Paypal Jumps Into Bitcoin With Both Feet 134
retroworks (652802) writes The BBC, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and several other business sites are buzzing with Paypal's incorporation of Bitcoin transactions. According to Wired, Paypal will be "the best thing ever to happen to Bitcoin." Paypal-owned Braintree not only brings 150 million active users in close contact with Bitcoin, it signals "mainstreaming" similar to cell phone app banking, perceived as experimental just a few years ago.
Can someone clarify the state of BitCoin? (Score:2)
From having read bot positive and negative articles about bitcoins, it sounds to me that the system just can't work as it is flawed in too many ways.
Is PayPal doing this as a mean to be in should this concept go mainstream or is intending to focus on making it mainstream?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Bitcoin is still cumbersome for everyday transactions, but it's great for settling balances internationally. Paypal probably wants to be known as the easy way to use Bitcoin for small and quick transactions (something that Coinbase has a headstart in), and capture the market before someone else comes up with a way to use Bitcoin directly.
Re:Can someone clarify the state of BitCoin? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not exactly a guru of bitcoin, but I'll summarize as somebody who's tried it recently out of curiosity.
Getting into it is surprisingly difficult. Purchasing bitcoins right now (or before paypal maybe) is pretty hard. Near impossible to find a site that will let you buy with a credit card, because sellers get screwed over with chargebacks.
Mining bitcoin at this point isn't worth it. At all. A high end GPU working 24/7 would get you $10 per month while costing more in power. At this point mining is only profitable to people willing spend a lot of money on very specialized hardware.
Once you have some, it's easy enough to use. But it's an unregulated system, so there is some danger and no safety net. If you're ever going to put serious money into it, be very, very careful. Danger comes both from things like getting hacked, and from that the value fluctuates without any central control.
Tax-wise it seems tricky. It seems (you're nuts if you take advice from a random stranger on this) that it's considered an asset, and if bitcoin gains in value you have to pay tax on that. Up to you to figure out how to keep track of it and do it properly.
As far as working, it does. You can buy stuff with it fine, and the USD/BTC exchange rate is stable enough. If you have cash to spare it might be worth to get some, just in case it increases a lot in value (I doubt paypal would get into it without consulting a bunch of lawyers), but you'd be nuts to put your life savings into it.
Re: (Score:2)
Like most assets, don't you (in the US) just pay tax on it when you sell it and realize a profit? Just like stock?
That doesn't seem tricky at all.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, but:
You buy 0.1 BTC at $500/BTC. Later you buy 0.2 BTC at $550/BTC. Later you buy 0.2 BTC at $560/BTC. Your client will say you have 0.5 BTC, but internally there actually are 3 separate accounts that it'll handle transparently. If you pay 0.3 BTC to somebody, it'll have to issue payments from at least two of them.
So, you wait a month, now it's $570/BTC, and sell 0.05 BTC.
My understanding is that it's perfectly possible that your client will decide to source bitcoins from all 3 accounts in some random
Re:Can someone clarify the state of BitCoin? (Score:5, Informative)
You buy 10 shares GOOG at $500. Later you buy 20 share of GOOGs at $550. Later you buy 20 share of GOOG at $560.
If you pay 30 shares to somebody
So, you wait a month, now GOOG is at $570, and you sell 5 shares.
Your cost base is ( $500 * 10 + $550 * 20 + $560 * 20) / 50 = 544
When you paid someone that 30 shares, the price at that instant was $560, so you made a capital gain of (560-544)*30 = $480
When you sold 5 shares at $570, you made a capital gain of (570-544)*30 = $130
I really don't see what's so confusing about this.
Re: (Score:1)
Mod parent up. Calculating the purchase/sell/holding cost/price is a solved problem. It will be up to YOU to solve it, but is fundamentally similar to buying and selling anything with taxable value. Stocks, CDs, Bonds, corporate debt, land, works of art, etc. are all done is exactly the same manner. It is immature of the BTC crowd to think that the taxable value cannot be calculated.
Re: (Score:2)
It can be calculated. The real question is will it be reported to the tax authorities. No report, no tax.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing at all confusing, when you read the fine print. Paypal wont be 'accepting' bitcoin, it will be allowing transactions and the merchants are the ones who will only voluntarily accepting bitcoin and paying real money to allow those funny money transaction. So Paypal will sneakily be handling bitcoin to earn real money and pushing all the risk on merchants foolish enough to accept them. As to be accepted the majority of merchants will refuse them. So bitcoin will only be a parallel currency and not as
Re: (Score:2)
FIFO is just the default most brokerages use. You can also (usually) choose to use LIFO, or even specific lot selection. As far as I know, you can only use "Average Cost" with Mutual Funds, though.
