BitCoin Card To Launch In 2 Months, Says BitInstant 216
hypnosec writes "Charlie Shrem, co-founder of BitInstant LLC, has confirmed that a BitCoin-funded international debit/credit card should be available very soon. Giving a time frame of 6-8 weeks, Shrem said over an IRC chat session that the card will function like any other credit or debit card, and that it can be used at places where MasterCard is being accepted. Shrem has also said that the initial 1000-odd cards will be given for free and subsequent cards will carry a charge of around $10. Any transaction that is carried out through the card [will incur a] 1% BitCoin transfer fee on top of the $1.50 ATM withdrawal fee."
Dreading the Day (Score:3)
When BTC becomes ubiquitous and I'm paying .00000343 BTC for a soda.
Re:Dreading the Day (Score:5, Insightful)
if it happened no one would think of it that way, at least not any more than we currently think about driving cars around at some fraction of light years per second.
Re:Dreading the Day (Score:5, Funny)
Us old folks still remember the day when the speed limit was 2.5989246 × 10^-15 light years per second on the highway. Nowadays, you see people zooming along at 3.78025396 × 10^-15 light years per second in the 3.07145635 × 10^-15 light years per second zone. It's MADNESS!
Where's my cane?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Why are you obfuscating your numbers like this? You seem to never have heard of SI prefixes! Also, your accuracy is overblown. Say "2.6 femto light years per second" and everyone will understand you.
Oh, and you'll be fined 2.5 micro bitcoins for driving too fast.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm...
Lightyear is c*t. Lightyears per second is c*t/t. So why not simply measure speed as some fraction of speed of light? For example, 60 miles per hour is 8.94698959 Ã-- 10^-8*c, or 89 nanoc. And 88 miles per hour, the speed requried to break space-time -continuum, is 131 nanoc.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Dreading the Day (Score:5, Informative)
Also called 3.43 microBTC (of course slashdot doesn't support the mu sign, not like a nerdy site could need that). Probably around the same time Intel introduce their 0.000000008m processors.
Re: (Score:2)
More likely you'd pay 3.43 micro-BTC.
Yey! A BT story! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yey! A BT story! (Score:5, Funny)
A subsequent RaspberryPi story shouldnt take long now, so strap yourselves in guy's!
Business plan:
1. Mine bitcoins with your Raspberry Pi. [stackexchange.com]
2. Store the bitcoins on your Raspberry Pi [bitcointalk.org]
3. Use those bitcoins to buy another Raspberry Pi [bitmit.net]
4. ?
5. Profit!
Re:Yey! A BT story! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
No, these are great. It's August and Bitcoin stories are stoking demand, because for the second year in a row we're having an abnormal BTC price run-up (faltering lately, but still managing to hang in there).
I sold out a week ago and made 200% off coins I bought last November, completely on the theory that BTCs go scarce at the height of summer and suddenly stop moving when school starts.
Hookers, drug dealers and Russian Mafia rejoice! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hookers, drug dealers and Russian Mafia rejoice (Score:5, Insightful)
Please don't bundle the hookers with the rest of those, for they are service workers who involve nobody but themselves and their willing customers in their transactions. Also, please don't bundle the drug dealers, who are mere black market resellers, with extortionists and assassins.
Hookers are completely legit service providers, whether they happen to offend your personal morality or not. Drug dealers may or may not be legit, depending on their business practices. The Mafia, Russian or otherwise, is just a bunch of parasites which often preys on the first two groups. There's no other connection here.
Might be vaporware (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd take this with a grain of salt. This might be nothing but an idea and a photoshopped image [imgur.com].
Re: (Score:2)
limits and fraud (Score:3)
From their FAQ [bitinstant.com]:
If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering is to block transactions over a certain size, you fail. We're all dying to move away from that ridiculous idea that visa/mc/banks are currently using, because it is fundamentally broken. Who are you to tell people not to buy cars, home repairs, startup business equipment, etc...
