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BitCoin Card To Launch In 2 Months, Says BitInstant
hypnosec writes "Charlie Shrem, co-founder of BitInstant LLC, has confirmed that a BitCoin-funded international debit/credit card should be available very soon. Giving a time frame of 6-8 weeks, Shrem said over an IRC chat session that the card will function like any other credit or debit card, and that it can be used at places where MasterCard is being accepted. Shrem has also said that the initial 1000-odd cards will be given for free and subsequent cards will carry a charge of around $10. Any transaction that is carried out through the card [will incur a] 1% BitCoin transfer fee on top of the $1.50 ATM withdrawal fee."
When BTC becomes ubiquitous and I'm paying .00000343 BTC for a soda.
A subsequent RaspberryPi story shouldnt take long now, so strap yourselves in guy's!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Finally you can trade your services to each other directly in meatspace with the simple swipe of a card.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'd take this with a grain of salt. This might be nothing but an idea and a photoshopped image.
From their FAQ:
If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering is to block transactions over a certain size, you fail. We're all dying to move away from that ridiculous idea that visa/mc/banks are currently using, because it is fundamentally broken. Who are you to tell people not to buy cars, home repairs, startup business equipment, etc...
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
BitCoin's supposed to be this anonymous fiat currency system. Yet they're going through a decidedly non-anonymous regular payment card network (MasterCard).
I understand it makes the handling much easier for regular transactions, but doesn't this really sorta make it non-anonymous?
Though, I suppose since it's really just a currency enchange between bitcoin and whatever you use, though given it's volatility (and speculators don't help), it seems dangerous - one wrong swipe of the card and what was supposed to be a 1BTC/$15 USD exchange turns into a 1BTC/$4USD exchange because some hacker decided to cash out 40,000 BTC or something at that time. Remember the currency exchange on a credit card happens at the time of the transaction...
(And whoever is cheering the day BTC becomes the popular currency - remember there is no protection against the ills of the financial industry. Speculation, HFT (including arbitrarge amongst exchanges), etc.).
1% + $1.50 fee... so why would I want to use this? My current debit transaction fees are... zero. AND I don't have to worry about the value of the money in my account fluctuating wildly.
It probably involved email and HTTP too. Do you trust them?
I think in the next 6-12 months we'll see botnets largely stop mining on Bitcoin because the rollout of ASIC mining hardware will make virus-infected PCs hopelessly un-competitive, even though the electricity is free. They're already worthless for doing CPU mining even if you have thousands of them and soon even if you have a lot of infected gaming machines the return will probably not be worth the time.
So a virus used your computer to generate bitcoins, and now you don't trust the currency? Thank god it didn't steal your bank account info, you you'd have to stop using the US dollar as well!
Wasn't the whole point of Bitcoin for it to be anonymous, like cash? Wouldn't having a card, with your name on it, to transfer Bitcoins to/from defeat that purpose, or at the very least flag you as a suspicious-individual-dealing-with-shady-untrackable-currency-used-by-hackers in the yes of the feds?
Bow before me, for I am root.
It IS Mastercard. I'm surprised the fees are that low, the bitcoin-to-card solutions out there now are several percentage points more expensive.
I've seen where some of the sites that accept and trade bitcoins were hacked, but AFAIK the bitcoin system itself has never been hacked. Many, many more dollar and euro based websites are hacked, and dollars are printed freely even in countries that aren't supposed to print them (the dollar "system" has been hacked).
Yet we use dollars and euros.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There's already BitCard, from "Global Standard Bank" They're not a real bank. They used to have pictures of their supposed building and offices in Montreal, which turned out to be a Photoshopped picture of a building on the US west cost, with a fake sign added, and a picture of a bank interior in Florida. They're not registered with Canadian banking authorities.
Here's the discussion on Bitcoin forums about them.
As for the new operation, I have a hard time taking seriously a financial institution that announces its products on IRC.
They need to find a new bank.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
FWIW, I think you are missing the point.
This is simply a vanity-marketed stored-value reusable gift card. The vendor of this gift card just happens to accept bitcoin in exchange for value-add. This isn't any different than any other partner-reward card that puts value into a debit card, except you are rewarded by being able to pay in bitcoin instead of say buying gas or groceries (oh and you have to pay 1%+ATM fee on top of that instead of say getting 2% back)...
Vanity/Affinity gift-card marketing works great. I'm surprized that nobody has thought this up before...
Please don't bundle the hookers with the rest of those, for they are service workers who involve nobody but themselves and their willing customers in their transactions. Also, please don't bundle the drug dealers, who are mere black market resellers, with extortionists and assassins.
