BitPay sponsored angel-hack Seattle that I participated in this summer. Their developer api was horrible and poorly documented wasting everyone time. I was in one of the few groups that got it to work. When asking when we would find out who won the 5 bitcoin prize for best use of it we were told to contact bitpay. I contacted them multiple times and support told me to to contact their CEO who ended up not responding to my emails. I will not use bitpay in the future.
Yeah, prize disbursements were handled terribly. My team won BitPay's prize at AngelHack SF, contacted them repeatedly, and were told to wait until all AngelHacks were over before anything would be done. Months and months later it arrived this week. We actually avoided BitPay intentionally at a couple hackathons after since no one was sure if they were just scammers or not.
That said, I had no problem with their API. They had an easy web checkout link that could be generated that worked fine in an Android WebView for my first implementation. Later at AngelHack SV I used their PHP API to generate invoices for specific prices for goods dynamically and was then still able to send people to their site to finish checkout and get redirected when it completed.
Didn't really see any missing documentation and their site worked fine, responding quite quickly when money was sent to the barcode it showed or the link that could start a wallet app on Android, and their PHP sample code worked trivially. Who knows, maybe they've improved the docs and samples since you used it, though. Or you were trying to hack bitcore, which is a completely different level of difficulty.
Hey, Eric with BitPay here. If you're still waiting on information about AngelHack, email me: eric@bitpay.com
We just this past week launched our new REST API, which should be significantly better than our old API: http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/09/18/announcing-the-new-bitpay-... – we spent a long time thinking very carefully about making the developer experience as smooth as possible, but I'm sure there are things we can be doing better. If you've any ideas on how we can improve it, please let me know.
Hey Rygu! We really appreciate the feedback – we're doing everything we can to make working with Bitcoin extremely simple. What can we do to reduce the complexity?
I've worked with Bitpay while making https://www.incoin.io/ and their developer docs are average to good. It wasn't horrible, the documentation was good enough and Bitpay offered to help (and were super helpful when we asked any questions). In fact, other than having to implement BitAuth ourselves it was pretty painless.
You might be thinking of BitID, which tightly couples payment addresses to identity: https://github.com/bitid/bitid – BitAuth does not use Bitcoin keypairs.
We created BitAuth as a way to avoid coupling payments with identity, which is why the keypairs are independent and include a different prefix (0x02).
>Bitcoin addresses are intended to be single use, disposable keys rather a long term method of identification. A portion of Bitcoin's address design is intended to minimize publicity of EC public keys if at all possible.
A potential work around is to just BitAuth with a HD wallet? Thereby negating any address-reuse issues.
Hey Tony! Great work on your Go implementation of BitAuth: https://github.com/codelittinc/gobitauth – would you mind sending me an email about your AngelHack issues? eric@bitpay.com
Hey Eric! Thanks for the heads up, will send you an email now.
Hah... that library was awesome to work on. Ended up reimplementing the signature algorithm before getting a library that lets us use golang's built in ecdsa libs. Not clever!
Love BitAuth. It's super easy to use and works brilliantly.
I'm developing an app now, where bitcoin payments are part of it. I decided to try bitpay rather than running bitciond myself (less chance to fuck up) but their API is horribly hard to use, gives inconsistent errors and the docs are awful at best.
I'm using their old version, but the errors I get are from the new version. Their library for the language I use is not yet updated. The new docs seem to be better, but I lost faith in them as a developer.
Correction: Bitcoin traders were looking for an excuse to buy a lot of Bitcoin. Your eyes are deceiving you. The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief.
This is how it's been for almost a year now.
Ask yourself: Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable. Examine the fundamentals before you jump into a gambler's market.
> Why use Bitcoin? What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends?
- Buying things that people would be unwilling to sell to you with existing payment methods due to fraud risks. One legal example: iPhone purchases shipped to Nigeria.
- Buying things electronically where the existing payment methods are too slow or expensive. For example, funding a stock trading account in seconds to an hour instead of 1-2 days or funding an online gambling account (legal for most non-US residents but slow and expensive with credit cards).
- Buying an expensive item from a trusted merchant at a discount commensurate with the reduced transaction cost and zero chargeback risk.
- Paying for contractors or crowd-sourcing efforts in any country in the world with ease.
That's a nice list of things most consumers won't be doing. That's not to say there's no value for people who do need it, but it does not suggest Bitcoin will become hugely valuable like Visa.
