They've asked for information, that's all. Regulators are still trying to learn and understand about bitcoin.

That's correct, just like dollars don't have to.

The government doesn't prosecute currency, however. It prosecutes individuals, and individuals certainly do have to comply with state money transmission laws.

Why would the SEC care? I'm unsure if you understand what it is they do.

I look forward to you trying to convince a country that just because you bought some property in that country, you have the right to revolt and secede. Good luck with that.

Because directories are inefficient and silly, due to the volume of data that is largely irrelevant to an individual user. That's why Yahoo, which began as simply a directory of sites, got trumped by Google, which crawls and indexes.

Just use google shopping. It's a far improved version of what you're looking for.

shopping.google.com

No, it's not. You just have to declare it.

Then you don't understand what Paypal does very well.

Paypal is a layer on top of the fiat currencies of the world, to help people transfer those currencies to each other. Paypal is not a currency.

Bitcoin is just another type of currency, and if gets to the point where there's any kind of mass adoption of it, Paypal will certainly be happy to help people transfer bitcoin with fraud protection for consumers layered on top.

My guess is that you don't understand what a banker is.

Yes, bankers certainly serve society in meaningful ways. Ask anyone who has a mortage and didn't have to save up a 100% deposit to buy a house, to buy a car, to start a business. Ask the farmer who is able hedge his weather-related risk. Ask anyone whose house was robbed and who didn't lose his life savings because his money was in a bank (ie the original purpose of a bank, which is remarkably similar to keeping btc in cold storage today).

Ultimately, if bitcoin is to be successful, institutions will exist that duplicate all of these features for consumers. If you want to have the opportunity to earn interest on your btc holdings, someone (they're called bankers) must exist to manage the lending of that money to generate that interest, at a very basic level. Bankers provide services far beyond that, of course, but that's one of the basic functions.

I'm not a giant fan of the modern banking industry, don't get me wrong. I think the Goldmans, Morgans, etc need to be reigned in drastically, and it needs to be done via government regulation, because they're money-hungry psychos who are out of control on the institutional level. But that doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You are misunderstanding what intrinsic value is. You're talking about market value. There is no intrinsic value to bitcoin, only market value. Intrinsic value is typically calculated in finance by looking at the sum of the future income that's generated by that asset, in terms of discounted present value.

What you describe in your post is entirely about market value, which is the only value an unbacked currency has.

The only time you could get away with microtransactions? What are you smoking?

Almost every MMO in existence is free-to-play with microtransactions today. There are only a few hold-outs left, like WoW, and even WoW engages in microtransactions on top of their subscription model.

Similarly, most people who game today (most gamers are on mobile) are playing microtransaction games. Every single top-grossing game on iOS and android is microtransaction.

The difference is that land has intrinsic value. Bitcoin has none. Its only long-term value is as a currency. Currencies have no value if they aren't used as means of exchange.

Were I a mod, you'd get the scammer tag because everything about your proposal either screams of teenage-level naivete or a very badly put-together scam.

Occam's Razor guys, come on.

They take paypal because it's one of the most widely used money transfer methods in the western world. They don't take bitcoin because the number of people that use it is insignificant at this point and so integration is not worth it.

You are being a drama llama. Ebay's customer service sucks consistently, period. The idea that you're being persecuted because you mentioned bitcoin is hilariously naive.

Yes, because gold was going up then. One tends to release new products when one things they're going to be hot. You're mistaking the introduction of the ETFs as the cause rather than the reflection I think.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's a big analog scale rather than some kind of failure/success binary. Still, I'm mainly interested, personally, because I want to be part of something that goes big or goes home.


Oh sure, I understand. As we sell digital goods, we're a high risk customer. We let people mail us cash though, and they pay the same as credit card customers do. It's standard for most merchants to absorb transaction fees, making them invisible to consumers.



Depends. If it's with a huge company, I may well choose the $388 option, knowing that they respect and want my loyalty. If it's with someone smaller, I'd rather pay $400 and know I'm reasonably insured against being ripped-off.

