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Expedia To Accept Bitcoin
An anonymous reader writes With the debacle of Mt. GoX, Bitcoin's future was looking a little murky. But in a significant mainline acceptance, Expedia has said they will begin accepting Bitcoins as a form of payment. At first, they will accept it for hotel bookings only, will accept it only in USA, and also will not be holding Bitcoins for any length of time — converting it to dollars as soon as they can. But, quoting Emily Spaven, managing editor of Bitcoin news site CoinDesk, as told to the BBC, the move was "brilliant news" and it "brings digital currency further into the consciousness of the mainstream." So you can't quite fly to Galt's Gulch to your newly Bitcoiin-purchased real estate without switching currencies.
...Bitcoin will not fulfill its promise: keeping cash flow untaxable, allowing people to hold on to their hard-earned income instead of the state taking it away from them at gunpoint.
Bitcoin makes no such promises. The only "promises" (goals, really) bitcoin purports to make are centered around the current trust-based model of payment processing and it's unnecessarily high transaction costs. Only people (like you, apparently) with an agenda/ax to grind believe bitcoin promises anything else.
bitcoin has to much fluctuation for them to hold it. and do you want to show up at the hotel and be told you have to pay more to make up the short fall and or be told you can only get a room at the walk up / Max rack rate that can be sat 3-5 times the Expedia rate.
and it's unnecessarily high transaction costs. [bitcoin.org]
Which is naive at best and ignores the fact that its only 'free' on the bitcoin network now for ancillary reasons that will go away. As time goes on, the same fees will be syphoned off bitcoin transactions as well if it continues.
Its really silly to think that processors aren't going to their as much extra as they can.
BitCoin is MORE expensive to actually process than a CC transaction, and it gets WORSE over time. Processing fees aren't there because of the cost, they are there because they CAN charge extra to deal with a trusted processor. As popularity grows, so will fees.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I've seen a reasonable number of announcements regarding accepting Bitcoins, but am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business. People either seem never to report the numbers, or only those with relatively poor Bitcoin numbers report them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
bitcoin has to much fluctuation for them to hold it. and do you want to show up at the hotel and be told you have to pay more to make up the short fall and or be told you can only get a room at the walk up / Max rack rate that can be sat 3-5 times the Expedia rate.
You would never "show up at the hotel and be told you have to pay more". Normally I would just call you an idiot. But it is not your fault. The Mainstream Media has done you a disservice. When you pay a merchant with Bitcoin they can choose to have it INSTANTLY converted to cash or save a portion of the Bitcoin payment. There is no "fluctuation risk" for the merchant unless they choose to hold Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, American regulatory practices mean that for the foreseeable future, businesses will convert Bitcoin to cash as soon as they get it, and deposit it into ordinary bank accounts. As long as that goes on, Bitcoin will not fulfill its promise: keeping cash flow untaxable, allowing people to hold on to their hard-earned income instead of the state taking it away from them at gunpoint.
Its not American regulatory practices, i.e. the recent IRS advisory about virtual currency being an asset not a currency. It is, and has been since before the IRS spoke, bitcoins volatility that causes merchants not to **hold** bitcoins.
Also, merchants don't have to convert bitcoins to fiat currency. They may never even touch or see a bitcoin. Various bitcoin exchanges have merchant services where the merchant tells the exchange the price in fiat currency and the exchange calculate the equivalent number of bitcoins to display to the customer, provides an exchange payment address, and when bitcoins are received at this address the exchange credits the merchant's account the exact fiat currency amount they originally stated regardless of any bitcoin fluctuations. The merchant does all its pricing and accounting in fiat currency and receives the exact correct payment in fiat currency. It merely receives the payment from a 3rd party, the exchange rather than directly from the customer.
Again, all of this was in place **before** the IRS advisory. It was due to bit coin's price volatility, which continues today. This week bitcoin lost 11.6% of its value. Bitcoin acts much like an asset, i.e. gold, stocks, etc.
That said, bitcoin is an excellent payment system. It will probably replace paypal and such, put a dent in credit cards, but probably not compete with the US Dollar, the Euro, etc to a large degree. Bitcoin has to become a stable store of value before it can become a serious currency.
And of course if you are a speculator bitcoins have a value there too.
So you can't quite fly to Galt's Gulch to your newly Bitcoiin-purchased real estate without switching currencies.
For Christ's sake, stop hijacking the story and trying to show off your cleverness, especially if your snarky comment could've been written better by a ten-year old. A slow ten-year old at that.
The editor comments are generated by algorithms. The site beta tests algorithms for future Turing tests. :-)
People either seem never to report the numbers, or only those with relatively poor Bitcoin numbers report them.
Perhaps they are reporting the numbers, but most of the numbers are "poor"?