Re: (Score:2)
Well, they'd rather not get raided by the IRS. I don't think I blame them, I wouldn't want to get raided by the IRS either.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It goes the other way around. "Oh, so you're doing transactions for more then $1000? We'll shut you down then".
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:limits and fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
You have failed the understand the problem here.
The fraud problem is not with Bitcoin. Bitcoins security model is very simple and easy to understand - you have private keys, protect them. If they're stolen, so is your money. There are no chargebacks. How secure you make those keys is entirely up to you. I have most of my money stored in an offline wallet encrypted under a very long passphrase, which is very secure but somewhat inconvenient. Then I have a smaller amount of money stored on my phone which doesn't require any passwords to use and I just accept that if my phone is stolen or lost somehow then I lose that money, but it's very convenient.
The fraud problem comes from the world of credit cards and traditional banking which are hopelessly insecure. Rather than give people the tools they need to secure their money, the managers of these systems simply shift the pain onto merchants who can do nothing about it beyond try and protect themselves with strict transaction limits, complicated risk analyses and just accepting that they'll lose some of the time.
There are also other reasons which you conveniently elided, such as government regulations that forbid / complicate large transactions.
Re: (Score:2)
You go too far. Insecure compared to what? Sites that maintain "accounts" of BTCs in wallets are routinely hacked, and employ many of the same identity validation procedures a human bank uses-- Mt. Gox won't remit human currency to you unless they have a photo ID on file, and their password recovery is comparable to any old dumb bank website. Keeping your bitcoins at home in a wallet or on paper i
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Compared to any reasonable system design.
Let's try an analogy. Imagine if the way you received email from somebody was by giving them the password to your email account, and then they logged in and uploaded a message directly to your inbox. There would be no SMTP, just IMAP upload/download. Nobody sane would design email in such a way because it'd mean to receive a message from somebody you'd have to trust them to not read your mail, which is unrealistic. But that's
Re: (Score:2)
They can write off the losses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCZRqH7sRyA [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Lol, no. Visa & Mastercard get cracked like three times a day, and that money never comes back; they just hide it in the fees they charge people.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't buy a car with a regular debit card, and you're dinging them for not supporting it with a Bitcoin debit card?
Re: (Score:2)
Trust me, it's very rewarding to talk a car salesman down to a price that's relatively near their cost and know their thinking "Well, I'll just screw him on the financing." and then lay the debit card down on his desk and say "put it on that"
I recommend calling the bank ahead of time and telling them the charge is coming though. I've had the bank sit on the charge and call me (literally while I was still standing at the counter) to verify I was really putting $15k on my debit card
Re: (Score:2)
There's nothing rewarding about giving a large chunk of cash to somebody when a loan was available for 2% or less... It's extremely easy to invest that same cash into something that pays more than that interest.
It's the exact same premise as your house loan which you say is for tax purposes. The loan interest is so affordable that the benefits you get from having the loan are higher than the payments you make in interest.
The house loan and its benefits are complicated, but it's still the same basic math --
Re: (Score:2)
"It's extremely easy to invest that same cash into something that pays more than [2%] interest."
If you had $10,000 right now, where would you invest to make an "easy" 2% ?
Money markets are paying 1%. 10 year T-notes are paying less than 2%. The only "easy" 2% I could find was a five year CD from my bank @ 2.08%. I consider having my money tied up for five years a hard way to earn 2%.
Re: (Score:2)
Lesson learned. Credit card debt ... never again.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
People talk about the mortgage interest deduction, but my taxes always come out cheaper without itemizing... I don't know what I'm doing wrong...
Why did you decide not to get a rewards card (e.g. 1% or 2% cash back) and pay it off each mont
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've done this too, about 8 years ago. (Yes, I had to call the credit card company, but I got it approved in 15 minutes over the phone.) I tried to do it again 2 years ago and the dealership refused, saying they will not accept more than X thousand dollars on a credit card (forget what X was, but it was less than half the price of the car). The dealerships aren't under any requirement to accept credit cards.
