| > Permission required to participate in any electronic-fiat-money-transfer-system™ = mucho Then make a better system which doesn't burn all of Ireland's electrical output to handle 2 transactions a second, to let people transfer fiat to each other. Maybe you can call it "Pal Pay". "But then I'd have to follow regulations!! :(" But you'd have to with Bitcoin as well. Just ask Coinbase or Circle. "Ah, but Bitcoin gives me the option to evade the law, unlike those assholes as Google or PayPal who need 'identification' and keep whining about 'money laundering'". Perhaps, but you could build a system to track IOUs on Tor if you'd wanted and as long as your OPSEC wasn't as shitty as DPR's "my_crimes.txt" you could evade the law for awhile too. As it stands those are mostly orthogonal concerns, although I do appreciate how nice it is for the Feds to be able to publicly view every transaction ever made in Bitcoin, something that couldn't be done on an off-blockchain system. |
I've actually created a service (B2B) which requires bitcoin as I need atomicity, which bitcoin delivers perfectly (as long as I wait for N confirmations, it's pretty certain that I now _own_ the bitcoins). This is where PayPal fails, people can get refunds, chargebacks from credit card providers & PayPal can limit/suspend your account without notice (which they are famous for doing). I'm not a pro/anti bitcoin evangalist but I'm just throwing out there an example of what "programmable money" actually means. Bank transfers work well for non-refundable payments as well but most banks don't offer an API so bitcoins is the best alternative for my use case.
Other advantages over PayPal are the OP codes and multisig which are a powerful thing for programmers to use. Bitcoin is great for merchants/developers but it has many disadvantages for customers.