Re: (Score:2)
That sounds just like tracking stock purchases and that is pretty straightforward.
Re: (Score:2)
Stocks don't have this built in either. Broker services have some of this but it is still the responsibility of the investor to track when they purchased what and when they sold what. For instance, I can buy stock through multiple brokerages and transfer the knowledge of my ownership from brokerage to brokerage and the purchase date/purchase price might not always transfer. It is my responsibility to track that and I can't rely on any kind of historical market record other than my own because those usually
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but:
You buy 0.1 BTC at $500/BTC. Later you buy 0.2 BTC at $550/BTC. Later you buy 0.2 BTC at $560/BTC. Your client will say you have 0.5 BTC, but internally there actually are 3 separate accounts that it'll handle transparently. If you pay 0.3 BTC to somebody, it'll have to issue payments from at least two of them.
So, you wait a month, now it's $570/BTC, and sell 0.05 BTC.
My understanding is that it's perfectly possible that your client will decide to source bitcoins from all 3 accounts in some random quantities that add to 0.05. So how much have you gained? Hard to tell, since the standard client won't directly tell you what accounts it used, and doesn't know how much you bought each part of your balance for, it doesn't do banking at all.
Software could automatically apply a LIFO or FIFO scheme to the coins and calculate their basis when coins are spent or sold. See http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... [slashdot.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, of course it could, my point is that right now it doesn't. But I figure that'll eventually appear. Meanwhile people will have to do it by hand. Fortunately the records are there.
Re: (Score:1)
O, yes, it's easy enough. You buy some $5 item on eBay using PayPal in BTC. Then you download the most recent copy of the blockchain, go through the transactions to figure out exactly which of your bitcoins was used and how much those particular bitcoins were worth when you acquired them (either by buying them with USD, or being paid in BTC by somebody else). Then you calculate the capital gains tax to add to your tax report. Simply do this for every transaction you make. Easy, it's just a simple habit to g
LIFO a good default policy ? (Score:3)
FIFO or LIFO is to simple when dealing with taxable transactions. The sell priority goes Losses > Long-term gains > Short-term gains.
Its not really that simple either. For example LIFO (last in first out) has the advantage that it helps accumulate long term gains. So applying LIFO within the current short term gains helps a particular coin age and move from the short term to long term. Also one might want to be selective about when long term gains are spent. Again, LIFO is useful in this respect in that it prefers to spend short term.
In short LIFO may be a good default policy, maximizing and preserving the long term gains. A policy th
Re: (Score:2)
And this is different than stocks how?
Re: (Score:2)
And this is different than stocks how?
I don't have to worry about capital gains on my stock portfolio when I buy a sandwich.
Re: (Score:2)
Your stock broker reports your gains/losses to the IRS.
Re: (Score:2)
2. Isn't BTC anonymous hence why bother reporting?
You better have documented some source for the money on your tax return after $100,000 USD suddenly lands in your bank account, or the government will throw you in jail.
Taxed when you spend, not just when you sell (Score:3)
Like most assets, don't you (in the US) just pay tax on it when you sell it and realize a profit? Just like stock? That doesn't seem tricky at all.
If I understand things correctly, the tricky part is that you realize a taxable gain when you spend your bitcoins. Not merely when you sell them. Buy a coffee, remember to calculate and report your gain.
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
Re: (Score:2)
That's because the act of spending a BitCoin is really the act of selling it for "real" money and then spending the real money. Everything I've seen seems to be treating them very much the same way stocks are treated for taxing purposes.
Re: (Score:2)
That's because the act of spending a BitCoin is really the act of selling it for "real" money and then spending the real money. Everything I've seen seems to be treating them very much the same way stocks are treated for taxing purposes.
In common scenarios the merchant uses a bitcoin exchange as an intermediary, as a payment processor. The customer never sees or touches a fiat currency (dollars, euros, etc), they only see bitcoins. The merchant never sees or touches a bitcoin, they only see fiat currency. Its only the exchange, a third party, that sells the bitcoins for fiat. The exchange accepts bitcoins from the customer and sends fiat to the merchant.