> - Buying things that people would be unwilling to sell to you with existing payment methods due to fraud risks. One legal example: iPhone purchases shipped to Nigeria.
Small global market share for legal uses.
> - Buying things electronically where the existing payment methods are too slow or expensive. For example, funding a stock trading account in seconds to an hour instead of 1-2 days or funding an online gambling account (legal for most non-US residents but slow and expensive with credit cards).
Most non-US residents can do bank transfers as fast as Bitcoin or will be able to Real Soon Now.
> - Buying an expensive item from a trusted merchant at a discount commensurate with the reduced transaction cost and zero chargeback risk.
So like 5%? Fringe, people who really care about a discount will buy something cheaper or haggle.
> - Paying for contractors or crowd-sourcing efforts in any country in the world with ease.
How do you know? It's currently small because it's currently impossible.
> Most non-US residents can do bank transfers as fast as Bitcoin or will be able to Real Soon Now.
I disagree, most non-US residents in the world don't even have bank accounts. Not to mention, the US and Canada are a huge market with a terrible banking system that refuses to modernize.
> So like 5%?
5% is the entire federal VAT in Canada. Would you really say no to saving $100 when buying a new MacBook? Would you just not bother claiming VAT-exempt status for your business because it's a measly 5%?
A fringe here and a fringe there and pretty soon you have a whole robe.
> How do you know? It's currently small because it's currently impossible.
I think the reason for my belief about iPhones-in-Nigeria being a small market is self-evident. As for other examples: people tend to buy things locally because local businesses are generally good at recognizing local demand, organizing import if necessary, and reaping the benefits of scale (shipping a container of phones). That this arrangement allows for localization of the product which further increases local demand is just icing on the cake.
> I disagree, most non-US residents in the world don't even have bank accounts.
Yes, but they are getting bank or quasibank accounts faster than they are getting Bitcoin wallets.
> Would you really say no to saving $100 when buying a new MacBook?
No - but as a price-sensitive customer I would buy a couple-months-old, gently-used Macbook and save $200 or more. As a price-sensitive business I would buy a Dell.
> A fringe here and a fringe there and pretty soon you have a whole robe.
Sure. But a robe still much smaller than a mainstream provider like Visa.
> No - but as a price-sensitive customer I would buy a couple-months-old, gently-used Macbook and save $200 or more. As a price-sensitive business I would buy a Dell.
Given the number of successful 1-2% cash-back credit cards, it would seem that even regular consumers care about saving tiny fractions on their spending.
To add: it's also a lot easier to just tap the 1% card as you would normally. There's no change to what people do normally except you get free money (not strictly, but close enough for most people).
It requires a lot more commitment to decide if the transaction is big enough to warrant a no-chargeback discount and if you trust the retailer. Some people would definitely do it if given the chance but it in no way compares to using a cashback Mastercard to buy your lunch.
Fiat currency is printed on the whim of governments, effectively defrauding the citizens of every country in the world through value dilution. Bitcoin is a technological innovation which allows for a constant and known rate of currency generation. I'd prefer to intrust my pension to maths than to a civil servant with an economics degree. This aspect shouldn't be overlooked or taken lighty because it disrupts the power, ergo the control that governments can wield over their citizens.
> Fiat currency is printed on the whim of governments, effectively defrauding the citizens of every country in the world through value dilution. Bitcoin is a technological innovation which allows for a constant and known rate of currency generation. I'd prefer to intrust my pension to maths than to a civil servant with an economics degree. This aspect shouldn't be overlooked or taken lighty because it disrupts the power, ergo the control that governments can wield over their citizens.
Yawn. If people as a whole cared about 1% of what you just said there'd be revolutions in every country yesterday.
Money is inherently a social thing. You provide goods or services today to earn a social credit and be able to acquire goods and services after you retire. Your pension is useless without an economy made up of ordinary people who don't care about maths and cryptography but feel they owe you something. They only care about power governments can wield over citizens when things go really wrong. And when things go really wrong you can't buy potatoes with a hard drive.
There are numerous examples in history (and today!) of governments wiping out their citizens' savings through hyperinflation, restricting their access to foreign currencies, etc. This is not just an ideological libertarian conspiracy theory.
It is a virtue of Bitcoin that it helps subvert the power of those corrupt governments over the economy in much the same way TOR and proxies help to subvert their power over free speech.