The "carrot" has always been "we can use this as currency for purchasing goods!" but the reality has always been that Bitcoin is in reality a speculative commodity that is rarely used in commerce.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That's my suspicion, yes. The few numbers I've seen reported more or less boil down to "we implemented Bitcoin [purchasing | donations] and got like, $27.95 total from that route over six months". If there are stories of companies implementing a Bitcoin payment route and doing significant volume through it, I haven't been able to find them. Well, at least if you're looking at companies selling legal things.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've seen a reasonable number of announcements regarding accepting Bitcoins, but am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business. People either seem never to report the numbers, or only those with relatively poor Bitcoin numbers report them.
To be honest most of the large merchants/service providers announcing that they accept Bitcoins never actually see a bitcoin. They contract merchant services where a bitcoin exchange acts as an intermediary that converts the price to bitcoins, accepts bitcoins and then pays the merchant in the currency the original price was stated in. And they pay the exact amount originally stated regardless of any bitcoin fluctuations.
All accepting bitcoins means for most of these merchants is that they work with a different payment processor, say Coinbase rather than VISA. The merchant still prices, receives payments and does all their accounting in dollars, euros, etc.
WTF is a "Bitcoiin" anyway?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I think volatility also plays a role.
Certainly I wouldnt hold on to bitcoin longer than I had to, maybe some people are comfortable with that level of risk but I certainly am not.
Do you have any actual numbers to back this assertion?
But as the market grows, volatility decreases, which makes it possible to deal directly in Bitcoin. This is very different from credit cards where network effect limits competition.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"American regulatory practices"
Such as...?
"American regulatory practices"
Such as...?
A recent IRS advisory said virtual currency is to be treated as an assent not a currency. So lets say you receive some bitcoins. At some future date you spend these bitcoins. Since these bitcoins are an asset you have to account for their gain or loss in value for the days you held them an declare a loss or gain on your taxes. In short spending bitcoins has the paperwork overhead of selling stocks, its not like spending dollars at all.
Ex. You buy one coin at $500 and another at $600. Coins are priced at $800 at the time of a future purchase. You buy something for $1,200, 1.5 coins. Using FIFO (first in first out) your basis for the outgoing 1.5 coins is $500 + $300 = $800, and the basis for the returning 0.5 coins is still $300. You experienced a gain of $400 on the 1.5 coins at the time of the sale and that $400 would seem to be taxable income. Apologies if I botched the math, hopefully the point gets across.
Well you are doing a disservice to Slashdotters by poking holes in their mindless dribble. Just let them be and allow them to wallow in their fantasy worlds, they're happier there!
Thanks for the response. The asset vs. currency advisory is a relevant point and I admit that I missed it.
It's not that the information you present is completely implausible, but could we get a Skylark or something?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
keeping cash flow untaxable, allowing people to hold on to their hard-earned income instead of the state taking it away from them at gunpoint.
how did that work out for Greece when it turns out nobody was paying taxes and the community (cities) had to borrow the cash so the trash men would be paid ?
if society doesn't want tax revenue it wouldn't exist, but as a collective you need roads, trash, schools etc, the American idea of "fuck you i got mine" isn't healthy when trying to be a civilized society.
If you desire an all-bitcoin environment, then this is a required precursor. If a business is accepting bitcoins, and they in turn do business with another that accepts bitcoins, then someone there will soon realise that skipping the dollar-conversion in the middle saves a lot of commission costs.
Bitcoin does have a few advantages aside from those sought by crypto-anarchist idealists. For one, it's conveniently international - even Paypal isn't active in all countries. It means you can offer a service globally without having to worry about handling a hundred different currencies and ten different payment services.
Yup, they do not accept Euros either. They convert your Euros into US dollars, which they accept.
As popularity grows, so will fees.
But as the market grows, volatility decreases, which makes it possible to deal directly in Bitcoin.
That will not eliminate fees. The Bitcoin model will eventually require increased fees on each and every transaction. As mining becomes more difficult and less rewarding, miners need an incentive other than solving blocks. That will be the fees embedded in each transaction.
Keep in mind that miners do not only create new coins. They also verify the transactions in the block chain and get the embedded fees. Without a large number of independent miners this block chain can be corrupted and individual transactions listed can no longer be trusted to be accurate. To keep a large number of independent miners involved they have to be rewarded. Today mining new coins is the main reward, some day it will not be and the fees embedded in transactions will have to provide the necessary reward.
All investment carries risk. High risk carries high reward but you should moderate how much you put into a high risk store like Bitcoin. Of course, bitcoin will stabilize dramatically as volume increases.
1. "bitcoin has too much fluctuation for them to hold it" - correct
2. Do you want to show up at the hotel and be told you have to pay more to make up the short fall - What shortfall? See #1.
Wait...you're saying Satoshi was naive? Interesting. An awful lot of people/money would disagree with you, though.
