Here's Why People Don't Buy Things With Bitcoin (vice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: One reason for this, if you live in Toronto like me (or anywhere else for that matter), is that there's basically nowhere to spend digital coins in the real world. Coinmap, a service that maps bitcoin-accepting locations all over the world, shows a few places that accept bitcoin in Toronto, but it's clearly out of date -- I called several businesses listed on the site and they had no idea what bitcoin even is. A bigger problem is perfectly illustrated in a Reddit post from Wednesday morning complaining that a bitcoin transaction worth just $9 still hasn't gone through the network after two days of waiting. Two. Days. The likely reason is that the fee attached to the transaction in order to incentivize faster confirmation -- 50 cents, which is about as much of a premium as I'd pay for a $9 transaction -- simply wasn't enough. "Should I have paid $3 on a $9 transfer to get it processed?" the person wrote.

Comments

Transaction fees

[green1]

The author has a good point, and I've always felt that the transaction fees were a big problem for bitcoin. Many of the people who are looking for an alternative form of payment are trying to get away from all the fees banks put on their money, but if you have to spend more than 5% in transaction fees to get your payment processed, have you really gained anything?

I like the concept behind crypto-currencies, but it's just not going to work if it's more expensive to use it than to use existing payment methods.

Re:Transaction fees

[green1]

That point becomes irrelevant very quickly when you realize that most people make far more transactions in the $9 range than the $9M range.

The whole point is that when using a currency of any form, you don't want to have to think about how the back end stuff works, you just want to pay for your item and be done, and with the minimum transaction fees, and minimum hassle.

That's why things like tap to pay work so well, they're easy. You don't have to think about how that whole thing works, it just does. And my credit card is free to use (actually it pays me a percentage of each transaction) (I know, I know, the merchant pays for it and passes that along to me in the form of higher prices, but as long as I don't get a discount for using a different payment method, it works out to the same thing and I'd be stupid not to use the credit card)

Now that's just talking about convenience and price. There's also the privacy argument, but that's a completely different one, and I'm not certain that bitcoin is anywhere near as "untraceable" as some people think.

Re: Transaction fees

[argumentsockpuppet]

It all depends on the systems you use. I have a debit card with a Visa logo. Anywhere they take Visa, I can use it to spend money. In this particular card's case, it withdraws bitcoin from my coinbase account when I use it. I pay the price in whatever currency the merchant is using. McDonalds gets USD from Visa. Visa gets USD from coinbase. Coinbase gets bitcoin from my wallet.

Basically, I can spend my bitcoin anywhere that takes Visa. Or, I can sell bitcoin and get USD deposited to my credit union account. As a bonus, I can send bitcoin to people or organizations. If I ever need to pay someone who doesn't have a bank account, or need to pay a (cheap, cause I don't have much) crypto malware ransom, I can do that with bitcoins or ethereum. In theory, I could buy things on a black market with my crypto-currency holdings, but honestly I haven't looked into it because I don't want to connect myself to that world.

Miners don't want to mine Bit Coin?

[bobbied]

Seems like the inevitable is about to happen. Nobody want's to mine Bit Coin for what they pay anymore. Silly me, I thought that this wouldn't happen until all the coin was gone and they stopped issuing new ones, I was wrong by a long shot.

Re:I don't get it

[burtosis]

Value is what people believe it to be. The US dollar is just as imaginary as bitcoin, the difference is there is an infrastructure in place to process it, whereas bitcoin is non-central. There are plenty of places you can exchange bitcoin, like gold, but issues like the one in the article do happen mostly because it's still in its infancy. Playing a mmorpg someone went off on how it's insane that in game gold has real value when it's imaginary, I pointed out that the in game economy of world of Warcraft alone exceeds that of Venezuela

Re:bitcoin isn't real, either

[sjames]

That's why larger investors have gotten more friendly with smaller investors in the 21st century. They realized they can make even more money if they blow the bubbles up big and stick a bunch of suckers with the dynamite just as the last bit of fuse burns down.