What is Bitcoin but a collectivist agreement that something has value? Those bits aren't reimbursable. You can't get that electricity back for them once it's spent - unlike gold, which holds some real world value by virtue of being the element it is.
Bitcoin advocates rage about fiat, while trading the ultimate fiat currency since it doesn't take too many people deciding they don't want Bitcoin (say: landlords, farmers/wholesalers) before the currency is useless.
Actually, fiat money means something else. According to Wikipedia: "Fiat money is currency which derives its value from government regulation or law".[0] It doesn't mean "currency which derives its value from a collectivist agreement".
Equivocation fallacy. By that logic every other available currency in the world is saving us from the corrupted governments. Hell, the "virtue" of cowry shells can save me from hyperinflation and help protect my free speech!
Except people stopped using cowry shells as a currency, just as people stopped using Bitcoins as a currency. Now people hoard/trade them like digital beanie babies. If liquidity and insurance problems ever get solved, then we might see mass adoption.
>I disagree, most non-US residents in the world don't even have bank accounts. Not to mention, the US and Canada are a huge market with a terrible banking system that refuses to modernize.
Didn't Nigeria, specifically, just issue national ID cards which are implicitly tied to being Mastercard direct debit cards as well?
I wonder how many merchants are able to accept Mastercard in Nigeria. More likely people are using them simply to deposit or withdraw cash. Remember, before square and stripe it was an expensive bureaucratic nightmare to accept payment cards even in Canada or the US.
Besides this, in person payments are much easier with a bitcoin app scanning a barcode from a screen that embeds the price and transaction info than swiping a card and entering numbers you need to remember, and one less thing to carry around.
'What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable'
It isn't? Western Union makes $5 billion in revenue every year. PayPal - and a reference to sending money to friends is literally the name of the company - also makes $5 billion in revenue every year.
Exactly, it is mostly a solved problem. The question is, what value does Bitcoin add (for the average customer not interested to buy narcotics on Silk Road) and what is the price for this, for example unsolved security issues and large price fluctuations during the early adoption phase?
Transportation was a solved problem when horse carriages were invented. Every solved problem can be solved even better. Isn't that what most startups are about?
Why the obsession with "the average person"? Remember, that average changes over time. The automobile didn't improve the situation for the average person within the first decade of its invention.
Wha?? How is something that flips up and down by several hundred percent over a given quarter-year going to 'align the exchange amount of currencies with real market value'? What does that even mean? Like the billion-dollar currency trading industry isn't doing that already, we need one more currency to get it just right?
You're describing how BTC looks today. The vision is that if liquidity is high (billions of transactions a day), then BTC could in theory replace all mediums of exchange between currencies. Today, for example, the dollar can be hedged because the price of oil, and vice versa. So we don't always get a true value of the dollar. (it's way more complicated than that, just trying to simplify) Additionally, using BTC massive lowers the barrier to exchange money (i.e. you don't need a bank). Banks make a lot of money (ever seen a "transaction fee"?) by simply moving money around.
But that is a chicken egg problem - with large price fluctuations no mass adoption, without mass adoption large price fluctuations. And except in comparison to the very early days (2011 and before) the price fluctuations did not get smaller over time.
Let's be more general. Set A = stuff you can buy with USD. Set B = stuff you can buy with BTC. Set W = all stuff. Set A will always be a subset of set W, and is getting to be a smaller subset every day. Set B will in the future be an exact match for Set W. Which unit of account would you choose? A or B?
Assuming you meant set B with set C - what makes you believe set B will match set W one day? Especially right now set B is incredible tiny compared to set A and there is not much incentive to switch to B which in turn makes it unlikely that set B will quickly converge to set W.
Most people don't yet understand how infungible the USD is becoming. Argentenians and Venezuelans understand the infungibility of their national currencies much better than Americans do theirs. Wealthy Americans and the wealthy of other nationalities who travel understand it better than those with little savings who are largely bound to their own states. Only big players and those on the fringes of society notice the problems with the USD right now.
As more people leave the official economy every day, the fringes grow larger. The more the US clamps down on foreign banks holding USD, the less attractive the USD will be as a store of wealth.