Re: (Score:2)
And somewhere in that chain both customer and merchant "know" the real dollar value they are talking about. For taxing purposes, the customers will need to know.
Re: (Score:2)
And somewhere in that chain both customer and merchant "know" the real dollar value they are talking about. For taxing purposes, the customers will need to know.
Of course, that was my point a couple posts up. :-) One needs to know the basis and the value at the time of trade. I was only objecting to the notion that the customer is selling the coins and using fiat currency. It seems more of a barter and of course one needs to know the value of the object being bartered for tax purposes.
I wanted to point out that the sale takes place at the exchange to emphasize the conveniences and lack of risk in such systems. The merchant prices and does all their accounting in
Re: (Score:2)
You can object to the notion all you want, but as far as your tax return goes, that's exactly how you have to treat transactions in Bitcoins, as if you sold the Bitcoins for dollars at the moment of purchase.
Re: (Score:2)
You can object to the notion all you want, but as far as your tax return goes, that's exactly how you have to treat transactions in Bitcoins, as if you sold the Bitcoins for dollars at the moment of purchase.
Denominating the value of your trade in dollars does not change the fact that the coins are sold by someone else. And it does not change the fact that this someone else pays the merchant a different value than what they received from the sale, i.e. the merchant is paid the exact dollar amount specified at the beginning of the transaction regardless of the actual proceeds from the sale. There are three transactions reported to the IRS here and only one is a sale of bitcoins.
Re: (Score:2)
So what happens when you sell coins using LIFO/FIFO and take a loss?
I assume you may not combine losses with gains and report the difference since the IRS made that ruling that gambling in one session has to account for them separately so you pay taxes on winning hands without accounting for losing hands.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You would spend any coins that you bought at a higher price first (report a loss for a tax deduction).
Not necessarily. If they are aged enough to be long term one may want to hold on to them. Spending long term assets may be something that you want to occur as an exceptional case, a manual selection, not a default automatic policy. Timing the loss is sometimes a strategic decision.
Plus if they are approaching an age where they will convert from short to long term assets one may want to hold on to them.
Then you'd spend coins that are already old enough to be taxed as an investment (lower rate), ...
Again, possibly best to be a manual selection not an automatic default. For example it would be regrett
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it's taxed like any other investment asset.
The issue is that, if you go ahead and use it as a "currency", each transaction becomes a taxable event. Say you buy bitcoins when they're worth $500 each. You buy a coffee when they're down to $490, get groceries when they're at $600, buy more Bitcoins when they're worth $575 (new tax lot), then buy a Dell computer when they're at $375, each of these transactions is a separate item on your Schedule D.
For people who have them, the best 'solution' from a tax co
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
If you want privacy, you can use localbitcoins.com and find an individual to get them from directly, for cash, or find one of the rapidly growing number of bitcoin ATMs (though there are not that many yet) that accept cash and send you coins.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the way to get bitcoin is to sell products or services that people want to purchase in bitcoin. Just like any other currency, you get it by doing stuff for people who have it. Not everyone in the real economy gets money by digging gold out of the ground to buy stuff with. The currency has to circulate to be of value. Mining and banking and currency conversions are niche edge activities and you have to be both buying and selling to be circulating (otherwise you are stockpiling or running out)
Re: (Score:2)
You can buy stuff with it fine, and the USD/BTC exchange rate is stable enough.
Until it crashes or bubbles or both in short succession, which it has a nasty habit/history of doing.
Im gonna keep my money in more stable financial vehicles for now; I agree with most of the things you said and they all scream "dont touch it unless you like troubles."
Re: (Score:3)
It's risky of course, but it has its upsides. Eg, here's an ID:
1GFRGRC37baNYgL6JbwrbXft2XjDHskFwf
If you want to buy me a beer, it's easy. No need to exchange personal information, mess with bank transfers, or anything of the sort. I can accept payments without even making any preparation -- install the client, generate the ID, figure out how to get the money later. That's the sort of thing where I think it does great -- allowing the near equivalent of just buying somebody a beer in person, but through the i
Re: (Score:2)
That's the sort of thing where I think it does great -- allowing the near equivalent of just buying somebody a beer in person, but through the internet.
And with all the costs of obtaining Internet access wherever you want to spend money, such as upgrading from a dumb phone with a voice plan to a smart phone with a voice and data plan.
