better than any other.

WU is already a de facto exchange. If I send USD from the US, and someone in Brazil receives Reais, WU has done the exchanging (usually at a rate that is obscene to the point of vomiting). Yes, WU could maintain their business model and co-opt Bitcoin as the intermediary, as it would save them the cost associated with keeping their own WU network running, which I guess is not a trivial cost. But, as someone already mentioned, at some point it would become obvious that individuals could do exactly what WU is doing.

Now, if WU were to slightly adapt its business model to become more of a Bitinstant, and to continue to offer payment remittances as part of that business, they would save themselves a ton of money and make another ton as an exchange.

Will they do it, or even consider it? If I were a betting man, my money would be on no, but who knows, perhaps there are some enlightened souls within the WU walls who are ready to consider it.

He didn't say "trade". He said "buy/sell". World of a difference. And yes, illegality of operating as an exchange without being licensed to operate as an exchange is a very real possibility.

I used trade as shorthand for buy/sell, I apologize for any confusion.


"illegality of operating as an exchange without being licensed to operate as an exchange is a very real possibility"


What??? You lost me. If your company has to be licensed to operate an exchange... that hasn't nothing to do with whether WU is operating one or not. The more competition, the better. For such a decentralized economy we sure do seem to rely on mtgox a lot.   ::)

buy the rumor,...  ;)

bitcoin is the dissolution of banks, money transfer corporations government printing presses and embodies the true definition of "you cannot stop and idea who's time has come"
 

This was her response "David Thompson said he's interested in developing partnerships for digital currency efforts." Which seems pretty clear that they do not want to create a competitor...


http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vf6Kw7gU3CQ/UDQ1ivJv9qI/AAAAAAAAAtY/iIv7hGZZpuY/s1600/on.jpg

Not necessarily.  It's possible to interpret that as "developing partnerships with companies for creating our digital currency."

Honestly this might depend on a very few poeple.
I was to think that they would hate bitcoin, but if the head of WU is a clever and open minded guy, i have no doubt that they can find a business model that will make them fire a few poeple and save loads amount of money.
And this is a very good argument for a company.

So wait and see!

Finally, someone seems to understand what corps do when they find something the "overcomes" the barriers to entry they have put up in their industry.  Their lobbyists now know about this threat and will work on the ways to destroy it.   BTC MUST get into circulation fast.   We need a way that the common man can use this easy and become comfortable with it.   BTC miners should become the VC of the BTC economy (it is in their own interest).

lebing, would you post the emails and tweets here for us?

its all in here

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bi8q3/western_union_may_offer_digital_currency_services/

Large corporations like WU can not change rapidly. They have the legal, administrative... etc. to deal with.

don't forget the biggest obstacle; overhead.

http://mashable.com/2013/04/02/western-union-bitcoin/ (http://mashable.com/2013/04/02/western-union-bitcoin/)

Mashable is now reporting about it also.

Wow. Unless WU comes out in the next few hours to deny this, this will be huge!

I'm a WU shareholder. I think it will be very profitable for them to take business from BitInstant.

I agree. They already have a network of offices and locales all over the world. If all they do is charge 1% either way for transfers to and from BTC, they're looking at pretty significant revenues right there.

For the record,  it appears Wall Street likes their decision.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=wu&ql=1

Not hugely up,  but if the announcement was "garbage" in their eyes it would be down.

And that is what will finally break Bitcoin into mainstream. If there is money to be made, in time Wall Street will catch it. They are not stupid. Luckily we have just been even faster and because of that most of us will be filthy rich if we just play our cards right.

What exactly does it mean for a payment transfer service like WU to "accept" bitcoins?
Are they going to be just another exchanger, but a uber big one?

yep, that seems to be what is happening.

Dude, LOOOL.

Why oh why won't that $10k wire to MTGOX arrive already.

This is very, very big news. It is for real and it means that Western Union is not stupid. They have very smart people in charge. They can benefit hugely by adding Bitcoin, and lose greatly if they don't. This is a brilliant move and takes Bitcoin to another level.

Obviously it's still in early stages but it makes too much sense for them to not do this.

The new CEO obviously seeks to sweep out the cobwebs...more like take a high-powered grenade launcher to the cobwebs.

So what about PayPal? They're as hampered by fiat as anyone. Market cap is higher, though. Maybe when BTC reaches $800 they will also decide not to fight the phantom force but to join it.