They have no intrinsic value, similar to tulip bulbs back in the day. Gold has intrinsic value. Currency has intrinsic value in that it's tied to the GDP and ability of its issuer to pay bonds. It's true monetary policy can grow or shrink a money supply, but see above. When a bitcoin is generated, it was generated from not virtually nothing, but literally nothing.
Assuming the merchant instantly converts Bitcoins into cash for say, a $100 equivalent transaction, what is the difference in transaction cost when compared with a credit card? I know credit card transactions cost roughly 2%, or $2 in this case.
0.0001 BTC is 5 cents in today's market (1 BTC = $568) which is quite cheap for a transaction. Suppose the buyer also does not want the risk of BTC fluctuations, so he purchases BTC just before buying from the online store. But the cost to convert USD to $100 worth of BTC and then reconverting the BTC to USD seems both inefficient and expensive because there is usually a spread (or difference in buying and selling prices of a commodity). So after all the fees and conversions, the buyer may have spend $101 or $103 for transaction, which is not much cheaper than a credit card transaction.
What is a bitcoin? It's an entry in a shared block chain (list of transactions) which requires computing a very difficult hash function to verify. That computation is called a "proof of work." The computer that successfully verifies a block also gets an entry in the ledger giving it a reward for calculating the hash. You can't arbitrarily create a bitcoin precisely because everyone on the network has the same shared block chain. All of this requires a lot of computational cycles and hence electrical power. So in a fashion you're translating electrical power into currency.
That's true, but they can still collect stats on payment methods, which is pretty routine. What I'm curious about is whether switching to a payment processor that accepts Bitcoin results in anyone actually buying things with Bitcoin. Is it more like adding support for EUR, or more like adding support for the Kazakhstani tenge?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business"
Silk Road? :>
Expedia is using something like Bitpay for their Bitcoin processing, right? If that's the case, they get their payment in cash right away and do not need to worry about any price fluctuations.
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/...
With the debacle of Mt. GoX, Bitcoin's future was looking a little murky
Not to anyone who actually follows Bitcoin. MtGox was old news in 2013, a year before it actually failed. Bit coin's success was never based on MtGox - it was the other way around. And the failure of a fraudulent company in the Bitcoin space made Bitcoin stronger, not weaker.
Tired of hearing this illogical assertion repeated.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The TSA does a whole lot of pre-flight data mining on passenger lists. I recall some discussion a while back about how they included included things like the credit card numbers, billing addresses etc in the mix.
Paying with Bitcoin has the same problem as paying with straight-up cash - it sets of all sorts of red flags because there's no real way to see if you're "connected" to other "interesting" people or not. No data = guilty until proven innocent etc.
When you're on the clock for getting to your departing flight, you really don't want to be on the wrong side of the extra special friendly pat-downs reserved for special troublemakers.
People like Expedia won't be wanting to mess with this can of worms for now, so they'll keep their bitcoin experiments a nice safe distance from the US Federal Government universe.
My company routinely has customers pay in Bitcoins and I've stopped converting them to USD as there are plenty of avenues to spend them...
What's your spot price for a kilo?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I don't know why, but I have a felling that Bitcoin is nothing more than a piramid scheme...
In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flanian Pobble bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
P.S. The whole hoarding bitcoins thing is a myth. Deflationary economies work the same way inflationary economies work the pressure is just in another place. Deflation is a built in wage increase for workers. Everyone's money being worth more is more temptation to spend it because prices get lower and lower. But while prices get lower and lower companies have to continue to pay workers the same amount.
This is partially offset by their cost for materials going down but bottom line is that companies will need to increase sales to keep up. Luckily for companies, everyone makes more than before because their salary of 1 BTC/week is worth more so they can afford more, so consumption goes up.
The confusion comes from people who have bought into the idea that the economy is driven by investors. Never believe this, it's nonsense used to justify people who do nothing but add interest, increase prices, and/or reduce the quality (aka cost of production) of goods and services to "realize value" and thus make money without contributing to the economy but rather by detracting to it. Often these try to take credit for and/or mask their efforts by blending in with actual technology improvements.
The economy is driven by workers (Production) and consumers (Consumption). All value in the economy comes from workers, technology improvements for instance are the work output of engineers and researchers. Consumers purchase goods and services, goods remain part of the economy and have innate value and service availability has an innate value and the output of the service may have a value as well. Consumers generally spend pretty much everything they make.
If you must obsess over middle men (investors, lenders, salesmen, etc) then you should realize that these people want other people's money. Banks don't lend to beat inflation, banks lend to charge an interest rate that is their profit+inflation. With a deflationary system lenders can simply exclude the inflation number since the payback will be in deflated dollars and the interest deflates too. How much interest can they charge? Dunno, but it will be as much as the market will allow and so it should amount to at least the same amount of increased buying power as loans now.