Competitive analysis of Bitcoin vs Square, SumUp, iZettle, Payleven

[DublinBrian]

I may be wrong but I was under the impression that the reason was because most of the patents for the chip are owned by european companies (Gemalto aka Gemplus). For example, smartcards with chips in them were being used for phone booths when I visited France in the 1989.

It may be true but those smart cards were already licensed around the world, and the US also uses smartcards in many places (GSM network SIM cards, DirecTV cards, etc). I don't think smart card patents explains it.

Mobile operators in the USA vigorously resisted GSM adoption until many years after it had become a global standard. They continued with their own mobile standards like IS-136 until the late 2000s.

Similarly the US government resisted the use of the european smartcard chips in passports, and insisted on contactless RFID instead, for which they controlled the patents.

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[BitPay Business Solutions]

Mike,

Square got in trouble early on because their magnetic stripe readers had NO ENCRYPTION between the reader and the phone.  Since magnetic stripes have extra security features, this little dongle quickly became a thief's best friend to creating cloned cards.

The readers are now encrypted.

At CES back in January I would say about half of our visitors had come to our booth after they had visited Square.  Our ability to do international payments and ecommerce payments are a big plus. The dongle is meant for small, retail businesses.  For card-not-present transactions, Square charges 3.5% plus 15 cents.

The killer app for bitcoin is definitely in the internet payment space.  All these guys will trip over each other fighting for the little retailer.

[Mike Hearn]

Thanks for the info BitPay and DublinBrian.

Do you know anything more about this Square encryption? Magstripes aren't exactly hard to duplicate, I don't see why encryption between the dongle and the phone would make any difference at all to how easy cloning is. That sounds like security theater to me.

[n8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU]

Huh, does anyone know why Barclays processes payments for this service only during Kenyan working hours? That seems bizarre even by the low standards of the banking industry. Why Kenya, of all places?

Most likely that's boilerplate text supplied by Barclays' legal department, which at some past date was borrowed and customized for use by their Kenyan subsidiary, and then never proofread or search-replaced by the developers who subsequently reused it for the UK site.