Re: (Score:2)
Why? Is there some reason you can't use euros/dollars/whatever in meatspace and Bitcoin as "Internet cash"?
Re: (Score:2)
Right, its really cool and Im sure in 10 years it might turn out to be a great thing, but right now an objective analysis of it says its a really poor place to stick money.
Re: (Score:2)
That deflation is dangerous is a myth perpetrated by the banking cartel. People have short term needs, like food, housing, and utilities. They will continue to buy those things regardless of whether inflation is +2% or -2% (i.e. deflation). Investors with a clue adjust nominal returns to "real" returns after inflation. Deflation just means they make that adjustment the other way. They still demand a certain real return for a given risk level, so the nominal return will adjust to get it.
Bitcoin represen
Re: (Score:2)
In deflationary currency returns a risk free rate, which will drive out any investment not returning more.
Then you are back to the old gold hording problem, which would lead to currency printing, which would kill deflation. But there could be some bad months in there. Obviously currency printing isn't a problem/solution with bitcoins.
Bitcoins can't work as a currency by themselves. But they can serve to keep the bastards somewhat honest by providing global competition in currencies.
Re: (Score:2)
In deflationary currency returns a risk free rate, which will drive out any investment not returning more.
Which is good, because that would have been a poor investment anyway. For the investor, and for society; any money poured into a venture paying less than the "risk-free" rate of deflation would take real resources away from other investments with higher returns. We're all better off if that money is "hoarded" instead until a better rate of return comes along.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Can someone clarify the state of BitCoin? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bitcoin itself doesn't have any known security flaws. One usability issue is that you can't instantly guarantee a transfer of coins -- nobody is going to be buying coffee with it directly.
It's not so much about problems with Bitcoin, but with Bitcoin "banks" that turned out to be incredibly insecure. The banks were created to exchange paper money for Bitcoins, and to facilitate instant transfers. They just happen to be incredibly bad at it, and because there is no regulation like an actual bank, are pretty much free to be as bad as they want.
Paypal is actually a good fit, as Bitcoin is essentially a decentralized Paypal. Paypal is also pretty well known for the same evils as they aren't regulated like an actual bank either, but they've got a lot of infrastructure and experience that could make them a far better Bitcoin bank than what's available right now.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not so much about problems with Bitcoin, but with Bitcoin "banks" that turned out to be incredibly insecure.
Sort of like how quantum cryptography is unhackable -- until you hook it up to a live system and try to use it in the real world, and then using it turns out to have a number of potential exploitable factors.
Every indication is that you want to stay away from bitcoin for a number of years until the dust settles, unless youre the sort of person who has a lot of fun at the roulette wheel in Vegas.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You have no need to break the encryption, you just need to break the system.
Perhaps you've heard of 'heart bleed'? One flaw in an ancillary portion can be enough to break it from every practical perspective.
Re: (Score:2)
You completely and utterly missed my point.
The math and crypto can be good, that doesnt mean the system as a whole is secure. If you are using strong-crypto-based currencies, but have to trust unreliable partners to perform transactions, or if the system suffers from potential issues like the majority issue, none of the crypto strength ends up mattering.
You're experiencing the exact blindness I was talking about: you see the strong bits (based on SHA hashes), and are missing the relevant bits (practical s
Re: (Score:2)
Paypal is also pretty well known for the same evils as they aren't regulated like an actual bank either,
yes they are. they are registered as a bank in Europe and regulated like one in other places too ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Only for certain things. Not everything they do falls under that umbrella. Their credit card does, as an example. Just storing 'cash' in a paypal 'account', not so much.
Re: (Score:2)
The summary is all over the place (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as the main story goes, I wouldn't call it "jumping in with both feet" when they're not actually even enabling it on Paypal. They're just putting it on Braintree. While that might look like a huge investment, it fits Paypal's hobby budget pretty well.
Ah, hell (Score:5, Funny)
...and people were afraid MtGox was going to steal your money. Well, at least there is no doubt with PayPal.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a good short sell opportunity.
PayPal steal your bitcoin (Score:2)
Bitcoin is anonymous, Paypal is a govt stooge (Score:1)
IS *NOT* ANONYMOUS (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire security scheme of bitcoin is actually based on the exact opposite:
Not only is it not anonymous, it's public knowledge *BY DESIGN*.
