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Midnightlighting, just the same as you would never walk around with your bankroll in your wallet, there's no logical reason to store anything more than a few days worth of spending in a bank account to fund a debit card.
At the current value of a single bitcoin, there's little reason you should need to store more than a few in your bitcoin card's "hot wallet". You'll never be at risk of losing more than that and assuming a free service does arise, there could be optional fees to insure your deposits against theft.
If you're foolish enough to store your wealth someplace you're not personally in complete control over, well you're asking for an expensive lesson.
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Sooner than that. We just rose $25 in two-three days. Unless we pause at sub $75 it could be at $100 before the end of next week.
Could be that soon but my guess is before the end of the month given the recent trend. |
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If you're building a PoS system, then most merchants will want some form of transaction record for their business's books. I think a simple printer would be a plus here.
Anonymous transaction information (datetime, sale total, etc.) can easily be made available online for a merchant account. I'll consider the thermal printer as an addition, including it by default would unnecessarily drive up the cost of the device. |
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Sounds awful, yet another reason I only trust banks with small amounts.
It may sound stupid, but investing in a safe to store all your valuables where they cannot be touched by the government is your best bet. Just don't be cheap with the safe if you're going to store a lot in it.
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Thats why our system give the merchant the option at the time of taking LTC, USD or BTC.
The system could focus on accepting BTC, but the payment processor would offer to buy those bitcoin from the merchant immediately. The only addition would be logging the exchange price for each transaction to properly reimburse the merchant at the end of the day/payment cycle. |
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Trying to make deals with the current payment processors, and convince them to reprogram devices to accept Bitcoin would be an incredibly wasteful and expensive undertaking. More headaches then necessary and the whole point is to break away from the current system.
Thankfully credit and debit card terminals are a very simple technology, it would not be difficult to produce a more cost efficient device geared towards Bitcoin. The only problem is getting merchants to adapt it like you said. There needs to be a reason why they personally would want to accept and hold bitcoin before you convince them to invest in a bitcoin terminal.
If they'll be going through the hassle of converting back to fiat anyways, why bother.
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The problem with the ideology of wanting total independence from the banks is that without them, you don't get any customers either - Yes, you could bring your own hardware, but its just too much for a retailer to worry about. To get the service into the shop, you must go through the payment gateway company who are already there. Don't worry there are a few of them, unfortunately, they are mostly banks or closely connected with them. Thank you, this is exactly what I have been saying. We don't have to restructure society altogether. Some things work well, like carrying around a plastic card instead of something with "real" value that can be lost or stolen. Tipped +.002 btc |
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So, some new central authority issues cards with their own account numbers (formatted the same way as current credit cards), which the central authority links to a bitcoin address and does the transactions. Yes, that would be nice, but, as you say, there's no such trusted giant to be the processing authority. Plus that centralizes bitcoins, which negates one of its benefits (decentralization). Plus the central authority would probably need to take fees out for its own profit from every transaction, which would put it back to exactly like the current credit card company systems, which I don't think is where bitcoin wants to go (it's a new currency, set to correct mistakes of existing systems, not repeat them).
Can you explain to me why decentralization would be necessary for a service like this? The fees are not for profit. They are the minimum required to maintain the integrity of the service being offered at no cost to users. Merchant transaction fees are hardly the issue here, it's the monopolies credit card companies have over all digital transactions be they at POS or online. You said it yourself, it's a new currency. It's not a payment processor, nor was it meant to replace them. Credit card companies didn't appear from nowhere, they came about when it started becoming more convenient to carry a plastic card than fragile paper currency. |
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I don't believe he does Mr. Andresen.
But now that the bug is resolved, will there still be an update to allow increased block sizes? I'm not understanding how the team intends to allow older versions to accept larger blocks from 0.8+.
Will a full-scale 0.8 update be forced?
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Ah, excellent, can you please send me the documentation that says exactly how many locks will be taken by each bdb operation? I haven't been able to find that. Thanks!