From the press release it seems WU wants to create their own digital currency not accept bitcoin. I wouldn't use WU for anything they hold even $200 transfers these days

Doesn't sound like that to me. Plus that would be silly. Why ever not just use Bitcoin?

correct me if im wrong but they didnt mention bitcoin by name and they could mean dwolla or paypal etc. its far from what the topic says.

Corporations like cost certainty, there isn't with bitcoin. I see them going the Canadian Mint route and developing their own cryptocoin transfer service they proclaim as 'new and innovative' but it will come with heaps of identification documents and transfer limits.

This makes obvious sense for WU but i thought they would be too stuck in their ways with admin inertia to jump on this wagon. It must be the old pioneering spirit of the railroad coming out.

The BIG win that WU could achieve here is to use bitcoin network as their backbone for transferring payments around and do away with their legacy infrastructure. Their WU affiliates in every office all over the world now only needs a bitcoin enabled PC running to send/receive payments.

WU would become the p2p fiat exchange for the masses with all their installed infrastructure ... and oh yeah, if you want to take buy/sell bitcoin from local WU office can do that too.

These guys know exactly what needs to be done to make this happen on global scale tomorrow.

Good Luck to them ... they are one company that has stuck it out against the banking elite in the payments space for over a century.

Bitcoin confirms too slow they'd have to use something like LTC or their own coin, because WU offers instant transfer pickup.

WU is also firmly the banking elite, and not against them. Try sending a few transfers in one week, watch them hold everything ,report you to IRS, report you to FBI, and seize your money. Their customer service is now a guy in the Philippines pushing a macro response button to everything, and it takes 60 days to get your money back if anything goes wrong with the transfer.

WU should die, btc/ltc should replace them and every other money transfer business that's been screwing us over in giant fees for last 3 decades.

I do not think they are saints.  Look at their fees.   They basically rip off illegal immigrants who are sending money home to their families.

It will be lovely for all of us if WU starts accepting BTC, but you will notice, the article states that they are "looking at alt-currencies like BTC" which could very well mean "they are watching BTC and taking notes and trying to figure out how to take all that BTC is and make their own version which gives them a cut right off the top of every transaction and is also easier to use and has been branded (by them) as being safer and more secure. even though I understand about the security of the BTC network, many potential users dont. yesterday my brother, who studies these forums almost as much as I do, said to me..."oh yeah, and the blockchain can be hacked and everyone loses their BTC..." to which I had to spend about an hour explaining how incorrect he was. The point is, people aint got the clear view of the full picture with BTC and some fat-cat corp. like WU or paypall or ebay will leap on these vagaries and create a version that people like better. sadly.

so I'm not sure if these type of stories are actually good news or more likely storm-clouds on the horizon. I wish I knew more about R&D for software etc. cuz I would be all over these problems, but unfortunately I am just an Unfrozen caveman, and your cryptocurrencies confuse and amaze me...

I honestly can't believe that people here dislike Western Union.

Western Union was like, last generation's bitcoin. While it was not as completely revolutionary as Bitcoin has the potential to be, it was loads better than anything offered at the time and even now remains loads better than most other 'normal' ways of sending money, aside from things like Liberty Reserve that are entirely online.

Yes they charge high fees, but this is a capitalist society, they are supposed to charge as high a fee as they can get away with. At least they are honest, unike 'real banks.'

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Western Union became a sort of Bitcoin processor. There are lots of demand for instant payments, and while BTC transfers are fast, they aren't quite instant. Instant is needed for buying groceries in a timely manner, and people will probably pay some for that service. Its hard to buy BTC with USD. They could bridge that gap. If nothing else they lend their legitimacy to BTC and walk away with a few extra coins in their pocket for the favor.

I don't see anything particularly dishonest or ignoble with what they are doing. It makes business sense, and its perfectly fine. (Assuming they actually do what I think they plan to do.)

This.

Western Union are well-positioned to be BitInstant's worst nightmare if they move into this space.

BitInstant could look at expanding into the other side of the trade also to compete with them I suppose?

"Just going to pop down to the BitInstant office and pick up some money XXY is sending me."

Exactly what I thought. But it's indeed hard to believe such a large corporation would have the guts to restructure itself this way. Many internal branches would have to be cut. There's lots of politics inside these large corporations. The people in charge would have to be very bold and ready to make lots of people very unhappy.

True. But if the CEO is smart and under alot of pressure from shareholders... its not uncommon for heads to roll.

I've thought about the WU piggy-backing P2P to subsidize its infrastructure angle too, and I ultimately come to the conclusion that WU would be taking a huge leap of faith on ... well ... basically Gavin, right? The SatoshiDice tx dust flap is the elephant in the room. Can Bitcoin scale?

