Bitcoins

btw banks don't charge you for atms because you are letting them hold your money

yes banks want to handle yr money they want you to open accounts and take out loans deal with them altogether

and some crypto banking network is a threat to that

but the whole argument is stupid in the first place cause if the only thing you have going for you is the ability for individuals transfer cash internationally youre never going to reach the critical mass that something like this needs to work, how is the vietnamese villager going cash out the bitcoins their son sent from germany, if there is some way for them to do it is it really gonna cost less than the 3% paypal charges

and some crypto banking network is a threat to that

― lag∞n, Wednesday, January 22, 2014 10:25 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I never said anything remotely suggesting bitcoin is a threat to the banking system. I pretty clearly said the opposite. I just think that the built-in anti-doublespending/self-verifying properties of bitcoin may have some potential uses.

basically you need a bank account and a smartphone at least to even use bitcoin, once you have those things you have access to reasonably priced financial services that bitcoin could only ever compete with on price if it became ubiquitous enough that it didnt need to be exchanged for local currency in order to buy things eeeeexcept that will never happen because bitcoin will never be a stable store of value

i wasnt be sarcastic about the threat stuff if bitcoin starts doing some of the things banks do now then by nature its a threat and they will react, i mean its not an existential threat, but banks arent just gonna sit by and let competitors do whatever they want

i do also wonder if ppl will lose their life savings when their house burns down, computer gets stolen, etc... in a way isnt this a return to stuffing money under the mattress

yeah thats one of the most lol things about it, yr fancy cyber future money that has to live in a physical place

the winklevos twins keep theirs on thumb drives in safe deposit boxes lmao

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FMNW1dq8Jvo/UqhfwAMI5BI/AAAAAAAAOKg/OMVCqqIgp3U/s1600/bitcoin%2Bpie%2Bownershp.png

if this keeps up itll be moot theyll all be purple

how do they divide up which individuals are in which slice of the pie

i guess roughly by quarters

xp for one thing, just spitballing here, you could have storefront local currency exchange shops that do bitcoin transfers, i.e. I go to bucket shop in Chicago, I give them cash, they send bitcoin to bucket shop in vietnam, vietnam bucket shop gives my uncle cash. Again, I am talking about potential uses and in the future if at all, and would not work unless bitcoin price was at least kinda stable, (b/c bucket shop in vietnam would not want to be stuck holding the bitcoin if it was super volatile).

I am a major stan of central banking and I hate libertarian techno-nerds as much as anyone, but I still think the technology is interesting and has potential.

i feel like if you did htat you'd end up paying as much as you do now to send money somewhere

maybe. I have neither changed money in a long time nor done a WU transfer ever, so IDK

yup and bitcoin by its nature will never be a stable store of value

the bitcoin technology is amazing as technology (not that im some computer scientist but this much seems true i trust the comuter peoples opinons on computer things), as economics/commerce its idiotic, im sure the underlying principals of bitcoin technology will be repurposed for useful things at some point

Suggest Bitcoin

although if the bitcoin part of the transaction lowers the cost for the exchangers, it would lower the fees they'd need to charge to make it profitable

but yeah, I also lean towards "will never be a stable store of value"

the thing about western union is they take advantage of people who dont have bank accounts, yr concept of the store front bitcoin exchange doesnt sound totally unreasonable but theres a tremendous about of competition to bank the unbanked of world rn, a lot of it through mobile technology, so i kinda doubt western union is long for this world anyway, and once people can just move money around via their phones they dont need the bitcoin storefront

phone-money could be bitcoin based too obvs. I ultimately do not have the wherewithal to evaluate whether it would be cheaper to (A) run a global phone-based payment network that relies on the traditional banking system, or (B) run a global phone-based payment network that relies on bitcoin and currency exchange, where I guess you'd have to pay for some expensive hedging instrument against bitcoin fluctuation (they do this for currency exchange risk but the fluctuations are generally much smaller obv).

you dont need any global phone based network or currency hedges, you transfer the money via paypal or square or w/e then its converted into yr local currency when you deposit it into yr bank account, just like would happen if you sold something on ebay to someone in england, the whole thing costs like 4%

paypal is a global money transfer network (and a bank in some countries, fwiw) and I'm sure they have currency exchange hedges

whatever you wouldnt need to is the point, the larger point is that all this is basically possible right now

also do you mean you transfer the money from your phone service account via paypal? otherwise how would you do this without a bank account or credit card?

you have a bank account via yr phone which is also capable of behaving like a debit card

it might not be a full service bank account like we recognize but its basically a bank account

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101180469

fwiw:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-28/bitcoin-service-targets-kenya-remittances-with-cut-rate-fees-1-.html

interesting

BitPesa will charge 3 percent on overseas transfers and says the money arrives the same day. At that rate, it would cost $6 to send $200 via BitPesa.

