Does your visa pay the merchants too? If banks/cards are are still charging merchants 2-3%, then some of that is passed on to us users as well (just not explicitly)
That being said, I do have a business accepting card payments and the 2-3% for me is closer to 0.1% past bank fees.
But you're right that from the merchant's perspective, depending on country (e.g. the US) things can be worst.
Then again, from the merchant's perspective cryptos seem to have much larger downsides, after all there's a reason why they aren't widely used, and lack of good supplied for crypto is larger than lack of people willing to use them.
> That being said, I do have a business accepting card payments and the 2-3% for me is closer to 0.1% past bank fees.
Are you saying that you only pay 0.1% in fees for accepting credit cards? Is this in the US? If so, please tell me whom because that's an insanely good deal, and they are surely losing money.
Some other pieces you aren't including - credit cards are prone to fraud. Despite paying 2-3% in fees to banks, merchants have to build systems to limit this, and pay to refund any fraudulent charges. Crypto allows for a basically instant settlement that looks very much like a cash transaction.
> Crypto allows for a basically instant settlement that looks very much like a cash transaction.
Which customers don't want. Customers like paying by credit card because they know that if your product/service was fake, the credit card company will make sure they get their money back.
That or maybe just a few colluding mining pools. The network is only 'secure' because mining cartels own most of the specialised hardware, increasing difficultly. ETH 2.0 starts to pool all that power back abit, by allowing others to compete for staking rewards.
Perhaps it is too late for replicating existing use cases. However, the general idea of running EVM-like smart contracts secured by Bitcoin PoW (e.g. merge mined sidechains) is still quite attractive
Counterparty eventually adopted the EVM, and yet could not get traction for multiple reasons:
1. Network effects already on Ethereum
2. Bitcoin block time too slow and block size too low
3. Counterparty uses Bitcoin as a data layer, but Bitcoin itself cannot recognize Counterparty transactions, so Bitcoin consensus does not secure Counterparty transactions.
Only if you enjoy all of the negatives of EVM-like smart contracts including chain splits, gas problems, subtle bugs that could drive exchanges to insolvency, mass theft, broken multisig, the list goes on...
I don't enjoy the negatives. We'll move to better alternatives as they become available. Until then.. it's just like democracy or free markets.. no demonstrably superior alternatives yet
First off I recognize and appreciate your username :-)
As such, you should know more than anyone how heated the OP_RETURN drama got, and how ANYONE using the BTC chain for anything other than moving money from point A to point B is a complete non-started and will be unanimously opposed by the core development team.
:-) Yeah. There's some baggage there, but I was still surprised nobody wanted this username.
Core devs may not agree with what some users do with the system (current specs/features).. but as the Ethereum miners showed with increase in block size, core devs' philosophical objections may not matter in the end
> except for mining security
where did you see that? I don't think their security model has any connection with Bitcoin mining. They are not merged-mining with bitcoin
The system selects one of a set of competing miners to produce the next block via a VRF whose state is recorded to Bitcoin OP_RETURNs. There is at most one Stacks block per Bitcoin block, and the probability of winning is proportional to the relative amount of BTC burnt or transferred.
The system's design is well-documented via the SIP process. See https://github.com/stacksgov/sips (you'll want to read SIP-001 and SIP-007 in particular).
Bitcoin miners have no role here. Anyone can sign up to be a Stack-miner by bringing in their own BTC into this network. That amount (in BTC) is distributed to those who have staked their Stack-tokens. A pRNG process (based on VDF or VRF) selects one of these miners at random to create the next block
Does your visa pay the merchants too? If banks/cards are are still charging merchants 2-3%, then some of that is passed on to us users as well (just not explicitly)