Let's do this point by point, cause I'm bored at the moment.
> Volatility risk is inherent to every single currency.
Except for the currency that's native to your country. I do not have "volatility" risk holding USD, purchasing things with USD. I do have volatility with BTC, even sans the export to fiat, as BTC is only valued based on it's worth relative to other currencies.
> There's nothing particularly unique about bitcoin that makes it volatile except its youth and nascent ecosystem.
So, you're saying a decentralized, pseudonymous digital currency whose scarcity is not derived from policy mandates and whose trade value is not backed by anything beyond what someone is willing to buy it for in another currency, that can only be acquired by purchasing said currency from a third-party, has no properties that are particularly unique to it that would influence volatility?
> Over time its predictable supply curve makes it less volatile than most of the world's currencies for most of the world's population that don't live in stable OECD economies with decent currencies.
See above.
> Merchant fee? Bitpay offers 0% processing for all. Their most recent merchant taking bitcoin through Bitpay (at 0% fees) was Microsoft.
BitPay offers a 0% processing charge and makes money on the spread. Also, that's basically a "for now" situation. Third, even if you remove that fee, there are miner fees involved with any transaction you'd like to actually have verified in a decent chunk of time (they are tiny, but there.)
So "0% merchant fees" is a completely disingenuous statement.
> Transactions are instant…virtually all of online retail has no real confirmation issues long term.
So, transactions are instant but aren't instant, but that's OK because for most things they don't need to be instant, but it's important that transactions be instant (which they aren't).
Gotcha.
> Escrow: it's just an insurance service, no reason there won't be a company offering it. Paypal and Amazon's systems aren't adequate and allow too much fraud and require too many costs.
So, instead of placing escrow responsibility on the shoulders of the merchant and banks, we should place it on the shoulder of the consumer, and make them pay for it, because that's a great idea.
> Whether the customer or the merchant pays isn't relevant, the customer ALWAYS pays, it's not like the merchant will pay extra fees from his money-tree in his backyard.
The assumption here, and it's so hilariously common I have zero words for it, is that merchants, if you pay with BTC, will discount their products to reflect the 1-3% fee they're saving.
Just like how, when you pay with cash today, people commonly discount things by 1-3%.
> Same with creditcard theft. Oh you don't have to pay if your CC gets stolen and someone spends $1k of your money? You still pay. Mastercard isn't giving you $1k.
Correct, almost, but not at all!
Mastercard isn't actually paying, in many, many cases. More often than not, they simple reverse the transactions and make the merchant deal with absorbing the cost. Otherwise, you're right. MasterCard pays out their revenues, which are funded by interest on debts and merchant fees.
So, I pay a fee to MasterCard for letting me borrow money I don't have, and merchants pay a fee to MasterCard so they can take get money people don't have, and to you, this is a bad arrangement?
> Credit is hugely overpriced? Paying 15-20% a year on credit when if I put money in a savings account I can barely get 0.5%? That's obviously because there's no peer-to-peer lending, if there was you'd both pay/get 10% and be better off by 10%.
In what universe did you find this magic 10% statistic, and how can we borrow money from it?
People pay high interest rates on credit because it's risky to give them credit. If it's not risky, you pay next to nothing.
Peer to peer lending will not magically solve the rate issue. There are peer to peer lenders out there now, and their rates are actually worse than banks in many cases. But they're also willing to loan to a riskier customer base. Huzzah!
> In short, creditcards are a 1950s invention that are hugely unsecure: people walk around with plastic cards with their freaking entire password (doubles as an account number) printed on it. And everytime you want to pay, you show your password. It's insane.
You're absolutely. That's why the CC industry is working very hard to derive new transaction methods which are more secure. Chip and Pin, Apple Pay, etc.
But yes, by all means, let's abandon all the wonderful, painless, things about our current banking structure so that we might bask in the warm glow of an unregulated, barely-beta quality piece of software.
Because there's absolutely no way our banking system can get better, except for all the ways its gotten better for the last 100 years.