Funnily enough the Venezuelans and Argentinians solve the infungibility of their national currencies with US dollar-denominated offshore accounts. The US dollar is also the national currency of two other Latin American countries. Call me an extremist if you like, but I think the US is more likely to regulate Bitcoin into near irrelevance (guess what, AML laws can be applied to exchanges and Silicon Valley companies accepting BTC too!) than they are to make it difficult for Banco Central del Ecuador to replenish its dollar reserves. And Russian oligarchs facing sanctions are more likely to keep their money in Russian banks than in the crypocurrency their own government intends to ban
http://rt.com/business/187440-bitcoin-ban-russia-cryptocurre...
How many people have left the informal economy to transact exclusively in Bitcoins?
Isn't a currency fungible by definition - a dollar is a dollar is a dollar? And we are getting away from the question I asked - what are the advantages of using Bitcoins, advantages that average people actually care about today and that are not offset by disadvantages of using Bitcoins.
Again, why the focus on the average person? Does the average person actively, directly participate in space industry? No. Has the average person been profoundly affected by the technologies developed by space programs? Undeniably.
Isn't this the whole goal of Bitcoin? Mass adoption so that you can use Bitcoin at least as easily as your credit card? You can obviously not have mass adoption without the average person. If, on the other hand, you only want Bitcoin as a curiosity used by a hand full of people, accepted by a hand full of business, well, this goal has already been reached.
Because someone can point a gun at your head to defeat ECC. They can't do that with banks. That's why people keep their life savings in a bank, and why you'll need a bank even with Bitcoin.
I always felt bitcoin was more about replacing paper money than replacing banks. Banks give you interests, Bitcoin just sits there and the amount (in bitcoins) never changes.
> Because someone can point a gun at your head to defeat ECC.
You can store an encrypted paper wallet in a safety deposit box at the bank if you're worried about that threat. You don't, however, need to hand it over to the bank to lend it out to bad debtors if you don't want to, which is the threat FDIC protects against.
There are at least two problems with this approach. First, this just makes you a target when you go and retrieve your paper wallet. Secondly, even if you never actually leave the bank with your paper wallet, this means you need to physically go to the bank every time you want to transfer money. But people need to transfer money on a daily basis in order to pay bills, meaning any access to a bitcoin wallet needs to be highly available. A paper wallet stored in a vault isn't.
The counterargument to this is to store a portion of your savings in a paper wallet. That's fine, but it's not what's going to make Bitcoin mainstream, which is what the conversation is about. It needs to become consumer-friendly.
I'm merely responding to your argument that people will be unwilling to carry the equivalent of their checking account balance (~$1000?) with them because they'll fear for their physical safety. People carry laptops and credit cards despite the fact it's not any harder to point a gun at me and take me to an ATM in a shady part of town or steal my laptop.
Would you make fun of the Burundian Franc because I'd have to convert them into USD to pay my US suppliers? Not everyone has to directly accept Bitcoin for it to be a real currency and generally useful.
The only difference with Bitcoin versus a small fiat currency is the people who are using it are distributed geographically worldwide instead of clumped together in one area. As long as they continue to prefer it to other currencies for some proportion of their transactions it will be successful and have value.
> Would you make fun of the Burundian Franc because I'd have to convert them into USD to pay my US suppliers?
No, if it's a bona fide currency, if you can walk around in Burundi and buy bread or a goat or a gun with it, then of course having to convert it to buy a Macbook isn't a dealbreaker. But Bitcoin is in the opposite situation.
> The only difference with Bitcoin versus a small fiat currency is the people who are using it are distributed geographically worldwide instead of clumped together in one area.
So with a currency you can buy life essentials, with Bitcoin you can buy virtual things or things that are feasible to send through the post. I wonder what is going to be more valuable overall?
Except Bitcoin makes it free to send money to friends. One way I could see this being financially viable to build a company around is if lots of people are storing money in the company's webwallet. Then the company could invest customers' money, like a bank. But if you are using a webwallet like Coinbase, then you are asking to get screwed out of your money, since there are no FDIC protections.
Its free if you have bitcoin and your friend wants bitcoin. Once you bring other currencies into the mix it is often more expensive to comparable services and just as slow if not slower.
Agreed. Bitcoin is not competitive for small transactions. Given the average transaction confirmation time of 7 minutes (which will never go down) it clearly was not meant to be.
Once the major mining pools receive the transaction, it's very unlikely to be double-spent. If you try to purchase something online from a merchant accepting Bitcoin via Coinbase or Bitpay, you'll notice the transaction completes almost instantaneously.