I mean, look, the major reason I'm interested here is because of the situation you describe. The 2-3% that credit cards take every year is an absolutely gigantic market world-wide and bitcoin has an opportunity cut into part of that. I hate the credit card companies and their collusion. I think they charge more than they would if they weren't effectively colluding. I'm just not as optimistic as some of you are.

So then those that still choose to pay with credit card do so because they plan to use the customer protection -- thus the cost of fraud on a per-dollar basis rises and the merchant fees have to rise.   It's a self-reinforcing trend.   A larger share of the remaining credit card transactions will be fraudulent, allowing the cash/bitcoin discount to become larger, which pushes more of the non-fraudulent activity over to the cash/bitcoin method.


That already sounds too complicated for mainstream adoption on a regular basis, to me. If I have to go somewhere physical, that's a huge burden. The only reason I should have to go somewhere physical to buy something is if there is a physical thing there that I am physically picking up (groceries, etc).

They didn't "steal" it from anyone. The contract the retailer signs with the merchant bank that lets them accept credit cards spells out whose responsibility it is. If you don't like it because you want to put the burden on customers, well, that's your issue, but good luck building a viable business beyond the tiny scale.

Credit card companies and merchants agree up-front that it is the responsibility of the merchant to verify that the person using the card is the person who owns the card. Of course, merchants are going to get ripped off. We get kids using their parents' cards. We get fraudsters buying digital goods (so no delivery signature is required) with stolen card info. It happens. It's a cost of doing business absolutely no different than the similar cost that restaurants have for broken dishes or corner stores have for shoplifting.

In my case, the merchant was Home Depot and they paid for it because they obviously did not verify that the person holding the counterfeited card was me. Whether you think that's fair or not is pretty irrelevant. It's the effect of the legitimate, contractual agreements Home Depot, Visa, and myself variously have with each other.

I understand the customer side of the equation because that's the side that matters. I make money when customers feel safe in spending their money with me. Happily, Visa/Mastercard/Paypal assist both us and the customers by providing a trusted, regulated intermediary. We can certainly be ripped off by customers, and sometimes are, but that's our business to manage. If someone should bear the burden here, it should be the person whose enterprise is this, rather than the person who just needs to buy something. The merchant is more equipped to deal with the consequences of trust, in other words, in those cases where the third-party intermediary (visa/mastercard/paypal)'s guarantees aren't sufficient.

Unsure where you live, but unless it's on a deserted island, you have money changers you can reliably take your dollars to and convert into your local currency. If you live anywhere near an urban area, you have dozens of hundreds of options, whose reliability may vary not much at all (Europe/US) or widely (2nd and 3rd world). Regardless though, you'll have many options.

Part of a currency's value is in how universally it is accepted as a storage of value, and the dollar is way up there. Bitcoin has a very long way to go to becoming universally recognized, much less universally recognizes as having value.

But see, one of the reasons it is cheaper is because there is no insurance for the consumer. One of the reasons that Visa/Mastercard/Paypal charge transaction fees is because they offer insurance on transactions. That's worth something, and bitcoin currency doesn't offer that option for the most part. So it is nominally cheaper, but if you get ripped off enough, it may well effectively be more expensive.


As a consumer, I won't use bitcoin, period, on any site that doesn't have a great reputation (virtually none), because I have literally no recourse if I'm ripped off.

I've had people steal my credit card info (not the card itself) and proceed to run up $16,000 in charges. The credit card company just took care of that for me, at zero charge to me other than a bit of time. Until Bitcoin can offer that kind of protection, it will always be a niche currency at best. With Visa/Mastercard, I don't have to trust the site I'm on. I can spend money without thinking about it, because they've got my back. THAT is why they get their 2-3% from merchants, which the bitcoin community generally seems to fail to understand.

Happily, there are going to be well-backed companies that prove they deserve the kind of investment it will take to fund the creation of the insurance required for that trust, and they'll get that investment. Bitcoin isn't there yet though, and ultimately the different between bitcoin and Visa/Mastercard is probably going to be under 1%....but that's enough to build huge businesses off of given the size of the global retail market.