~same rate as paypal tho

I'll wager paypal doesn't allow any withdrawals to kenyan banks

It looks to me like Paypal does not serve Kenya. Also their fee for a lot of other countries appears to be 3.9%

I think they might even charge 3% to send and 3% to receive. Skimming on both sides, fucking assholes

they only charge 3% to withdraw theres no fee for sending or receiving, they can extend to kenya any time they want, lol at thinking an imaginary bitcoin operation is differentiating themselves with a .9% savings

i mean do you see hurting this is what everyone has been telling you for the last 24 hours, someone introduces a bitcoin service like you were suggesting is a game changer and they charge the same type of fee that established services already charge, and they dont even exist yet, they havent even had a chance to deal with real world complications, their naive estimation of what they need to charge is even the same as paypal!

Actually, in many countries with paypal you have to pay a 3.9% fee to "receive" the funds internationally, AND a withdrawal fee to withdraw, just fyi. Also, the the difference between a 3% fee and a 3.9% fee is nearly 25%. And the M-PESA fees appear to be higher. As for your other speculative arguments, I could just as easily speculate in the other direction -- maybe they can charge 3% because they're still the only bitcoin-based game in town and they still have competitive advantage over other options, and maybe if other bitcoin-based competitors open up shop they'll be forced to go cheaper.

Not saying you're definitely wrong, but the infrastructure of the bitcoin transfer itself is immensely cheaper than the infrastructure behind a traditional money-transfer, so the only question is whether the costs on either end cancel that savings out.

sry, MORE THAN 25%. It's actually 30%, to be exact.

Not saying you're definitely wrong, but the infrastructure of the bitcoin transfer itself is immensely cheaper than the infrastructure behind a traditional money-transfer, so the only question is whether the costs on either end cancel that savings out.

― signed, J.P. Morgan CEO (Hurting 2), Thursday, January 23, 2014 12:37 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it would be kind of fun to have a discussion about bitcoiin but this sort of total belief in something you clearly know nothing about (not that any of us is an expert) is why nothing youre saying is landing with anyone itt fwiw

and like just general willful ignorance of business, do you really think paypal, a business that produced multiple millioares, couldnt cut its rates to compete

multiple billionaires sry

i mean omg a 30% difference from an imaginary company what will paypal ever do

lol if it really was this unstoppable new technology they could just make their own internal bitcoin that like actual worked

Lagoon, honestly this is a headsmackingly obvious point, like it's kind of incomprehensible to me that you are even arguing over the bolded part of that sentence. I could send you any amount of bitcoin that I owned (for the record, I own none), right now, at no cost, anywhere in the world, instantaneously. There's basically no infrastructure involved except the internet itself. I could not do the same thing, directly, with USD or any other currency.

Like you really seem to think that computers just allow you to beam money directly from point A to ponit B, like you are so used to making online payments that you think the money is just going in one end of the internet and out the other.

"Paypal could just lower fees to compete" lol, so any time a business has a cheaper way to do something, it doesn't matter, because the business with higher costs to do the same thing will just lower their fees to compete. Interesting take on capitalism.

Like you really seem to think that computers just allow you to beam money directly from point A to ponit B, like you are so used to making online payments that you think the money is just going in one end of the internet and out the other.

― signed, J.P. Morgan CEO (Hurting 2), Thursday, January 23, 2014 1:17 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im sorry to have to break this to you but thats how it works, the costs associated with running paypal are not those of beaming money all over the wold

its all 100% automated just like bitcoin

also like i said if there are somehow huge saving in one form of automation over the other it would be trivial for paypal to build their own internal bitcoin that actually works