This has been a bear market for bitcoin for months—many of the bears have been rooted out. It's not a conspiracy that bulls are coming in and pushing the price up. It's expected. Not every bull will close their position immediately. That's too simple of a view of how markets work.
There is massive value in bitcoin. Payments, asset tracking, international remittances, etc. Take just one of those markets, and just one company—say Western Union and international remittances. That's $8.7B worth of market cap that bitcoin obsoletes.
> That's $8.7B worth of market cap that bitcoin obsoletes.
That logic doesn't really follow. It takes over all those things even if its market cap is only $1 billion. Bitcoin's market cap not related to the industries it replaces.
If it takes over rare metals, though, as an investment, it might end up worth something close to the market cap of Gold.
You're correct. I'm simply replying to his statement that there's no value proposition in bitcoin to consumers. My response is that it can easily replace a company worth $8.7B, thus showing it has consumer value, not that bitcoin will be worth $8.7B if it replaces Western Union.
Bitcoin doesn't render Western Union obsolete until the day remote Burkinabe villages can walk to their local store and pick up the US-resident cousin's salary earned in CFA Franc banknotes. A highly volatile intermediary currency is hardly an advantage there.
That's completely true, but it's also true that if that day comes and Bitcoin is so entreched in the global marketplace so you can exchange it in Burkinabe villages, then it will be worth 100x today's price (especially when taking bubble effects into consideration). For some people in some situations that can be a rational bet to make.
Yes, it has a long way to go, but it's off to a good start. I doubt a significant portion of Western Union transactions are to ultra-remote locations, but I could be wrong.
Heard that before. The question to answer is, "Why now?" What's different now? Nothing. Not yet. This will change someday, but I don't think that's today.
The day Bitcoin gets FDIC protections is the day it can go mainstream.
The point of bitcoin is that you don't need FDIC protection. You need FDIC protection with a bank because the bank isn't required to hold enough reserve to cover its deposits. If there's a run on the bank, and everyone wants to pull their deposits out, and the bank is insolvent, then the government guarantees to protect consumers by printing more money (inflation) to fulfill the bank's reserve requirements.
With bitcoin, you either have it or you don't. You can run your own bank, as long as you know how to safely store a private key.
Yes, you're right. The point is, with bitcoin, there's really no need for banks.
It's easier (and safer) for me to hold a million dollars in bitcoin than a million dollars in cash. If I had a million dollars in cash, I'd be constantly worried that someone will find it and steal it. Hence the need for a bank. I feel much more capable hiding a private key, which is just information, than I do hiding 10,000 pieces of paper, which is physical.
Its not about need. Its about somebody paying you interest on your money. To the degree bitcoins don't pay interest, they are less valuable than hard currencies.
No one opens a bank account for the interest paid. Most accounts barely pay a tenth of a percent annually, maybe a quarter percent from a credit union—meanwhile, inflation is 2% a year. You’re losing net worth by holding USD in a bank account.
The point is that bitcoin holders don't need MtGox to hold their money. They would've been safer by far storing it in a 2-of-3 wallet, with one key held by a third party which does passphrase authentication (or similar) before they'll sign a transaction, one held on your computer, and a third stored somewhere hidden as a backup in case one of the other keys cannot be accessed.
Two of these already exist: BitGo[0] and GreenAddress[1]. Try doing that with physical money, and you understand why we have banks. With Bitcoin, you can have any level of security you like, and somebody only has to implement it once.
> That doesn't solve the problem mitigating risk from insolvency
Does FDIC insurance? If the dollar's worth nothing tomorrow, where's the insurance for that?
Everyone in my country has insurance for becoming personally insolvent, it's called welfare. If you have enough bitcoins that losing them would be devastating, you can also get bespoke insurance on them, even if there's not a pre-existing insurance product.
Yes, the FDIC does for when (not if) your funds are lost.
You've also confused deposit insurance with insurance for hypothetical government failure, and drawn a false equivocation with welfare, though my guess is you didn't have any other point so you went with the slippery slope.
Except you're susceptible to physical robbery unless you store your money in a bank with FDIC protection. This is one reason Satoshi chooses to remain anonymous.
We're in agreement. Since USD is a physical store of value, it suffers from problems like robbery. Hence the need for banks.
With bitcoin, you don't need a bank. I have a 24-word passphrase in my head that can be converted to my private key—a "brainwallet". I know it, and my parents do. It's not written down or stored anywhere. It simply isn't physical.
