I've been saying this for over a year now -- BitCoin will not succeed because it simply cannot offer competitive transaction fees. Merchants are upset enough by the ~3% they're paying to VISA or AmEx on every swipe, they're not going to move to a system that costs $30.
That's not the true cost of accept VISA, since every time there's a chargeback, the merchant is also the one who pays the bill, not only with lost merchandising, time, etc but potentially fees (e.g. Stripe charges $15 per chargeback).
Sure, but chargeback rates are low enough (somewhere between 0.2% and 0.4% of revenue for online merchants, much much lower for brick-and-mortar) that it's inconsequential when comparing it to flat rate $30. Additionally, 3% is about as high as VISA rates go -- WalMart, McDonalds, and the rest pay lower.
First off, it's spelled "Bitcoin", not "BitCoin". Spelling it the latter way looks wrong in the same way that "FireFox" or "FaceBook" looks wrong.
Secondly, even if the author is correct about the $30/transaction figure - this is still competitive with bank wires, which currently charge $25 or more (often up to double that for international wire transfers).
Finally, there are many other benefits to bitcoin other than lower transaction fees. They're difficult to confiscate, immune to monetary inflation, and they don't require a trusted third-party.
but nowhere near competitive with the credit card network, or the money transfer systems in every developed country other than the US (most of which do real-time transfers for less than pennies on the dollar). Even in the US, I guarantee that ACH will die faster than Bitcoin will get cheap
Bitcoin transactions currently are cheap. A typical transaction fee is 0.0001 BTC, which is equal to 0.05 USD at current exchange rates. If you wait long enough between sending transactions, you can send a transaction with zero fees. This fee is the same whether you're sending 1 BTC, or 1 million BTC.
that's the fee, but BTC prints money out of thin air every time a transaction is processed. If you compare transaction volume to payout volume, the effective transaction fee is on the order of 5% or $30, as explained in the original article... additionally, once BTC refuses to print any more coin, then the miners will start charging the money movers for their services, rather than charging the BTC network itself.
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I've been saying this for over a year now -- BitCoin will not succeed because it simply cannot offer competitive transaction fees. Merchants are upset enough by the ~3% they're paying to VISA or AmEx on every swipe, they're not going to move to a system that costs $30.
That's not the true cost of accept VISA, since every time there's a chargeback, the merchant is also the one who pays the bill, not only with lost merchandising, time, etc but potentially fees (e.g. Stripe charges $15 per chargeback).
Sure, but chargeback rates are low enough (somewhere between 0.2% and 0.4% of revenue for online merchants, much much lower for brick-and-mortar) that it's inconsequential when comparing it to flat rate $30. Additionally, 3% is about as high as VISA rates go -- WalMart, McDonalds, and the rest pay lower.
First off, it's spelled "Bitcoin", not "BitCoin". Spelling it the latter way looks wrong in the same way that "FireFox" or "FaceBook" looks wrong.
Secondly, even if the author is correct about the $30/transaction figure - this is still competitive with bank wires, which currently charge $25 or more (often up to double that for international wire transfers).
Finally, there are many other benefits to bitcoin other than lower transaction fees. They're difficult to confiscate, immune to monetary inflation, and they don't require a trusted third-party.
but nowhere near competitive with the credit card network, or the money transfer systems in every developed country other than the US (most of which do real-time transfers for less than pennies on the dollar). Even in the US, I guarantee that ACH will die faster than Bitcoin will get cheap
Bitcoin transactions currently are cheap. A typical transaction fee is 0.0001 BTC, which is equal to 0.05 USD at current exchange rates. If you wait long enough between sending transactions, you can send a transaction with zero fees. This fee is the same whether you're sending 1 BTC, or 1 million BTC.
that's the fee, but BTC prints money out of thin air every time a transaction is processed. If you compare transaction volume to payout volume, the effective transaction fee is on the order of 5% or $30, as explained in the original article... additionally, once BTC refuses to print any more coin, then the miners will start charging the money movers for their services, rather than charging the BTC network itself.