Hookers are completely legit service providers, whether they happen to offend your personal morality or not. Drug dealers may or may not be legit, depending on their business practices. The Mafia, Russian or otherwise, is just a bunch of parasites which often preys on the first two groups. There's no other connection here.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I could be sorely mistaken but I do believe that each and every business you're using your card at has to pay for the privilege of being able to accept your card. Which, in turn, means that business is passing that overhead to you, the customer, cash, debit and credit. So, all y'all have zero points. Or are businesses magical realms that separates a mystical "them" from "us"? They all have fees so whether you see them in the first person or in the third makes not one bit of difference as to whether you're paying for it or not. You are. We all are. Your cash back is a pittance in comparison to what the card providers are making. Otherwise you'd be getting nothing back, ever.
\r
I use a credit card at those places. I get about 2.61% back at restaurants (3x points for restaurants, but it's 115 pts/$1 for credits), and 2% back at gas stations and grocery stores. Gas costs more (technically it's a cash discount) at the time of purchase, but counting the cash back, I'm paying the same or less compared to other nearby gas stations.
I pay off in full every month, so it's more convenient and cheaper for me to use credit cards. (Yes, there is the credit card fee bundled into the price, but as I say every time, at each individual purchase, the price I pay is the same (gas station exception explained above), so it's advantageous for me to use credit cards.)
As for the main topic -- wasn't the whole point of this BitCoin thing to be anonymous? If you're using a credit card/debit card, even if it's backed by BitCoin, it's not going to be anonymous, right?
Please send me you untrusted dollars. I'll watch over them for you.
You need to be fully verified in both mtgox and dwolla (ie send them a copy of your id and a recent utility bill to both web sites). Also, to witdraw from mtgox, you have to wait 6 - 8 business days for the mtgox -> dwolla transfer and 2 -3 more days for the dwolla to your bank transfer. In addition to the 25 cents charge, there is a 0.55% fee that mtgox charges for each bitcoin transaction to both the sender and the receiver, so total cost would be 1.1% + 25 cents.
So given all that, these seems like kind of a better deal.
You may want to look into the costs of handling cash and cheques. There's a reason the card people can charge what they do.
Why would you withdraw cash and spend it at McDonalds if you have a completely anonymous Mastercard that you can use directly? Cash uses are very limited these days and look odd if they are more than $40 or so, you can use a credit card everywhere in any amount from $0.10 to $5,000 and nobody blinks. This works especially well if you have a legitimate income stream that can be used to explain how you pay your household expenses. Using your bit funded card frees all your income up for funding on the book transactions and house expenses like rent, utilities, and gas so you look good in an audit. You pay all your incidentals with your card, cash, or bitcoin.
If you have serious bank coming in through bitcoin or no legit source of income you are better off with it coming from bitcoin than cash. You can make web-based ventures be the source of the income. You can generate anonymous bitcoin addresses to be the source of income all day long. There are no co-conspirators to refute you and no way to trace transactions to verify if anyone actually uses your service for real. Just computer generate bogus transaction records that add up to the right figures. There are no fees to transfer bitcoin in and out of Mt. Gox, only to trade it for other currency. You can do that transfer, call the fees a business expense, pay your taxes like a good citizen, and walk away with perfectly clean and laundered income. Your business with be profitable and paying its taxes and is unlikely to ever trigger an audit and would pass it if it did. You can even pay an accountant to do the books and they would never know.
Wait, who's paying atm fees every time they use their Mastercard at a merchant?
They need to find a new bank.
Sadly, it is the merchant who is paying the fees most of the time.
There ain't no free lunch, and if merchants were allowed to charge the debit/credit card fee that they are charged by the card company for each transaction, it is very possible that most people would be using cash instead.
Frankly, a $1.50 per transaction is pretty reasonable all things considered.
Yes, it is possible for some merchants to essentially be paying banks for the right to give you a free lunch if you are buying something for a relatively low amount of money. Not only are they not really making a profit because of the cost to prepare the meal, overhead, and other things, it is possible that they are having to pay more in transaction fees than the amount they are taking in from the transaction in the first place.
Yeah, it sometimes sucks to be a merchant. Fees for debit cards tend to be lower (to merchants) than credit cards, but not by a whole lot. God forbid a merchant who has to deal with a real prick of a customer who decides to protest the charge that he has already lost money on and incur a charge-back fee as well due to a "canceled transaction", and other games that banks play with merchants.
This is also one of the reasons why Wal-Mart wanted to set up a bank of their own, so all of this money they were losing in transaction fees could be recovered at least partially (there is still the network fees banks pay, but those are a fair bit less). Also Wal-Mart, as "the bank", could protest charge-backs easier. That generally isn't possible for a small merchant though unless they join a credit union with other merchants.