On a panel with MasterCard and Visa

[franky1]

I am invited to join a panel discussion with local managing directors of MasterCard and Visa at a high profile Finance IT forum on 19. September.

Please feed me any arguments and facts with links you think would be helpful to make Bitcoin shine in comparison. Thanks in advance.

The biggest disadvantage of VISA and Mastercard:
Security is a joke. They should have 2 Factor Authentication to accept each transaction.

The security of bitcoin is not so good either since it is really easy to lose a wallet due to theft, deletion or hard drive failure. But bitcoin is new, it is evolving. Visa/Mastercard have been around for several decades, their security still sucks.

they do kind of have 2 form factor..

form one. the card itself which not only has the card details (long number across the front) but also some extra info that merchants would only obtain from having a card present

form two. the pin number(for in person transactions)/ or digits on signature strip for person not present transactions.

the problem is that these 2 'forms' of identity are easy to find/replicate

[freedomno1]

Thanks a lot for all the input. The event will take place tomorrow in Budapest. http://www.portfolio.hu/rendezvenyek/reszletes.php?id=163

The audience will be senior banker, fund manager and some regulators. It is a local event but unique that Bitcoin is discussed in such a forum. I will update you.

I already got a follow up invitation to the deputy secretary of state responsible for financial policy affairs.

Good luck
I wish you the best in breaking the stereotypes of bitcoin and bringing serious conversation to it stubbornness lies deeply in the roots of tradition.

[RodeoX]

Don't be intimidated by the banksters. I have spoken to such groups and find them to be very interested. After all, they are basically money geeks.

[xxjs]

So, what happened at the meeting?

[pgbit]

So, what happened at the meeting?

They will be collating all the ideas, and releasing their own alt coin shortly!

[grau]

The event started better than expected: The second speaker a partner from Deloitte demonstrated his knowledge of cutting edge technologies by asking the crowd (it was about 150 people) if they heard the name Satoshi Nakamoto. I was one out of 4 who raised a hand. At the end of his speech he had a slide exemplifying Bitcoin as real innovation to watch out for. I talked to him in the pause, but figured that he had only a rather shallow understanding of what Bitcoin is, but who cares, recognizing it as a disruptive innovation is the right first step.

The next talks were rather boring about online-banking innovations and security of banking applications. Innovations they were touting paled in comparison to Bitcoin, but they did not seem to know yet.

The final panel was the one I participated. It was preceded by a talk of the head of regulations department of the national bank (comparable to FinCen that operates within the national bank in Hungary). He spent quite a few minutes explaining why cash is bad for the economy and what benefits more frequent electronic payments would bring on national scale. I used this to catch him in the pause and telling him that cash and electronic payments is not a contradiction but Bitcoin is electronic cash. He got interested, so I have an invite to his office

My panel was with local MDs of Visa and MasterCard and a company launching a mobile wallet in cooperation with them that enables credit card payments via NFC. I managed to go over couple of arguments you shared with me. Let me draft the most notable exchanges:

They called NFC payment a breakthrough innovation, even a butterfly moment. I made the point that changing the infrastructure behind the payments is likely a bigger a breakthrough than the difference between sliding a plastic card into a slot vs. waving the mobile phone over the slot. The MasterCard guy said that the biggest obstacle in introducing a new payment method is gaining trust that they successfully established, I countered that people likely trust even more mathematics than them. They said in 5 years we will have majority using mobile payments with NFC, I said in 5 years we will no longer talk about innovation in payments but settlement of financial instruments and rights via technologies that learned from the Bitcoin network.

Close to the end the audience could vote (with a voting machine) on the question of what they see is future of payments is and a staggering 11% voted for Bitcoin (alternatives were credit card, mobile, bank transfer and cash payments)

I think that is as good as I could possibly get it, considering that only 2.6% new Satoshi's name at the begin of the conference.

[BombaUcigasa]

The event started better than expected: The second speaker a partner from Deloitte demonstrated his knowledge of cutting edge technologies by asking the crowd (it was about 150 people) if they heard the name Satoshi Nakamoto. I was one out of 4 who raised a hand. At the end of his speech he had a slide exemplifying Bitcoin as real innovation to watch out for. I talked to him in the pause, but figured that he had only a rather shallow understanding of what Bitcoin is, but who cares, recognizing it as a disruptive innovation is the right first step.

The next talks were rather boring about online-banking innovations and security of banking applications. Innovations they were touting paled in comparison to Bitcoin, but they did not seem to know yet.