Every single bitcoin transaction (or any other alt-coin for that matter) is publicly broadcast on the network.
Every single full node on the network is always aware of the transaction.
The point is that, thanks to this broadcast, every single bitcoin user can independently verify the transactions and (based on these checks) together all the node can agree who has how many coins left.
Unlike traditional banking (or a web payment like paypal, for exemple), there is no central authority that is the official referrer about account balances (with banks: the bank is the official authority about the content of its users' acounts. With webpayment: paypal is the official authority about the content of paypal accounts, etc. BUT with bitcoin, everyone can control the history of transactions by looking up the blockchain, there is no official central "Bitcoin, inc." that is in charge).
Due to this design (security by public broadcast) that means that no transaction is secret.
At best, it could be called "pseudonymous": the transaction are hidden behind public key hashes. (the civil/legal identity of parties of a transaction aren't directly written into the block chain. Instead the public key hashes are written).
so there's a low risk that an identity is immediately leaked, just by casual look of the blockchain.
It at least takes a conscious effort to track public keys accros the blockchain and follow the money train until an actual identity can be matched.
But that's completely possible and well within the capabilities of governments.
Re:IS *NOT* ANONYMOUS (Score:4, Informative)
Though technically right it is not complete.
#1) You can create a new public key for each and every transaction which makes linking a key to a person hard.
#2) You can transfer them across Tor net and then linking them to an address is hard if not impossible.
#3) You can set up any number of clients on a private network and transfer coins between the clients.
#4) You can use tumblers and coin exchanges to disconnect a given key from you and a transaction.
So although bitcoin itself is not anonymous you can make it anonymous. Just as e-mail and browsing the web is not anonymous but you can take steps to make it anonymous.
Following the trail. (Score:2)
Regarding: 1, 2 and 3 :
I wasn't referring to matching single transaction/single keys and IP adresses, etc.
I was more referring that, if you want to use bitcoin in a meaningful way, you'll have to interract with the real world.
At some point, a real bitcoin user who isn't just playing with bitcoin for the sake of it, will buy an actual good.
Meaning that the seller will need to send the goods to an actual address.
At the other end of the chain, a would-be future bitcoin customer will need actual BTCs to do tran
Re: (Score:2)
It depends on what you mean by altcoins. There are several newer cryptocurrencies with a fresh start, instead of cloning the Bitcoin codebase and changing a few parameters/algos, and these take the privacy aspect to a new level. I'm mostly familiar with Boolberry and Monero, both of which share a common Cryptonote ancestry.
However, Bitcoin's cash-like privacy is probably good enough for many people. You can trace the movements of cash via serial numbers, but this in itself is a fair amount of work, and y
Re: (Score:2)
It at least takes a conscious effort to track public keys accros the blockchain and follow the money train until an actual identity can be matched.
But that's completely possible and well within the capabilities of governments.
Not really true. There are two things you can do to remain anonymous:
1. You can buy coins for cash from random people meeting up in coffee shops.
2. You can put the coins through a laundry; they get merged with coins from everyone else using the service, and spit out in a random number of accounts with random quantities all adding up to what you put in (minus fees).
Either one of those options provides a fair degree of anonymity. The two together make you untraceable, unless you've done something else to l
A match made in heaven (Score:5, Funny)
Awesome! All the user friendliness of bitcoin combined with the great customer support of Paypal.
Freeze (Score:3)
Joking aside:
at least bitcoin has on purpose been designed in such a way to make it impossible for a central authority to freeze an account, because on purpose there are no central authorities.
So that's a relatively small advantage over paypal.
(although, in both case, these system should be used EXCLUSIVELY for payments only. You should only use them to push money around, you should NOT use them to store money. Neither Paypal, nor the bitcoin network are banks. So if you got a big amount of money frozen, it
Re: (Score:2)
Another huge difference is that PayPal can freeze more than just accounts, they can freeze *people* such that they can't even create a new account. Not only does Bitcoin not have a central authority that can freeze any account, but you don't need anyone's permission to have a Bitcoin account. A number of people, including myself, have lifetime PayPal bans and PayPal won't even tell them why.
Re: (Score:1)
A number of people, including myself, have lifetime PayPal bans and PayPal won't even tell them why.
Bullshit.
I'm not saying you aren't banned, but you know why you are banned. I've yet to see any instance where someone showed their transaction history and it wasn't clear to everyone else on the planet. It may not be a legitimate reason even, but you know.
