Payment contexts or scenarios

[joecascio]

I've been doing some thinking about the many different payment contexts or scenarios that occur in consumer of business transactions. Many, if not all, are now performed by credit cards in some fashion, or with checks. Here's my list so far.

• B2B Invoices. In the US these are done for the most part by check.
  
• Direct deposit of payroll to employee bank accounts
  
• Retail store purchase (cash register)
  
• Restaurant waiter
  
• Household bill payment (essentially an invoice)
  
• Subscription payment (e.g., EZ-Pass "auto-refill", newspaper delivery, insurance premium payment).
  
• E-commerce purchase
  
• Self-serve gas station
  
• International purchases
  
• Hotel "card-on-file" bill payment.
  
• Retail store charge account. Many contractors have these with hardware stores, supply houses, lumber yards or other suppliers. Combines retail purchase w monthly invoicing.
  
• Money transfer at real estate closing.
  
• Donations
  

Can you think of any others?

[Stephen Gornick]

Can you think of any others?

self-service vending

[hxtop]

hi,I think the bitcoin should be a tool for  pay,such as gamble ,vending,shopping guns ,and so on....

[Graet]

In my country we have EFT Electronic Funds Transfer, I can "pay anyone" from my bank account with a bank branch identifier and an account number.

[joecascio]

@CornedBeefHash Thanks and yes, that's a good point. One of the reasons I'm putting this list together is to identify that kind of issue and decide how it could be handled. I will discuss all of this in a blog and post a reference to it in the "Press" section here.

All retail transactions have this issue of waiting for confirmations because the expectation is that they will be fast. Briefly, my thought on this is that bitcoin is no worse and may actually be better than credit cards in this respect because the actual payment of a credit card charge doesn't happen until the merchants transactions are "batched" at the end of the day. During that waiting time, the card holder can renege on the payment. Also, I think as a practical matter, double spending attempts will be relatively few and far between because a) most people are honest and b) you basically can't get away with it in the long run.

But it remains is an interesting problem to try to really fix.

[nevafuse]

I don't think I'm quite ready to wait for six confirmations to buy a soft drink. Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't even want to wait for one long block.

If you really wanted to steal from a vending machine, you could just break the glass/plastic.  And $1 sounds like a small amount to go through the effort of double spending.  The benefits of using bitcoin probably outweigh the risks of double spending.  Like not having to collect the money, people stealing the money, using fake money, adsorbing credit card fees, etc.  And since you are most likely connected to the internet anyways, the vending machine could use an intermediary to take the risk of double spending.  Or only take mtgox or bitinstant credits for hopefully a smaller fee than credit cards.  Lots of options.