The final panel was the one I participated. It was preceded by a talk of the head of regulations department of the national bank (comparable to FinCen that operates within the national bank in Hungary). He spent quite a few minutes explaining why cash is bad for the economy and what benefits more frequent electronic payments would bring on national scale. I used this to catch him in the pause and telling him that cash and electronic payments is not a contradiction but Bitcoin is electronic cash. He got interested, so I have an invite to his office

My panel was with local MDs of Visa and MasterCard and a company launching a mobile wallet in cooperation with them that enables credit card payments via NFC. I managed to go over couple of arguments you shared with me. Let me draft the most notable exchanges:

They called NFC payment a breakthrough innovation, even a butterfly moment. I made the point that changing the infrastructure behind the payments is likely a bigger a breakthrough than the difference between sliding a plastic card into a slot vs. waving the mobile phone over the slot. The MasterCard guy said that the biggest obstacle in introducing a new payment method is gaining trust that they successfully established, I countered that people likely trust even more mathematics than them. They said in 5 years we will have majority using mobile payments with NFC, I said in 5 years we will no longer talk about innovation in payments but settlement of financial instruments and rights via technologies that learned from the Bitcoin network.

Close to the end the audience could vote (with a voting machine) on the question of what they see is future of payments is and a staggering 11% voted for Bitcoin (alternatives were credit card, mobile, bank transfer and cash payments)

I think that is as good as I could possibly get it, considering that only 2.6% new Satoshi's name at the begin of the conference.

Sounds good man!

Just out of curiosity, was their innovation talk built around NFC? Does it have anything extra above chip/pin methods, like any new types of security or communications behind it?

[grau]

Sounds good man!

Just out of curiosity, was their innovation talk built around NFC? Does it have anything extra above chip/pin methods, like any new types of security or communications behind it?

Yes, it seem to qualify as innovation that cards are loaded into a wallet app and charged via NFC (up to a limit of about 20$ without further interaction by the customer) They were pretty excited about soon combining it with biometric authentication (say iPhone).

[niko]

Sounds good man!

Just out of curiosity, was their innovation talk built around NFC? Does it have anything extra above chip/pin methods, like any new types of security or communications behind it?

Yes, it seem to qualify as innovation that cards are loaded into a wallet app and charged via NFC (up to a limit of about 20$ without further interaction by the customer) They were pretty excited about soon combining it with biometric authentication (say iPhone).

From the consumer privacy perspective, their solutions seem designed for tracking. Even a static bitcoin address offers at least some uncertainty, which is completely removed by the biometric NFC wallet.

[smoothie]

I am invited to join a panel discussion with local managing directors of MasterCard and Visa at a high profile Finance IT forum on 19. September.

Please feed me any arguments and facts with links you think would be helpful to make Bitcoin shine in comparison. Thanks in advance.

Please let us know how it went today.

[freedomno1]

I am invited to join a panel discussion with local managing directors of MasterCard and Visa at a high profile Finance IT forum on 19. September.

Please feed me any arguments and facts with links you think would be helpful to make Bitcoin shine in comparison. Thanks in advance.

Please let us know how it went today.

Already did and biometrics is a hot field glad to hear some comments helped

[Kupsi]

I am invited to join a panel discussion with local managing directors of MasterCard and Visa at a high profile Finance IT forum on 19. September.

Please feed me any arguments and facts with links you think would be helpful to make Bitcoin shine in comparison. Thanks in advance.

Please let us know how it went today.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279386.msg3191188#msg3191188

[Mike Hearn]

I recently was at a conf where a woman from Visa gave a talk on the "future of money". She was all about NFC payments as well.

I agree that it's a rather damning indictment of the existing payments industry that switching from a wired to wireless interface for the last few centimeters of a transaction is considered the the cutting edge of innovation. From their perspective though it's a big deal - it means changing all the point of sale equipment, it means somewhat more convenient payments for common transaction sizes, etc. They aren't even capable of imagining things that shake up the organisational status quo at this point.

[cypherdoc]

The event started better than expected: The second speaker a partner from Deloitte demonstrated his knowledge of cutting edge technologies by asking the crowd (it was about 150 people) if they heard the name Satoshi Nakamoto. I was one out of 4 who raised a hand. At the end of his speech he had a slide exemplifying Bitcoin as real innovation to watch out for. I talked to him in the pause, but figured that he had only a rather shallow understanding of what Bitcoin is, but who cares, recognizing it as a disruptive innovation is the right first step.

The next talks were rather boring about online-banking innovations and security of banking applications. Innovations they were touting paled in comparison to Bitcoin, but they did not seem to know yet.

The final panel was the one I participated. It was preceded by a talk of the head of regulations department of the national bank (comparable to FinCen that operates within the national bank in Hungary). He spent quite a few minutes explaining why cash is bad for the economy and what benefits more frequent electronic payments would bring on national scale. I used this to catch him in the pause and telling him that cash and electronic payments is not a contradiction but Bitcoin is electronic cash. He got interested, so I have an invite to his office

My panel was with local MDs of Visa and MasterCard and a company launching a mobile wallet in cooperation with them that enables credit card payments via NFC. I managed to go over couple of arguments you shared with me. Let me draft the most notable exchanges:

They called NFC payment a breakthrough innovation, even a butterfly moment. I made the point that changing the infrastructure behind the payments is likely a bigger a breakthrough than the difference between sliding a plastic card into a slot vs. waving the mobile phone over the slot. The MasterCard guy said that the biggest obstacle in introducing a new payment method is gaining trust that they successfully established, I countered that people likely trust even more mathematics than them. They said in 5 years we will have majority using mobile payments with NFC, I said in 5 years we will no longer talk about innovation in payments but settlement of financial instruments and rights via technologies that learned from the Bitcoin network.