With those 24 words, you can unlock all of the value I have stored in bitcoin.
You're okay with someone being able to hold a gun to your head and demand your 24-word passphrase? That's why you need a bank with FDIC protection, even with Bitcoin.
You don’t understand what the FDIC is for. It’s not there to protect your deposits from being stolen by robbers. It exists to ensure consumers that banks are guaranteed to be solvent while they practice fractional reserve banking. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corpo...
If someone holds a gun to my head, I would give them my passphrase. I’d also go into my bank and wire my money into their account. In both scenarios, my money is gone forever.
Maybe someday, someone will invent a store of value that is safe, even if someone is threatening to kill you.
The point of FDIC isn't to defend against robbers. It's to enable you to safely store money. You cannot do this with bitcoin. You can do this with USD.
Most people don't walk around with their life savings on them. That is exactly what you're doing by storing your life savings in your brainwallet. Hence, the need for banks.
Bitcoin mixers also make it an attractive avenue for robbers. No one can demand you wire them money without getting caught. But they can demand you give them your passphrase and then make your money disappear in an untraceable way.
If someone is willing to murder me for my money, a bank (or the FDIC) won’t keep that from happening. All the bank needs for me to wire all of my money into someone’s account is my ID, signature and the other account’s details. This would-be robber could strap a bomb to me while I execute the transaction, or hold a loved one hostage. The FDIC can do nothing in this scenario.
I think we disagree because you haven't lost money due to no fault of your own, thanks to Bitcoin. I have, and it sucks.
Most consumers will take risks like these seriously. If Bitcoin is going to go mainstream, it needs to address these concerns.
No one is going to strap a bomb onto you and then force you to wire them money. Remember, if someone were to do that, they would be caught immediately, because it's very easy to trace money transfers from banks. But Bitcoin makes tracing money impossible, thanks to mixers. That's why banks are safer than Bitcoin: A robber can't extract money from a bank without getting caught, but a robber can empty your brainwallet in a way that hides where the money has gone.
As for holding a loved one hostage, kidnapping for money hasn't worked for a long time. The failure rate for kidnappers demanding money is around 100% in the US. But kidnapping will become much more lucrative if Bitcoin catches on in the way you're imagining. It needs consumer protections.
Once bitcoin has consumer protections, it will be very valuable. That's why I'm advocating the protections. It's a necessary step in Bitcoin's development.
EDIT: To put it another way, instances of kidnapping and theft are rare because the current system defends against them, not because they're inherently rare. If bitcoin catches on without protections afforded by banks, then kidnapping and theft will likely become more common, because those tactics will be lucrative again.
Except that someone could just kidnap your daughter and demand bitcoins, regardless if you have them or not. If you don't own them, you could still be compelled to buy them and transfer them to the perpetrator, and the banks can't save you from that.
It's become a much more dangerous world, just by the mere existence of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is silly in lots of ways, but what something like it could potentially do is revolutionary. PayPal is worth billions; retail banking is a 12-figure yearly revenue industry. That's a whole lot of money on the table.
Buying steroids, drugs, porn, donating to Wikileaks -- anonymously / bypassing any Visa/Mastercard "embargoes". Fiat makes this quite difficult, Bitcoin solves this problem. Have you ever done an international wire transfer? It can take days. When I pay people with Bitcoin it takes at most minutes. If you actually start using it you'll probably stop asking this question. It is extremely useful at this point in time to many people.
> The way it works is, they buy in order to jump the price. Then other people buy and continue the momentum upwards. Then, in a few days, they sell, and thus capitalize on everyone else's belief.
Funny I also trade equities and what you're describing perfectly fits what happens there.
It provides a bigger picture because the current situation is not representative at all. Admittedly everybody who cares about Bitcoin is aware of that but it may still be a valuable information for the random reader without much Bitcoin background.
Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of the phrase "on this news."
Perhaps you do understand, but it makes you feel good to say something nasty about bitcoin. And that feeling is more important to you than honest discussion.
The given context was "on this news," explicitly referring to the single period of time since this information was made public. In that time and that time alone, bitcoin has come up a few dollars.
Nobody is denying the fact that bitcoin is still down from last week - or even last month, but the context in question is the past 4ish hours.
Context would be good if it were done without any kind of emotional undertones (which are often used to win arguments through emotional intimidation) or any kind of logical leaps (which are often used to squeeze in emotional understones).