As a Bitcoin bull, sure it's exciting, but if I were a WU shareholder I'd have serious reservations.

Bitcoin can surely scale. It can be larger than Visa in less than 5 years, if there's enough demand.
True, some people seem determined to do what they can to prevent that from happening. I think we'll end up having a fork at some point. Some people will remain on the old fork where no more than 7tps can happen, and others will migrate to the new, scalable Bitcoin. WU would have to be on the scalable branch, of course.

All "WU offices" I've ever seen were either cyber cafés or post offices.

Maybe it explains this:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159585.0

lol

While I agree with you, Bitcoin doesn't need to scale to suit WU's purposes. A lot of the transfers could be WU to WU, and never even touch the blockchain. Again, I'm not saying this will or even is likely to happen, I think corporations suffer from a distinct inertia problem that prevents them from this kind of reinvention, but if any company can, it should be WU. After all, they started off by sending messages on horses, didn't they?

I find this "enhanced-SWIFT" aspiration for Bitcoin so limited compared to everything it can do.... but anyway, I'll stop here in order not to derail this thread.

I agree, btw, was just referring to the need to increase the block size as a necessary condition for WU adopting Bitcoin.

Good luck with that.

In simple terms, what exactly is the issue assuming the max size can be increased as necessary?

The blockchain right now grows about 30 MB per day. That is at a daily volume of 60000 transactions.

Scaling up to Visa's level of transactions would translate to blockchain growth of 65 GB per day.

Median download speed for the US is 3 MB/sec. Downloading a 65GB file at that speed takes about 36 hours.

... and then you win.

This argument is akin to saying that we will never be able to watch movies on the internet when we were running dial up. Both bitcoins pruning ability and other technology will be upgraded (we are still in beta, remember) and the internet's pipes are going to get MUCH larger (As soon as google decides to roll out their internet to the rest of the US/world). Additionally, your entire argument hinges on decentralization by people, not corporate entities, which in a worst case scenario would be entirely acceptable to keep the blockchain going strong.

This post should be required reading. You will never make a killing in the market by reacting to the reacting of the media. By the time they know about it the "killing it" phase is over.

You really need to read (or re-read) this:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

Bitcoin can handle VISA's traffic using today's tech already, though it might cost a bit for full-node miners to keep up (fyi, my shitty mining rig is earning me about $100 a month of after-electric profit, which is easily enough to increase my storage by 2TB every month). Comcast (what most people use in my area) has 20MB/sec speeds as their cheapest option. If blockchain growth becomes an issue, block pruning will become the top priority and this issue will be fixed. Everyone who is not a miner (most of the people using Bitcoin) only need to download information for the transactions relevant to them, which takes almost no bandwidth or memory at all (that's why you can run a full, not web-based, Bitcoin wallet app on a smartphone)

If Bitcoin becomes really big, all that will happen is that the normal Bitcoin-Qt client will only be used by big companies and people who are obsessed with controlling their own wallet, and web-wallets will end up being used all the time, with (smart) people downloading their wallet.dat file daily just in case something goes wrong with their particular web-wallet.

That doesn't seem to me that BTC doesn't scale well, it scales better than 99% of other things. However it does mean that people will have to adapt a tad, which is to be expected.

Fixed.

I don't get what you have against web-wallets. Everybody already has to trust the banks. I trust things like blockchain.info much more than the banks considering they actually don't have control over my wallet file. The vast majority of people out there simply aren't going to have the knowledge needed to control their own wallet.

Offline wallets are always a good idea, however.

Mostly it's about how they all eventually lose coins.

Not anymore.

Because of their superior design compared to other web wallets, I consider them to be suitable for holding small amounts of funds on the same order as the amount I am willing to carry around as physical cash.

They will eventually obtain that knowledge. It's only a matter of how much money they will have to lose before they decide to learn.

So what's making me raise my eyebrows is that WU has not come out to explicitly deny any of this  ;)

Did a piss poor job fixing that. Blockchain.info can't steal your wallet, since they never get your private keys in unencrypted form (it gets encrypted in your browser before it's sent to their servers).
To add to Kazu's list, people who don't want to run the full client will also run things like Electrum wallet, which uses a central service to store the blockchain and uses the local client just to store keys and sign transactions, or a light bitcoin client, which Bitcoin-qt is working on developing, and which is already available on Android.