Re: (Score:2)
Your position is equivalent to saying, "anyone who says they saw a UFO is lying because there's no evidence UFOs exist".
Well, I'll tell you what I do know. They claim I had another PayPal account with a different email address. They did give me that email address (after many, many rounds of back and forth and repeatedly insisting that they couldn't reveal it for security reasons). It's not an email address I've ever used, and it's at a domain I've never used or ever had any association with.
Of course, I hav
Re: (Score:2)
Only in the vacuous sense that I know that it's because PayPal claimed that I violated their terms. To know why I was banned, what I'd need to know is what they think I did and why they think I dd it. I do not know either of these things.
I do, however, know enough to know that they are incorrect. I know for a fact that I never used that email address. I offered to provide a signed and notarized statement to that effect to PayPal, but they simply said that their decision was final.
Re: (Score:2)
you should NOT use them to store money
I disagree. I made 10,000% interest last year. I think I'll continue to store my money in there.
Luck (Score:2)
I made 10,000% interest last year
And depending on the days you pick up, an investor might lose 4x of what money was invested.
You got lucky, others won't necessarily.
(I happen to have been lucky, too, only with a very small initial investment)
I started wondering... (Score:1)
Who really created Bitcoin and what this move to digital currency means for the future.
I have to admit I find a future of digital currency kind of creepy considering how easy it is for Nation States to monitor everything done online or in any network.
If we had a truly cashless society would there be the possibility of the anonymous purchase as you can with cash?
Yes I understand that was BC's whole thing, but what happens when you legitimize BC?
Does it remain anonymous or do you lose that some where in the c
Re: (Score:2)
If we had a truly cashless society would there be the possibility of the anonymous purchase as you can with cash?
Will cash remain to be anonymous? Right now every banknote has an unique number. The only thing for stores and banks to do is to band together and scan the money once when you get it from the ATM in the bank or as change in the store, and once when you pay with it in the store.
Re: (Score:2)
Banks are already required to scan and report the serial numbers of all banknotes for deposits/withdrawals. Heck, the last time I got cash directly from a teller, it came not from the teller's drawer but from a dispenser that probably had a scanner built in.
But if I get cash from Alice and give it to Bob, no banks involved, it's anonymous. Unlike Bitcoin.
Re: (Score:2)
Banks are already required to scan and report the serial numbers of all banknotes for deposits/withdrawals.
can you give me a reference?
Re: (Score:2)
Meant to have a "large amounts" in there. I thought it was part of the rules to track money laundering, just as any transfer over $10k (or is it $5k?) must be reported. Banks definitely scan large deposits, but I can't find a link to a legal requirement for the serial numbers (they scan for counterfeits as a matter of course). Bill serial number scanners are a real product, but they seem to be marketed to police evidence rooms, not to banks, so I could just be confused on this one.
Re: (Score:2)
"it could be shut off" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
A government could of course shut off BitCoin, torrent, email, or anything else on servers connected to the internet. The problem with BitCoin (unlike email) is it doesn't realty work on ad-hoc networks. Maybe there's no central authority, but a central network is required, so that transactions from anywhere can be processed by every processor (miner).
BitCoin is quite vulnerable to a powerful government agreement deciding to purge it from the internet. That seems unlikely though, as I think the big playe
Re: (Score:2)
No, bitcoin is less anonymous than cash - it's just new enough that the infrastructure to regulate and track it it hasn't been built yet.
What planet do you live on? (or what internet do you use?) I'm fairly sure that the NSA has been tracking bitcoin transactions for about as long as the criminals have been using it. Heck, even the FBI likely has the capacity.... You do realize that ALL transactions are public knowledge by design, ANYBODY could track everything.
Laundromat? (Score:2)
So will PP keep your BC and dollars separate, or will you be able to swap back and forth between the currencies (either directly or via ACH transfers into/out of you account)?
Re: (Score:2)
No. They'll just keep your BC and dollars...that's all.
Ripple/Stellar? (Score:2)
Ripple is a payment network in direct competition with PayPal, which just-so-happens to use a Bitcoin-like internal currency for mediating incompatible transactions. Stellar is a fork of Ripple which has been generating some buzz recently.