Close to the end the audience could vote (with a voting machine) on the question of what they see is future of payments is and a staggering 11% voted for Bitcoin (alternatives were credit card, mobile, bank transfer and cash payments)

I think that is as good as I could possibly get it, considering that only 2.6% new Satoshi's name at the begin of the conference.

Congratulations.

That is a good result as an absolute value and as a relative value from beginning to end.

[NewLiberty]

Congratulations on opening some banker minds even without the benefit of a crowbar.
Very well done.  Thank you.

[Elwar]

So the credit card industry's innovation is mobile payments?

Kindly thank them for spending their advertising and marketing money to get people comfortable with something Bitcoin can already do. The more people get used to making mobile payments, the easier it will be to transition to Bitcoin.

[BombaUcigasa]

I recently was at a conf where a woman from Visa gave a talk on the "future of money". She was all about NFC payments as well.

I agree that it's a rather damning indictment of the existing payments industry that switching from a wired to wireless interface for the last few centimeters of a transaction is considered the the cutting edge of innovation. From their perspective though it's a big deal - it means changing all the point of sale equipment, it means somewhat more convenient payments for common transaction sizes, etc. They aren't even capable of imagining things that shake up the organisational status quo at this point.

Oh, how cute, you can use a technology in your field 10 years after it's launch...

Imagine explaining her that YOU can execute money transfers of over 1 000 000 USD, from within your mobile phone, to any other person on the planet, within the hour, and with possibly NO FEE.

Or that you can store that million dollars on a sticky note or even in your mind!

And not only that, but your value grows by 1000% each year* without you doing or risking anything!

(*deflation will slow down once adoption reaches final levels and the adoption S curve is formed)

[Mike Hearn]

Well, to be fair to Visa they have an enormous legacy system that has to be managed. Someone has to do it.

The woman at the conference gave a pretty good talk actually, it was quite engaging (IMHO better than the one by the guy from Square). Someone in the audience asked about settlement times (a few days, currently, ignoring chargebacks) and she pointed out that when she started settlement times were routinely in the region of weeks or months in some parts of the world. Back then it was all paper based, and in some places (like Greek islands) someone had to actually travel around on a motorbike collecting the paperwork from the zipzap machines, take it to a clearing office, which then batched it up again and delivered it by hand to the next office in the chain, etc. So from their perspective going from months down to 3 days is a big improvement. Of course compared to 10 minutes it's still pretty poor.

But, again, let's be fair here. Although NFC card payments might seem kind of trivial to us pulling out your card, waiting for it to sync with the network, entering your PIN, waiting again, confirming the amount etc ... it slows things down a lot. Whenever you make something much faster and simpler, people do more of it. There's going to be real economic impact to a big rollout of NFC card payments just in terms of increased commerce, because the card networks are so huge. Especially for small purchases if people can buy something by pulling a card from their pocket, doing a 1 second tap  and then walking away, that can be a big deal.

It's always easier to do things when you start from scratch with a clean slate, and that's why Bitcoin is awesome. But VISA/MasterCard have been building their networks for decades. It's going to take a looooong time until Bitcoin handles even a fraction of the traffic they do.

[murraypaul]

The point I was trying to make was that the architecture of card processing has a fundamental weakness: the consumer authorises the merchant to generate and send a message to the consumer's card issuer (via the card network) to take funds from their account  However, ensuring that the amount you authorised matches the amount they request is decidedly non-trivial.  In the absence of controls, the amount they ask for could be anything.  This means that every time you use your card you are open to the risk that the merchant asks for far more than you were expecting.

To mitigate this risk, the edifice of card security grew up over time....  in the paper days, the fact that both the merchant and retailer had an identical copy of the voucher allowed the consumer to dispute a fraudulent transaction. More recently, technologies such as chip+pin try to do something similar.  But they're all really just sticking plasters on the funamental problem: card processing relies on the merchant "pulling" the funds from the consumer's card issuer.

Chip and Pin doesn't work like that.
The card reader is supplied by the credit card company, and communicates directly to them, not through the retailer.
The retailer enters the amount to be charged, and hands the device to you. You see on the screen how much money will be sent, and choose to enter your Pin or not. You are pushing an amount of money you choose to the retailer, not trusting them to pull the right amount.

[murraypaul]

Keep it positive, make Bitcoins community shine, a dedicated community of the smartest 1 percent of the population backing and supporting the cryptocurrency movement; with them all problems can be solved.

ROFL.
The smartest 1 percent?
This community here, at bitcointalk?
ROFL.