Re: Seeing the forrest from the BTCs

On 01/20/2015 02:46 AM, Daniel.Buchner wrote:
> No, I'm advocating Bitcoin as the rail, not the currency.

+1 to instantaneous clearing crypto-rails. I don't think that technology
exists yet.

> Users would never hold Bitcoin prior to a purchase (unless they 
> wanted to for some reason), and right when they initiate a buy, the 
> USD/Euro/fiat wallet provider they choose would instantly convert to
>  BTC JIT under the covers solely to use the Bitcoin network as the 
> transmission rail for the value, and enable a simple, universal, 
> payment UX flow. On the other end the BTC would be instantly 
> converted back to the local fiat and neither party would have held 
> Bitcoin at any point.

Yes, but the wallet provider does, and that exposes them to ForEx risk,
right? Risk that they need to recoup in fees of some kind? In any case,
sounds like Ripple and Stellar to me, not Bitcoin.

> - Eliminates the volatility issues (users never hold Bitcoin)

You can't eliminate the volatility when you're doing ForEx, someone is
always hedging against you.

> Allows all UAs to implement against Bitcoin's open APIs and do 
> amazing things that are nearly impossible with a standard that just 
> slaps an intermediate layer between the user and legacy payment 
> mechanisms

Like?

> - Doesn't exclude banks and other legacy monetary institutions (your 
> bank could be a wallet provider)

Yes, but who is proposing that we exclude banks and other legacy
monetary institutions?

> - Standardizes the value transfer mechanism by default

For some definition of "mechanism" - I think you mean "clearing", which
doesn't solve any of the other problems we have on the web wrt. payments.

> - Inherently simplifies payment flows

+1

> - the flow of a BTC transfer is already 1 or 0 click

Yes, but has some properties that are pretty terrible for customers and
merchants: no charge-backs, wallet theft, password/two-factor loss, slow
clearing, etc.

I'm not anti-Bitcoin; I think it's great, and it has its uses.
However, it's a solution to one part of the problem (clearing), not the
entire problem space we're looking at. Just making sure we keep that in
mind during this discussion.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/

Received on Wednesday, 21 January 2015 05:15:31 UTC