So e.g. "It's worth keeping in mind, though, that bitcoin is down X% in the last month."
Today’s IRS guidance will provide certainty for Bitcoin investors, along with income-tax liability that wasn’t specified before. Purchasing a $2 cup of coffee with Bitcoins bought for $1 would trigger $1 in capital gains for the coffee drinker and $2 of gross income for the coffee shop.
“It’s challenging if you have to think about capital gains before you buy a cup of coffee,” he said.
My guess is that PayPal et al don't particularly care - the onus is on the bitcoin user (i.e. the consumer) to calculate capital gains, report to the IRS etc. Those consumers probably don't care - they'll wait to see how/if the IRS actually has a willingness/ability to enforce their own guidelines...
Not sure where you get that they're ignoring it. TFA says nothing of taxes, and that burden falls on the buyer anyway. Unless you're saying that the IRS's guidelines mean it can't be used to buy things for some reason, which is just not true at all.
Ignoring in the sense that Paypal thinks its worth their time to facilitate consumer transactions based on bitcoin.
As the bloomberg article states, if I have to factor in my my capital gains tax liability with each purchase of an ebook or mp3, then that is a royal pain and would lessen my desire to use bitcoin for everyday purchases.
It seems to me that perhaps Paypal just see's the IRS guidelines as a non-factor for consumers who will largely just ignore the guidance similar to how consumers are technically supposed to pay state sales tax on online purchases.
I'm not totally sure about the US case but in the UK you are technically liable for capital gains tax on foreign currency appreciation so if I buy US$ at 1.60 to the £ and buy a cup of coffee when for $2 when it's 1.40 to the £ I should declare the 20c or so appreciation in my dollars in pound terms. In practice no one bothers for small sums and if you've made a gain of say £10k you can estimate an average rate rather than itemising each coffee. In theory the tax inspectors could come back and ask you to itemise but in practice they have better things to do with their time. I imagine the US and bitcoins would be similar.
True, except it's not only that people don't bother to report holiday cash transactions - there are formal exemptions from capital gains tax in the UK for (i) cash which is for personal use while travelling outside the UK and (ii) (since 2012) for all foreign currency bank accounts. In terms of what most people do, it's only if you hold or use the currency for investment purposes that you need to worry.
HMRC initially tried to treat Bitcoin in the same way as gift vouchers, not currencies, which meant that different rules applied (particularly in relation to VAT). However they now apparently treat is as a currency which in theory means the above exemptions are open to people to claim.
There are issues with this though. Firstly, in the legislation "bank account" is not explicitly defined so it's unclear exactly which forms of wallet might qualify for that exemption, if any. Secondly, the exemption for physical currency doesn't include personal use of a foreign currency within the UK.
So it's still pretty unclear whether you'll be subject to CGT or not.
Most stuff that makes money gets taxed. The HMRC exempt investment in cars and gambling because they figure most people lose on those. Guess that goes for holiday money too as the money change fees probably exceed currency gains. Dunno if you could classify bitcoin as gambling on the value of some inherently worthless bits? Might have a chance with that one.
Merchants who use BitPay and Coinbase to accept Bitcoin usually choose to let those processors convert the funds to dollars on their behalf. Neither PayPal nor the merchants will typically touch Bitcoin during a transaction.
More choices in how people create value, share it, buy, sell and trade it – that’s exactly what PayPal is all about,” said Scott Ellison, Senior Director, Strategy, PayPal.
That's amazing! And me thinking PayPal was all about our money!
Nothing could make me less interested in BitPay. PayPal is just such a negative connotation in my mind that it turns me off of a business partner just to know they are collaborating.
Hmmmm... I thought that a large reason many people helped develop bitcoin and it's community was to thwart Paypal, its highly-politically-motivated nature, and others like it.
That's all I can think of - Bitpay/Coinbase/Gocoin partnered with PayPal because PayPal offered to acquire one or all of them.
Bitpay and Coinbase* offer only two advantages over PayPal - slightly cheaper transactions, and the ability to transact in Bitcoin. Due to the merchant account requirements of each you lose anonymous transactions, so for example Silk Road could never use one of these services. So it strikes me as extremely odd that these guys would be partnering with Paypal, basically giving away their advantage, if there wasn't something bigger in it for them down the road.
* not sure about Gocoin as I haven't looked at its merchant account offering.