Re: (Score:2)
If your transaction system is sufficiently insecure that your only solution to fraud and money laundering is to block transactions over a certain size, you fail. We're all dying to move away from that ridiculous idea that visa/mc/banks are currently using, because it is fundamentally broken.
The brokenness is legal, not technical. The US government wants to know the details of every transaction over $10,000, and it's actually against the law for banks to offer privacy and anonymity to their customers on su
Re: (Score:2)
If so, BitCoin is certainly not a solution. It's designed for anonymous use of money, in other words money laundering.
But it's a pipe dream. Silk Road has practically no inherent advantages over its many non-bitcoin predecessors, e.g. Darkmarket.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm the guy telling you your transaction systems are totally fucking insecure, and who has lost money because of that fact. Insecure at $50 or $50,000 is still insecure and blocking transactions of any kind does not change that fact. The financial service providers need to move away from "secret pieces of information" (PINs, mother's maiden name, credit card numbers, CVV, billing address, etc) all of which are trivially easy to determine with google, facebook, or a camera phone. They need to move towards
Doesn't this go against the spirit of BitCoin? (Score:4, Interesting)
BitCoin's supposed to be this anonymous fiat currency system. Yet they're going through a decidedly non-anonymous regular payment card network (MasterCard).
I understand it makes the handling much easier for regular transactions, but doesn't this really sorta make it non-anonymous?
Though, I suppose since it's really just a currency enchange between bitcoin and whatever you use, though given it's volatility (and speculators don't help), it seems dangerous - one wrong swipe of the card and what was supposed to be a 1BTC/$15 USD exchange turns into a 1BTC/$4USD exchange because some hacker decided to cash out 40,000 BTC or something at that time. Remember the currency exchange on a credit card happens at the time of the transaction...
(And whoever is cheering the day BTC becomes the popular currency - remember there is no protection against the ills of the financial industry. Speculation, HFT (including arbitrarge amongst exchanges), etc.).
Re:Doesn't this go against the spirit of BitCoin? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a nice counterargument [bitcointalk.org] on the Bitcoin forum. To summarize, the card is a great promotional tool, especially for merchants who might consider alternatives to credit card charges.
In a way, the purpose of this card is to make itself obsolete. This is not so strange if you consider many important social movements.
Re:Doesn't this go against the spirit of BitCoin? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a really common misconception. The point of Bitcoin is not to be an anonymous currency. The point of Bitcoin is to be a peer to peer decentralized currency that has limited and slowly decreasing inflation. Let me quote the original description Satoshi had on the website (nowadays it's on the front page of the wiki):
You'll note there's nothing in there about being anonymous. Bitcoin is designed to provide privacy (or call it anonymity if you want), because it's a financial system and people demand financial privacy. Would you use a payment system that published a public record of everything you purchased? In the current banking system, privacy is provided by your bank and credit card company (ignoring the fact that they often waive that privacy for governments both domestic and foreign, with or without legal due process). But in a financial system that doesn't have banks, that approach obviously doesn't work.
As a result, nothing requires you to be anonymous if you use Bitcoin. Most people would like to keep their transaction history private but are happy to identify themselves to merchants and financial service providers (for instance, I do that, as does any user of Mt Gox).
Re: (Score:2)
It fails, then. The number of bitcoins in existence will hit a ceiling and then slowly decrease due to hard driver crashes and such, while the Bitcoin economy will grow geometrically (assuming the system takes off, of course). What'll you get is deflation (which may or may not be a bad thing), and then technical problems once the value of one coin has grown to the point where the fixed-point
Re: (Score:2)
Irreversible transactions aren't necessarily a good thing. Put the wrong part in your cart and checked out? Too bad, it's irreversible. No canceling that order!