> Volatility risk is inherent to every single currency.
Except for the currency that's native to your country. I do not have "volatility" risk holding USD, purchasing things with USD. I do have volatility with BTC, even sans the export to fiat, as BTC is only valued based on it's worth relative to other currencies.
> There's nothing particularly unique about bitcoin that makes it volatile except its youth and nascent ecosystem.
So, you're saying a decentralized, pseudonymous digital currency whose scarcity is not derived from policy mandates and whose trade value is not backed by anything beyond what someone is willing to buy it for in another currency, that can only be acquired by purchasing said currency from a third-party, has no properties that are particularly unique to it that would influence volatility?
> Over time its predictable supply curve makes it less volatile than most of the world's currencies for most of the world's population that don't live in stable OECD economies with decent currencies.
See above.
> Merchant fee? Bitpay offers 0% processing for all. Their most recent merchant taking bitcoin through Bitpay (at 0% fees) was Microsoft.
BitPay offers a 0% processing charge and makes money on the spread. Also, that's basically a "for now" situation. Third, even if you remove that fee, there are miner fees involved with any transaction you'd like to actually have verified in a decent chunk of time (they are tiny, but there.)
So "0% merchant fees" is a completely disingenuous statement.
> Transactions are instant…virtually all of online retail has no real confirmation issues long term.
So, transactions are instant but aren't instant, but that's OK because for most things they don't need to be instant, but it's important that transactions be instant (which they aren't).
Gotcha.
> Escrow: it's just an insurance service, no reason there won't be a company offering it. Paypal and Amazon's systems aren't adequate and allow too much fraud and require too many costs.
So, instead of placing escrow responsibility on the shoulders of the merchant and banks, we should place it on the shoulder of the consumer, and make them pay for it, because that's a great idea.
> Whether the customer or the merchant pays isn't relevant, the customer ALWAYS pays, it's not like the merchant will pay extra fees from his money-tree in his backyard.
The assumption here, and it's so hilariously common I have zero words for it, is that merchants, if you pay with BTC, will discount their products to reflect the 1-3% fee they're saving.
Just like how, when you pay with cash today, people commonly discount things by 1-3%.
> Same with creditcard theft. Oh you don't have to pay if your CC gets stolen and someone spends $1k of your money? You still pay. Mastercard isn't giving you $1k.
Correct, almost, but not at all!
Mastercard isn't actually paying, in many, many cases. More often than not, they simple reverse the transactions and make the merchant deal with absorbing the cost. Otherwise, you're right. MasterCard pays out their revenues, which are funded by interest on debts and merchant fees.
So, I pay a fee to MasterCard for letting me borrow money I don't have, and merchants pay a fee to MasterCard so they can take get money people don't have, and to you, this is a bad arrangement?
> Credit is hugely overpriced? Paying 15-20% a year on credit when if I put money in a savings account I can barely get 0.5%? That's obviously because there's no peer-to-peer lending, if there was you'd both pay/get 10% and be better off by 10%.
In what universe did you find this magic 10% statistic, and how can we borrow money from it?
People pay high interest rates on credit because it's risky to give them credit. If it's not risky, you pay next to nothing.
Peer to peer lending will not magically solve the rate issue. There are peer to peer lenders out there now, and their rates are actually worse than banks in many cases. But they're also willing to loan to a riskier customer base. Huzzah!
> In short, creditcards are a 1950s invention that are hugely unsecure: people walk around with plastic cards with their freaking entire password (doubles as an account number) printed on it. And everytime you want to pay, you show your password. It's insane.
You're absolutely. That's why the CC industry is working very hard to derive new transaction methods which are more secure. Chip and Pin, Apple Pay, etc.
But yes, by all means, let's abandon all the wonderful, painless, things about our current banking structure so that we might bask in the warm glow of an unregulated, barely-beta quality piece of software.
Because there's absolutely no way our banking system can get better, except for all the ways its gotten better for the last 100 years.