Oh, please, Rassah, don't let the truth get in the way of some good old FUD  :D

Blockchain.info can send malicious javascript to grab the private keys of anyone not running the verifier plugin.

They can push an update to the verifier plugin that renders it ineffective.

They can use code obfuscation to insert the malicious code into their GitHub repository so that even people running with a good verifier plugin won't know there's a problem. They can steal keys until somebody notices the problem via code review.

Their design is better than most web wallets, but it is not impervious.

One of these two things will happen to every web wallet operator, regardless of whether or not they use blockchain.info style encryption. Every time the value of Bitcoin goes up the incentive to steal from a conveniently centralized repository increase. Eventually the incentive to steal overcomes any safeguards that can be put in place. This has happened over and over again throughout the history of Bitcoin. Web wallets are a scammer's paradise.

Laiki Bank was a honest company too.

So... what's to stop someone from doing the exact same thing with Bitcoin-qt, and inserting a malicious version of the client into the download section that will send a copy of your private keys to them, allowing a whole slew of newbies to download and use it before it gets noticed and fixed?

The issue here is, obviously, that they CAN'T STEAL FROM SOMETHING THEY DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO. How exactly are they going to go about stealing from your wallet that only you have the encryption key to, huh? About the only thing they could try is to get you to pass to them your key by modifying the JS upon login.

Laiki Bank is part of the EU.

Nothing. That's one reason I tell people to use an offline Armory wallet for their savings and why that recommendation will probably change to some kind of hardware wallet once those become available.

Yes, that's exactly right. There are known failure modes via which they can get access to your private keys. Those failure modes are not as easy to trigger as a typical hot wallet theft are, but sooner or later the economic incentive to make the attempt will exist.

Oh my goodness, talk about a conspiracy theorist.

Its open source. When money randomly disappears, people will notice "hey, wtf, my money disappeared, maybe I aught to look at source." Then they will see the fact that it is a scam, and nobody will use the web-wallet or software any more.

Furthermore people are very slow when it comes to switching to new software (http://www.ie6countdown.com/). The bitcoin community being what it is, people would probably find a change like that in less than a few days. The scammy developers would thus lose much more than they gain.

Read this if you still think WU is awesome
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=125257.0

Also google 'western union complaints' and read about immigrants having no money because WU held their transfers for 60days, even after WU screwed up and gave people the wrong MTCN (it happens). Agent fucks up, wait 60 days for refund, and everytime you phone you get a 3rd world call center rep who knows nothing except scripted responses.

WU should die, Bitcoin is perfectly suited to kill them and all the other money transfer cash rackets who've been fleecing us for decades. I thought that was the point of decentralized currency so we don't have to rely on these asshole payment corporations telling us what we can and can't do anymore.

EDIT.. offtopic, javascript browser encryption is not secure whatsoever. don't believe me, believe Moxie Marlinspike
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/21/researchers-warn-megas-new-encrypted-cloud-cant-keep-its-megasecurity-promises/

This is also why FireGPG was abandoned because it was found to be junk

Only if the thieves are stupid. A smart thief would collect private keys as long as possible and wait to transfer any bitcoins at all until the vulnerability was discovered.

The fact that you so readily downplay the motivation and ingenuity of thieves and scammers in the bitcoin community, after history has shown us such an ample supply of both, does nothing but make me suspect you of being one.

Yay, spooky stories!
Also google 'Liberty Reserve complaints' and read about how LR is 'stealing peoples money.'
Also google 'Egold complaints' and read about how E-Gold exists only to support ponzi schemes.
Also google 'Bitcoin complaints' and read about how Bitcoin was 'hacked' and how some transfers 'never confirm.'

You can find some person that feels like complaining about anything.
This is pre-bitcoin technology. You know, when there are people doing work, not computers, and where those people occasionally make mistakes, and where money takes time to transfer (time, as in days, not minutes). Just because they haven't adopted Bitcoin technology that will solve these problems yet doesn't make them 'evil' it just means that they haven't used Bitcoin yet.

You don't 'have to' rely on WU any more than you 'have to' rely on MTGOX. WU will (may) provide an easy way of exchanging to/from BTC, as well as potentially instantly-confirmed transactions using BTC. If you don't want to use it, then thats fine. I fail to see how WU getting involved is any different than, say, Microsoft implementing a new proprietary Bitcoin wallet in Windows Blue or any other corporation trying to make money off of bitcoin. They are corporations, they try to make money. Bitcoin is a good opportunity for them to do this. If you want to use their services, and pay for them, then thats fine. And if you don't, then I dont give a fuck TBH.
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