I would bet that PayPal's venturing into BitCoin in order to close the gap these systems are trying to exploit: ie. using a purely virtual, unregulated currency to make transaction costs near-zero. Out of all the choices they could make, BitCoin seems the most logical as i
Paypal + Bitcoin? (Score:2, Troll)
Man. Talk about a giant shit sandwich...
Re: (Score:2)
No, PayPal will not accept Bitcoin (Score:3)
Read the article. PayPal is not accepting Bitcoin. Braintree, which is owned by PayPal, sells a shopping cart checkout system which accepts various forms of payment. They're adding Bitcoin for merchants that want it. PayPal is not itself accepting Bitcoin, nor is eBay.
A number of shopping cart systems already offer Bitcoin as a payment method. Braintree is just catching up.
Re: (Score:3)
It's even worse than that. Apparently Braintree is not accepting Bitcoin themselves. They're passing the buck to Coinbase. Merchants who want to accept Bitcoin have to get their own Coinbase account. Coinbase is a broker; they exchange Bitcoins for dollars and pay dollars to the merchant. The merchant never sees Bitcoins.
Coinbase is flaky. Their business address is a mailbox company in SF. Their address registered with the SEC and FinCen is somebody's apartment. They have a "slow pay" reputation on bitco
I see no benefit to me to use, buy bit coins. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The point of bitcoin is to be a CURRENCY, not an investment. Sure, people invest in currencies all the time, but I don't have cash in my wallet in the hope that the dollar will go up relative to the euro, etc. I have it in my wallet so that I can buy $5 worth of food at a store without using a credit card.
Its main advantage is that you don't need anybody's permission to use it.
Suppose I have a hat and want to sell it to you for $20 (maybe on a site like Ebay). How do you give me $20? You can mail me a c
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Considering it's even banned in some countries, it's even illegal to use in some places. No permission necessary to break the law.
Sure, but the point is that no central body needs to endorse every user/transaction/etc. With something like a credit card you need to be blessed by a central authority before you can take part in a transaction from either side. In that regard it is like cash. It is illegal to do cash transactions in some circumstances in many countries, but to use cash you just have to have possession of it in practice.
Re: (Score:2)
And the only ones who can mine them are criminals stealing other peoples PC to do the mining. Someone here said its impossible to make a profit mining with one PC as the cost of mining it far greater then the profit.
Bitcoin mining these days is done using ASICS, not PC's...
I see no benefit to me to use, buy bit coins. I use dollars why should I switch unless to do something criminal?
Just because you don't see a benefit, doesn't mean it can't be beneficial to someone else in a different situation from your own. People didn't see much use to oil at first either. Doesn't mean the only other thing one can do with it must be something criminal...
Re: (Score:1)
Apple Pay was just announced... (Score:2)
Well...since Apple just announced Apple Pay, I guess they felt the need to get themselves into the headlines somehow. IMHO, this is probably more about their competition than it is about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin replacing PayPal ... (Score:2)
Well...since Apple just announced Apple Pay, I guess they felt the need to get themselves into the headlines somehow. IMHO, this is probably more about their competition than it is about Bitcoin.
What this is about is Bitcoin replacing PayPal, at least as a transaction processor, a transfer mechanism. As it is PayPal is basically doomed.
What PayPal is doing is trying to switch to a new business model. Become a bitcoin exchange converting USD/EUR/etc to and from Bitcoin, and also become an online Bitcoin wallet. However as an exchange or online wallet PayPal will be one of many. They won't be the 800-lb gorilla they once were.
Standards? (Score:2)
Is there any effort to match the headline with the contents of the linked articles? Here let me help free of charge:
"Payment processor (owned by eBay) is *looking into* accepting bitcoins months from now"
Yea that is just like paypal jumping in with both feet.
Simple math (Score:2)
Not a bank + Not a currency = Not a chance.
Re: (Score:2)
Paypal is just trying to survive
just shed a tear...
Re: (Score:2)
It just might work. Hell, people once bought pet rocks.
I was going to buy some of the pet rocks, but I heard the latency really sucks when using them for international money transfer, it was, like, way over 10 minutes to other continents. The privacy and fungibility aspects were also questionable. I wonder if they would be good for beating some clue into people who don't understand Bitcoin...
Re: (Score:2)
It just might work. Hell, people once bought pet rocks.
That's what they said about Hula Hoops and skate boards.... Ye of little faith, there is no bottom to the deaths of the stupidness of the American consumer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)