You know what funds are available for spending within seconds? Cash. Yes, this is a valid argument because we're talking about using a damn MasterCard at a point-of-sale terminal in this article. Available in minutes is shit in comparison. Oh, and since they are reliant on the MasterCard network, you get the MasterCard funds transfer speed, so
Re: (Score:3)
Transactions OF BITCOIN are irreversible.
Transactions between two exchanging parties are, of course, reversible.
If I give you a $10 bill, or B10, that's yours, and there's no "undo" button in the system to reverse the charge.
Nothing, however, stops you from giving me back my $10 bill or my B10 if we cancel the transaction.
You trust a merchant a heck of a lot more when you give them your credit card or checking information.
Re: (Score:3)
No, but I trust the bank that stands behind the credit card to honor the legal agreements they put forth when I open the account. I ordered a part from some shop in California earlier this year, they sent the wrong thing and didn't want to RMA, so American Express yanked my money back out of their account.
They tried to fuck me, but the bank fucked them first as my proxy. It's called buyer protection, and most payment services offer this.
Re: (Score:2)
Deflation doesn't prevent Bitcoin being a viable currency, it just (theoretically) prevents a Bitcoin-based economy from functioning properly.
People are free to use as their currency whatever they feel like. The economic effects are secondary.
Re: (Score:2)
It's already not anonymous anyway. Bitcoins live in an account, the account is associated with a person. It's exactly as anonymous as a VISA card.
Re: (Score:2)
the account is associated with a person
Not necessarily. The "account" only becomes associated with a particular person if that person chooses to do so (e.g. by obtaining the card in question).
Re: (Score:2)
In addition, at the best case, you're getting hosed for an extra 1% transaction fee instead of using the regular Visa / MasterCard debit card that is right next this card in your wallet.
What could possibly stand in the way of adoption?!
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, the problems the financial industry have are really more about how it's organized and run rather than specific concepts like arbitrage. Arbitrage isn't bad, it's the reason we can say something like "Bitcoins are worth $10 each at the moment" and have it be accurate, even though in reality there are many different exchanges each with their own rate. If those rates start to drift too much arbitrageurs bring them back into line. And basically anyone can do this, it's a very competitive market so in theo
Re: (Score:2)
what was supposed to be a 1BTC/$15 USD exchange turns into a 1BTC/$4USD exchange
Out of curiosity, do you have anything to back that up? Not doubting you, but I would have expected it to be a 1BTC/$15 exchange turning into a 3.75BTC/$15 exchange.
Remember the currency exchange on a credit card happens at the time of the transaction...
It's false. Though admittedly most people have this misconception if they don't frequently shop internationally. Both Visa [visa.com] and Mastercard [mastercard.com] calculate their currency conversion rates on a daily basis:
How does Visa calculate its rate? Every day—except weekends, Memorial Day, Christmas Day and New Year's Day—Visa calculates the rate for the next day's transactions.
MasterCard uses multiple market sources (such as Bloomberg, Reuters, Central Banks and others) to develop exchange rates. These rates generally reflect either wholesale market rates or government mandated rates that are collected during the daily rate setting process. The displayed rates are derived from the buy and sell rates included in the MasterCard daily rate setting process and do not include any charges or markups applied by the Issuer. Please note that due to possible rounding differences, the displayed rates may not precisely reflect the actual rate applied to the transaction amount when converting to the cardholder billing amount. The exchange rate that is applied to a transaction is the exchange rate as of the day of settlement which is the day that MasterCard determines the settlement amount to be exchanged between the acquirer and the issuer. The settlement date is therefore typically different from the date of the actual transaction. MasterCard does not provide the exchange rate when purchases are converted from the local currency by the merchant to the cardholder's currency at the point of sale.
He's right about the bitcoin volatility part though. The current market depth[http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD_depth.html] down to $4 is 246010BTC ($1616992 USD); so if someone had $1.6 million dollars worth of bitcoins to waste, yes it's possible to bring the currency down to $4 in a single order.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
1% + $1.50 fee... so why would I want to use this? My current debit transaction fees are... zero. AND I don't have to worry about the value of the money in my account fluctuating wildly.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Because you're not a drug dealer?