Now, now, Gavin. Play nice. ;) |
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This one is easy,
You take your goods to the checkout - merchant scans them with there normal POS system, the system calculates total and itemised bill / VAT reciept and encodes it into a QR code which is displayed on a cusomer facing screen along with another QR with the payment address of merchant, the customers wallet / payment app on there phone then reads both QR codes and asks the customer for a passowrd or a confirmation to send payment, it can also record the Itemised bill and total for customer records just like a receipt.
so any "peeping tom's" will just see your bill and the merchants address which could also be dynamically created by the POS software if for some reason the merchant wanted to use different addresses.
The actual sending of payment would be done through internet connectivity which is used by merchant POSs' anyway so in rural areas without mobile internet the merchants could provide wifi, could even be built into the POS.
You're requiring the merchant to make an expensive hardware upgrade/investment. But rather than just supply them with an all-in-one system worth investing in, you're requiring their customers to also have smartphones with data available otherwise the merchant needs to supply free WiFi. All that to make a bitcoin purchase. You don't think it's redundant that the user have internet access to verify a purchase when the merchant right in front of them can process the whole payment more securely/faster with the internet they already have for that reason? I'm failing to understand how that is even remotely easier than the systems already in place. I really want to understand your thought process here. |
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There is no need to reinvent the wheel, Bitcoin has already done that. All we need to do is make spending bitcoin as easy as credit/debit cards. This can be achieved simply by a trusted third party system that processes customer to merchant payments. It would function identically to modern credit card terminal purchases.
Because no service like this currently exists, there is no monopoly holding back competition. This is where it opens up for aspiring bitcoin entrepreneurs. Any POS payment processing company introduced would be smart to provide a safe professional service or risk being replaced by a competitor.
Ideas involving sending the merchant more than the purchase and requiring them to send the "change" back or having multiple addresses with variable amounts to send are just awful. Let's keep making things simpler not take 10 steps in the wrong direction.
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Third parties are important for widespread bitcoin adaptation. They'll provide the additional services bitcoin wasn't meant to replace.
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@hdcafe
It's all dependent on the miners who provide the majority of the hashing power. Unless you're implying that the they would follow orders from a pool admin without a legitamate reason.
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Guess they don't owe you anymore.
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My thoughts exactly, the bitcoin world is very exciting.
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And there it is...
Now let's hope the price drops so we can buy! |
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I smell a mass sell off along the horizon...
I sure hope so ;) I was away from the computer for a few hours and all this happened. The bitcoin world is so exciting! |
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What "critical design aspects"? People are used to seeing a cluttered grid of unnecessary things. Look at any website, and it could be easily rearranged into something like this, with very few elements. It would look much better, be easier to use, and load faster.
Can you tell me exactly what that design is missing, and why what's "missing" needs to be there?
I can't tell you what it's missing because I don't know what you were trying to design and I usually charge for that anyways ;) I can tell you what you overlooked. For some reason you've settled on a whopping 30px padding throughout but despite all that space, the content still looks squished together. To fix that eyesore rather than add space around the content, increase the font-size, line, and letter spacing to improve readability. While you're at it, ditch the drop shadow. You've done an awful job of implementing it because it exceeds your content width and doesn't blend in well. Frankly it would look more "minimal" without it, but that's what you're shooting for, right? The header is also abnormally sized at 108px tall, it may just be 2px off (or 8) but it's picking up on the small things that make a good designer. |
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This is a bit of a random question, but you wouldn't happen to have bought these components from the robot shop would you? I swear I recognise some of that stuff from there especially the LED display. It looks great, will remain to be seen whether you can get it too look presentable and work well with normal people though. http://www.robotshop.com/robot-parts.htmlI get a lot of my test components from eBay, they work great for prototyping but I can't vouch for their long term reliability. Because it's still in the prototyping phase, I'm constantly making changes. At the point where it is as easy to process as a debit or credit card purchase, then I will consider it "presentable". I'm always open to suggestions, so I'll be looking forward to what you think of the progress. |
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