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This might be a good time to mention dwolla dot com. A couple years ago they were offering an easy way to do small transactions with no fees at all. They might still be doing it, although they are not now advertising it as obviously as they were back then. So for anyone interested, it could be worth looking into.

Until someone starts offering a flat fee for payment processing somewhere close to cost of the transaction, which is microscopic

So you'd want a company to float you the money during the transaction for up to thousands of dollars, cover all the real costs of the transactions, and handle any fraud prevention and losses all by charging a few pennies? That sounds like a sweet investment deal to be had!

You mean like Dwolla?

With the recent rise in value of Bitcoin, the 0.0001 BTC fee may approach that of more traditional online payment methods such as Dwolla, which charges 0.25 USD.

If you're in the U.S. Dwolla is the *only* alternative you'd ever need, probably. With their flat fee of $0.10 per transaction, it's trivially easy to send money straight from your bank account.

Use Paypal to send money to 3rd party merchants. Refuse to accept money for goods from Paypal if at all possible, and instead, tell them about Dwolla instead. They'll thank you for it, with their $0.10 flat fees.

You really need to check out Dwolla !

It only has $0.10 transaction fees, flat. It's *incredible*. It has totally supplanted Paypal for interpersonal payments, such as to my contractors and such.

Holla for a dwolla? Always good to help a local Iowan out.

Just stick with the damn cards. If you lose it, your bank will send you a free replacement, and it's instantly disabled.

So this won't affect Square at all. Square is for accepting payments, by sliding a card through it.

The same goes for LevelUP, LevelUP is the equivalent of keeping a photocopy of your credit card (both front and back) in your wallet. You lose your wallet, you've obviously lost your card.

The only example where things get dicy is this Dwolla payment solution. Dwolla is for account to account transactions (without going through Visa or Mastercard). It's a lot cheaper because of this, but then, you don't have any of the traditional protections for fraud (unless they're spelled out separately specifically in their terms of use, which honestly, I haven't even bothered to read).

With the currency troubles in Greece and Spain, a "cashless society" is much further off. One plan for Greece is to suddenly convert the bank account of everyone in Greece from euros to drachma, then immediately devalue the drachma. Since this is well known, everyone with any money is pulling it out of Greek banks.

Keeping money in "the cloud" means someone else controls it. For a good laugh, read the EULA of WePay, a wannabe PayPal competitor. Or those of Dwolla, which is a pseudo financial institution run out of a hacker space in Iowa. The terms offered by most psuedo-banks in the "cloud" are awful.

Dwolla? The ones whose Terms of Service include such gems as "the parties to this [contract, lease, etc.]" (did someone take a template and forget to replace something?) and the following?

(a) “Account” means a holding account at Veridian Credit Union. Partners” means natural persons or
(b) “Dwolla entities that Dwolla does business with in order to bring the Dwolla System to the marketplace.
(c) “Dwolla System” means the software owned by Dwolla. “Dwolla User”, “You”, or “Your” means a natural
(d) person or entity using the Dwolla System via an account at a Financial Institution. Iowa state
(e) “Veridian Credit Union” is an chartered, NCUSIF federally insured credit union headquartered in Waterloo, Iowa.

I mean, come on. "Natural persons or"... what? And what's the unmatched quotation mark?

All this does *not* scream "professional" at me. I mean, if they can't even have someone proofread their Terms of Service, how can I have confidence that they do their *other* jobs competently?

How about these guys? https://www.dwolla.com/ I have not used them, but they were mentioned in another thread.

Seems like this is just the kind of break Dwolla needs to bring some much needed competition to the PayPal universe.

Why are you even using credit cards to pay bills? In Europe bank transfers are used for such and are entirely free for consumers.

Bank transfers (ACH payments) are free, in general, in the US. The problem is that they're not "instantaneous," and are less convenient.

The only well established platform for sending ACH payments online instantly is PayPal, and their fees make merchant account providers look like saints.

Here's hoping Dwolla catches on as a payments platform :P

I think you may be refering to Dwolla.

next time I will be a little bit more specific: Currently Dwolla is not opening accounts for residents in Germany

and as Dwolla is US only it is only an alternative for a part of all internet users.

next time I will be a little bit more specific: Currently Dwolla is not opening accounts for residents in Germany

and as Dwolla is US only it is only an alternative for a part of all internet users.

You don't need to log in to see that Mt. Gox uses Dwolla:

https://mtgox.com/users/addFunds
https://www.dwolla.com/default.aspx
http://www.dwolla.org/help/the-famous-faq-section/

And boy how making up a user name and password sure does put that user name and password at risk.