Re: (Score:2)
Where does the ATM fee in dollars get charged to, anyway? Do you have to link a dollar bank account to this card, as well?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The alternative is
Since the earliest days there have been people who will take BTC and mail you a gift card and/or those prepaid credit card gift card things but you have to wait for postage. I guess there are people who will email you at least some "virtual" GC like amazon and itunes card numbers. I have no personal experience.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's one scenario:
You sell things on eBay. You have a Paypal account that can accept credit cards. When you sell you item, you pay Paypal 2.9% + $0.30 for merchant fees.
Or, you sell things on eBay. You accept BitCoin. When you pull the money out of the ATM, you pay 1% + $1.50.
For a $100 item, BitCoin costs you $2.50 and Paypal costs you $3.20.
Re: (Score:2)
Except this is the actual scenario:
You sell things on eBay. You have a Paypal account that can accept credit cards. When you sell your item, you pay Paypal 2.9% + $0.30 for merchant fees.
Or, you sell things on eBay. You accept BitCoin. eBay deletes your auction, and maybe your account.
Supposing eBay DIDN'T ban you, there are cheaper ways to accept payment. In Canada an Interac e-transfer works essentially the same way PalPal does (you send money from your bank account to someone else, identified by the
Re: (Score:3)
I think you missed my point: it is cost competitive with existing, competitive solutions.
It gets even more competitive when you already have a quantity of bitcoins or don't plan on withdrawing them from an ATM, or when comparing with international rates for services like Paypal.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If you travel overseas (from the US), then transaction fees are not zero. In such case it might make sense.
All the grouchers need to understand that this is a journey. PayPal was not perfect from day one - this is a new paradigm that still needs to evolve. The perfect is the enemy of the good. - Voltaire
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, if I travel TO the US, my fees are not zero.
If I use my debit card to withdraw cash outside my home country my bank charges me nothing. The bank whose machine I'm using charges me some fee though. I really doubt this card will be any different, except that your bank (BitInstant) will charge you as well.
If using it as a credit card, my Mastercard charges me nothing to use anywhere MC is accepted, except the exchange rate, which is set in the bank's favour. BitInstant will charge $1.50 plus 1%, p
Re: (Score:2)
Anonimity (Score:3)
Wasn't the whole point of Bitcoin for it to be anonymous, like cash? Wouldn't having a card, with your name on it, to transfer Bitcoins to/from defeat that purpose, or at the very least flag you as a suspicious-individual-dealing-with-shady-untrackable-currency-used-by-hackers in the yes of the feds?
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't having a card, with your name on it
I have little use for a "Bitcoin" card with my name on it.
Right now you can go on silk road (and many other places...) and turn BTC into anonymous visa/MC prepaid "credit card" gift cards. I'm not motivated enough to determine where this product fits into the existing market WRT to more or less anonymity and more or less fees and more or less trustworthyness. Superficially with no research it sounds astoundingly lower anonymity, more fees, and much less trustworthy than the guys who've been happily doing
Re: (Score:2)
Considering Mastercard's stance on Wikileaks, I'm quite confident that they wouldn't go ahead with this without an explicit arrangement with the US government. And that may well be "ease of nabbing the Silk Road kiddies when they try to cash out".
Re: (Score:2)
How is it decentralized if you have exchanges and a very much centralized MasterCard issuing cards for it? The only thing that comes close to being decentralized is the minting process, and even that isn't decentralized but rather distributed to private parties as opposed to being done in a limited number of dedicated facilities. I wouldn't be surprised that this is Bitcoin's attempt at staying alive by giving federal governments what they want.
