Why google should endorse Bitcoins (and probably hates visa)

[kristoffernolgren]

One of the most obvious reasons to purchase stuff with Bitcoins is that it's a free alternative to VISA.

How much money are we talking about here?
There is a lot of different costs. But one that I have seen is cirka 5%. Of the sold value.

Propose the avarage margin for stuff sold on the internet is 30%. This will actually increase your revenue by 12%.

Now to the google part. Making ads in google is essentially like bying visitors. The value of one of these visitors is ofcorse at least the value of the earnings of what an avarage visitor buys.

This means, that if online merchants drop visa and start using bitcoins instead, it would make economical sense for them to increase the bidding on the ads aswell.

How big is this market for google?
2010 they had an adrevenue of 28billiion usd. An low estimate is that 10% av theese ads come from something that ends up with a visa-payment. 2.8 billion dollars.

That means that this should increase the value of ads with 336 million dollars. So google (I know your AI:s are reading this) How about you bring us some of that sweet cash. We could take them in ad-coupons

[BitcoinPorn]

It would make sense if the rest of the world jumps on board, I think Google will be focused on making Google Checkout kick PayPal's ass before they endorse Bitcoins.

But I hope I'm wrong.  But I'm not

[Jaime Frontero]

google will do what is profitable for google to do.

how are they going to make money off Bitcoin?  i doubt they're going to become an exchange...

'competitive advantage' - i.e., hurting the competition - only gets you so far.

[adamstgBit]

how are they going to make money off Bitcoin?  i doubt they're going to become an exchange...

visa fees 2.8 billion dollars.
btc fees 0

the whole world should be in on bitcoin i mean that would make the best sense...

how many $ are spend on visa fees?

problem is NO one knows about bitcoin, i know its hard to imagine but its true.
try asking 100,000 people if they know about bitcoin... maybe you'll get one bitcoiner!?

we need to gather our strength make bitcoin alot better, and then let everyone in on this bitcoin thing, which can fucking save the world MAN!

i don't know exactly how bitcoin will go about Changing the world.

but i believe it will. i can feel it.

2012 something has to happen...
O_O maybe god made bitcoin???

tripping! LOL

[wareen]

problem is NO one knows about bitcoin, i know its hard to imagine but its true.
try asking 100,000 people if they know about bitcoin... maybe you'll get one bitcoiner!?

This is certainly too low - that's probably even below the fraction of active Bitcoin users worldwide!
I guess by now I personally have told more than 0.001% of the population of my country about Bitcoin already

[DamienBlack]

problem is NO one knows about bitcoin, i know its hard to imagine but its true.
try asking 100,000 people if they know about bitcoin... maybe you'll get one bitcoiner!?

This is certainly too low - that's probably even below the fraction of active Bitcoin users worldwide!
I guess by now I personally have told more than 0.001% of the population of my country about Bitcoin already

I have not met anyone, IRL, that knows about bitcoin unless they heard it from me. I think that the number of people who know of bitcoin is still very low in every population besides the tech crowd.

[fennec]

I have not met anyone, IRL, that knows about bitcoin unless they heard it from me. I think that the number of people who know of bitcoin is still very low in every population besides the tech crowd.

Agreed. I doubt more than one in a hundred people have even heard about it.

But that's just my speculation. Anyone want to do an actual survey of random people in the street?

[kristoffernolgren]

google will do what is profitable for google to do.

how are they going to make money off Bitcoin?  i doubt they're going to become an exchange...

'competitive advantage' - i.e., hurting the competition - only gets you so far.

I'm afraid you miss the point. All the money merchants now spend on visa, will be moved to google ads.

As a merchant, every new customer that goes to your store and buys something is valueble, so even if 99% of your revenue goes to google, it still makes sense to "buy" that customer (using google ads), therefore, if the visa-costs would dissapear, the rational thing for the merchant to do is to increase the money he is willing to pay per click with the same fraction (12%).

[Tronlet]

Plenty of people, especially those who pay attention to economic and tech/geek news, have heard of Bitcoin. Whether or not these people are Bitcoiners is another story, but plenty of people have heard of it. Just look at articles on it by impartial journalists that don't take part in Bitcoin, they're often talking to their audience in terms of "You know Bitcoin, that cryptocurrency that's been making the rounds lately?", "The latest xyz on Bitcoin" and etc. They're operating under the assumption that the readers have some knowledge of the thing.

[wareen]

I have not met anyone, IRL, that knows about bitcoin unless they heard it from me. I think that the number of people who know of bitcoin is still very low in every population besides the tech crowd.

I agree and I also only met one non-tech guy who had a vague memory of having it read somewhere. On the other hand: in my opinion, the tech crowd is larger than many would think (may be observational bias of course).

I doubt more than one in a hundred people have even heard about it.

Yes, 1% is certainly much closer to the truth than 0.001%.

But yes, it still makes for only a miniscule share of the total population.
We need to improve on the software - especially on mobile devices and on the web-shop integration.
At least we sure have enough potential to grow

As for Google: I don't see them endorse Bitcoin anytime soon - they are probably more concerned about snatching a part of the soon-to-be huge electronic payment market themselves. The problem is that Bitcoin doesn't work well with companies trying to get a percentage from every purchase...

[Alex Beckenham]

The problem is that Bitcoin doesn't work well with companies trying to get a percentage from every purchase...

An exception to that rule would be escrow services... Google could be quite a large bitcoin escrow service if it wanted to be, maybe for people buying cars and houses.

[wujh]

It would make sense if the rest of the world jumps on board, I think Google will be focused on making Google Checkout kick PayPal's ass before they endorse Bitcoins.

But I hope I'm wrong.  But I'm not

Google will kick Paypal's ass by endorsing bitcoins.

[Tronlet]

Google will kick Paypal's ass by endorsing bitcoins.

Except, they won't.

[fennec]

Plenty of people, especially those who pay attention to economic and tech/geek news, have heard of Bitcoin.

Sure, but most people don't pay attention to tech news, or economics for that matter.

Following on from my previous comment, I reckon it would be cool for a survey like this. Simple question: "What is Bitcoin?"

TL;DW – 8% of people surveyed knew what a web browser was.