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Square Market Now Accepts Bitcoin
An anonymous reader writes "Square today announced it has added support for paying with Bitcoin. As a result, buyers can now use the digital currency to purchase goods and services on Square Market, which allows sellers to create an online storefront with online payment processing. The mobile payment company promises the experience won't feel any different for sellers and they 'don't have to change a thing, except potentially expecting new trailblazing customers and more sales.' In other words, Square wants them to be able to offer Bitcoin as a payment option without any headaches."
Stripe is also adding beta support for Bitcoin as a funding source. No word from Paypal yet.
If you're going to get 50-80% profit in the short term why on earth would you not invest in this? Unless you don't believe your own advice?
Sweet! Sounds like a great deal
I get the convenience of the transactions being helpfully reported to the government making my taxes easier
I get the joy of paying middlemen.
I get the reliability and stability of bitcoin.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
the draconian new IRS regulations
The new IRS regulations say that bitcoins will be treated just like any other property, such as, say, a bushel of corn. The alternative is to treat it officially as a financial instrument, which would involve more reporting and regulation. So the IRS has simply clarified the rules in a less draconian direction.
It's not the first time Bitcoin would change its value that rapidly or that much. But its volatility doesn't really matter much when using it as a transaction medium - you get BTC, you immediately sell it for USD, and that's that. And why would a US-centric service care about what Russia or China do?
So basically, if you're willing to risk it, now is the time to get in.
Acknowledge it as a threat by said superpowers. It could hardly get better advertising.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If you mean "inevitable wave of the future", as in "3-D movies in the home is the inevitable wave of the future" or "nuclear power is the inevitable wave of the future"...well, all I can say is, good luck with that, LOL.
I've personally tried to accept Bitcoin as payment for some electronics I sold online, but by the time the buyer paid, I actually lost about $5.
My experience was the opposite. I just bought some electronics online, and by the time the seller got my funds, I actually saved about $5.
You are conveniently forgetting the conversion to and from USD also involves transaction fees. Not only that, but you also have to trust the trading institution that is holding your dollar balance to not abscond with your dollars, otherwise you have to ALSO transfer your dollars into and out of the institution immediately.
So we are now talking about three transaction fees at a minimum, and five transactions if you don't trust the institution doing the dollar conversion. Plus someone has to eat whatever change in trading value occurs during the period where the transaction is being stored in BTC.
This immediately causes numerous problems, not the least of which being that the trade value of BTC is no longer deflationary if nobody doing real commerce is holding a balance in BTC. In addition to the fact that it won't be deflationary anyway because there can be any number of crypto-currencies in existence.
We are considering the question of volatility and whether it matters. The answer is: Yes, it does matter, and for some obvious reasons.
Consider the two holders of BTC. The speculators, and those trying to use it for commerce. You need stability for commerce-users to hold a BTC balance of any significance. Without stability the only people holding BTC are the speculators. When speculators are the only game in town, instability is guaranteed.
Now consider the so-called deflationary property of BTC (which is a phantom property in my view... wishful thinking at best). What happens to the two holders of BTC if you actually get deflation? What you get is hoarding by the commerce users (i.e. it stops being used for commerce) and more speculation by the speculators. Result == even worse volatility. Hoarding can easily destroy any currency as has been proven over and over again throughout history.
-Matt
Read more carefully. There's a big difference between accepting Bitcoin and pricing something in Bitcoin. Square market is pricing everything in dollars (because, really, no merchant in their right mind would ever price anything in actual BTC unless they were intentionally trying to fleece you).
It's a near meaningless gesture which puts the entire burden and risk on the consumer holding the BTC, who is not only eating the overhead from the transaction and the exchange spread, but is also creating a coincident sale on the exchange at market and is likely causing the whole BTC market to drop.
If you want to know how much it's costing you, consider that bitcoin has lost over half of its value over the last 4 months. Now you can make up all the reasons you like for why it is dropping, but my bet is that people are draining their BTC on goods and creating a field day for short speculators on the exchanges.
-Matt
That is, unfortunately, a very typical story. Buying during a fall thinking you are getting a good deal because the price was once higher is probably responsible for as many losses as those who buy at market tops and ride their 'investments' down.
It's basically due to the investor either not being able to come up with a reasonable approximation of intrinsic value with which to judge whether valuation is a buying or selling opportunity, or simply running on base emotion thinking that because the commodity was once at a higher price that it must therefore return to that higher price if only one waits long enough.
In the case of BTC, people come up with all sorts of crazy valuations (like '$500,000 per BTC') based on grade-school thinking and onto bandwagons of other's opinions thinking that it must be right because so many people believe it is right. So right that they can't lose even when value is falling through the floor. A lot of these people wind up eventually putting their entire life savings at risk, even if they didn't intend to originally. You see that money and potential profit and lose all semblance of reason. But in the end all they accomplish is to hand their money over to the other, smarter people.
It's not even necessarily an issue of greed... it's a problem of being driven by sentiment or specious arguments... depending on other people's opinions to form the basis for your own instead of generating your own opinion from basic principles (and not fooling yourself or pulling your own punches). Easy fodder for momentum-driven trading.
Consider for the moment that there is a buyer for every sale on an exchange. Who's doing the buying when the market is clearly going down?
-Matt