It's been done, and it was a scam. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's already BitCard, from "Global Standard Bank" [globalstandardbank.com] They're not a real bank. They used to have pictures of their supposed building and offices in Montreal, which turned out to be a Photoshopped picture of a building on the US west cost, with a fake sign added, and a picture of a bank interior in Florida. They're not registered with Canadian banking authorities.
Here's the discussion on Bitcoin forums [bitcointalk.org] about them.
As for the new operation, I have a hard time taking seriously a financial institution that announces its products on IRC.
Re: (Score:2)
> As for the new operation, I have a hard time taking seriously a financial institution that announces its products on IRC.
Bitinstant is well known in the community, as are the actual people behind it. What's wrong with Charlie Shrem, who frequents IRC, letting it be known that his company will be releasing a new product soon? This isn't after all their official "we have actually released this" announcement. Rather it's just a way to let people know and find some people who are willing to sign up for the
This could be great for Bitcoin (Score:2)
--Bitcoin is not required to be anonymous to be useful, and it's a benefit you can still have if you forego the credit card
--The point of the credit card is to make it possible to leverage your Bitcoins for every day purposes. If you reload the card using Bitcoins, but then you can use the card anywhere people use Mastercard -- now your Bitcoin savings can be used just
Re: (Score:3)
FWIW, I think you are missing the point.
This is simply a vanity-marketed stored-value reusable gift card. The vendor of this gift card just happens to accept bitcoin in exchange for value-add. This isn't any different than any other partner-reward card that puts value into a debit card, except you are rewarded by being able to pay in bitcoin instead of say buying gas or groceries (oh and you have to pay 1%+ATM fee on top of that instead of say getting 2% back)...
Vanity/Affinity gift-card marketing works g
Ultimate Inconvenience (Score:2)
Sweet. At last we've found a way to combine the inconvenience of finding a merchant that sells something you want and accepts Bitcoins with the inconvenience of finding a merchant that sells something you want and accepts non Visa/MC/Discover/Amex cards!
can I? (Score:2)
Re:My last virus clenaup involved BitCoin processi (Score:5, Interesting)
It probably involved email and HTTP too. Do you trust them?
I think in the next 6-12 months we'll see botnets largely stop mining on Bitcoin because the rollout of ASIC mining hardware will make virus-infected PCs hopelessly un-competitive, even though the electricity is free. They're already worthless for doing CPU mining even if you have thousands of them and soon even if you have a lot of infected gaming machines the return will probably not be worth the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Financial transactions via HTTP? Totally secure! Man in the Browser ... you got me there.
An unregulated virtual cash system is certainly a great idea, but BitCoin? Bitcoinica announced that they are upgrading their exchange "to a professional level of security" just this year. Trustworthy, what was I thinking?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So a virus used your computer to generate bitcoins, and now you don't trust the currency? Thank god it didn't steal your bank account info, you you'd have to stop using the US dollar as well!
Re: (Score:2)
I think his implication is that bitcoin is sleazy because it's used primarily by sleazy people, black market transaction, and people who will write viruses just to get more of them. Bitcoin hypothetically has legitimate uses whereas normal currency has been shown to have actual legitimate uses in practice.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My last virus clenaup involved BitCoin processi (Score:5, Funny)
Please send me you untrusted dollars. I'll watch over them for you.
Re: (Score:2)
I DO NOT WANT
To pay a RENT on BitCoins.
Fuck 'em. This is the same kind of transaction rent that makes "real money" truly evil.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed (however, it's a payment processor, not BitCoin itself, that is taxing things). But it works, I think, in the long run: merchants will wise up, and learn that in-network transfers cost them a lot less (less expensive that Mastercard / Visa, and the money is theirs).
Re: (Score:2)
You aren't paying 'rent' you are paying a pretty cheap transaction (by credit card standards) fee to move in and out of the mainstream economy.
You call a $1.50 ATM fee per transaction pretty cheap?
Re: (Score:2)
You aren't paying 'rent' you are paying a pretty cheap transaction (by credit card standards) fee to move in and out of the mainstream economy.
You call a $1.50 ATM fee per transaction pretty cheap?
For drawing cash out of an atm in a foreign country yes.
wtf do you think you'd use it for? paying at mcdonalds? no, the primary purpose is for you to be able to sell bitcoins and draw the cash as cash out of the wall.
Re: (Score:2)
Why the hell would anyone want to do that, when you can already convert BTC to cash through a number of online mechanisms (as one of the simplest, gox->dwolla costs $0.25 per transfer)?
I love the idea, and fully support (yes, even use, when possible) BitCoins, but sorry, this sounds DOA - And not for reasons having anything to do with the "B
Re: (Score:3)
You need to be fully verified in both mtgox and dwolla (ie send them a copy of your id and a recent utility bill to both web sites). Also, to witdraw from mtgox, you have to wait 6 - 8 business days for the mtgox -> dwolla transfer and 2 -3 more days for the dwolla to your bank transfer. In addition to the 25 cents charge, there is a 0.55% fee that mtgox charges for each bitcoin transaction to both the sender and the receiver, so total cost would be 1.1% + 25 cents.
So given all that, these seems like kin
Re: (Score:3)
Why would you withdraw cash and spend it at McDonalds if you have a completely anonymous Mastercard that you can use directly? Cash uses are very limited these days and look odd if they are more than $40 or so, you can use a credit card everywhere in any amount from $0.10 to $5,000 and nobody blinks. This works especially well if you have a legitimate income stream that can be used to explain how you pay your household expenses. Using your bit funded card frees all your income up for funding on the book tra
Re:My last virus clenaup involved BitCoin processi (Score:5, Insightful)
They need to find a new bank.
Re: (Score:3)
Wait, who's paying atm fees every time they use their Mastercard at a merchant?
They need to find a new bank.
Sadly, it is the merchant who is paying the fees most of the time.
There ain't no free lunch, and if merchants were allowed to charge the debit/credit card fee that they are charged by the card company for each transaction, it is very possible that most people would be using cash instead.
Frankly, a $1.50 per transaction is pretty reasonable all things considered.
Yes, it is possible for some merchants to essentially be paying banks for the right to give you a free lunch if you are buying something for a relat
Re: (Score:2)
That's really how it works where you live? In Argentina it's forbidden to charge extra for debit/credit cards, and debit cards will give you a 4.7% refund on all purchases at the end of the month.
In short, I save 4.7% of everything I pay in debit card, while extracting money from the ATM is annoying, and they usually don't even have change.
Re: (Score:2)
You would be surprised at the number of people who use a credit card or debit card at McDonalds, other fast food places, 7-11s, or Wawas. They could have just hit the ATM for $20 and saved a few dollars by paying cash.
Excuse me? I don't pay anything to use my card at any of those places. In fact, I get cash back every time I use my card. Paying cash would actually cost me more.
Re:My last virus clenaup involved BitCoin processi (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My last virus clenaup involved BitCoin processi (Score:4, Insightful)
You may want to look into the costs of handling cash and cheques. There's a reason the card people can charge what they do.
Re: (Score:3)
I use a credit card at those places. I get about 2.61% back at restaurants (3x points for restaurants, but it's 115 pts/$1 for credits), and 2% back at gas stations and grocery stores. Gas costs more (technically it's a cash discount) at the time of purchase, but count
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't trust computers. I watched a Highlander II DVD on mine, and since then I've a very expensive portable locked in the cupboard doing nothing.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Legendary security (Score:4, Interesting)
I've seen where some of the sites that accept and trade bitcoins were hacked, but AFAIK the bitcoin system itself has never been hacked. Many, many more dollar and euro based websites are hacked, and dollars are printed freely even in countries that aren't supposed to print them (the dollar "system" has been hacked).
Yet we use dollars and euros.
Re: (Score:2)
That's just like saying that your buying choices can be tracked when you withdraw cash from the ATM.