Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

The Corner,Square Engineering ^ | March 31, 2014 | Square Market

[TsonicTsunami08]

Sellers should never miss a sale. We’re building tools so sellers can accept any form of payment their customers want to use. Making commerce easy means creating easy ways to exchange value for everything from a massage to a DODOcase for your iPad.

[TsonicTsunami08]

Despite tremendous negative pressure, Bitcoins exponential adoption continues.

[Star Traveler]

Bitcoin news ...

[bolobaby]

Bitcoin “adoption” is an illusion. I guarantee these sellers are liquidating their Bitcoins for actual money as soon as fast as humanly possible. Not one of these sellers is stupid enough to bank these things, account with them, or do anything more than rapidly exchange them for actual dollars.

Don’t call this anything more than it is: barter with a quick sale of the Bitcoin to something actually backed by law.

[mmichaels1970]

I guarantee these sellers are liquidating their Bitcoins for actual money as soon as fast as humanly possible.

Assuming you are correct, bitcoin is proving to be an effective "medium of exchange", allowing people to easily transfer payment for goods. Whether the retailer holds onto the coins is immaterial in that respect.

[TsonicTsunami08]

Sir, respectfully your denial of this technology will not serve you well in the future. The Bitcoin protocol is here to stay and if you have any questions about its legality, I would refer you to the IRS.
I don’t have any hard numbers at this point but the “adoption” by Square of Bitcoin as a payment option will double Bitcoins market exposure, “give or take”. That is classic exponential growth.
To look at the reality of what is happening and deny it, one would have to be delusional.

[Greysard]

Assuming you are correct, bitcoin is proving to be an effective "medium of exchange", allowing people to easily transfer payment for goods.

That is a significant invention indeed, because up to this very day I have to carry gold coins to the vendor if I want to buy something, as there is no conventional technology that would allow me to pay by giving the vendor some sort of a long, secure number over the telephone or the Internet... a number that a bank would issue, for example... too bad that they never do that :-)

The criterion of "easy transfer of payment for goods" is a very low bar. People all over the world do it every day, and the payment mechanism is the least of our problems. It's not like we have to look around for the nearest licensed moneychanger, with scales and a table, whenever we want to buy a gallon of gas, or a pizza. Bitcoin may *also* be easy enough (if you carry a computer with you, and if you don't mind waiting 15 minutes for six confirmations, and if you don't mind having no money back guarantee in case *anything* goes wrong) - but that doesn't make it *better* than other systems. A newcomer has to do something better, otherwise why to bother?

[Errant]

Thanks Star Traveler and TsonicTsunami08.

Click to be Added / Removed.

[dalereed]

Who ever heard of Square and why should anyone care!

Bitcoin is a stupid idea.

[mmichaels1970]

But a vendor exchanging coins for cash is no reason to disqualify the technology as fake. It is in fact a medium of exchange. A vendor also needs no contract with credit card companies, does not have to issue refunds due to fraudulent paypal complaints, etc. Whether it is truly as ground-breaking as it claims can be a valid debate. But its ability to act as a medium of exchange is without question.

[TsonicTsunami08]

Founded in 2009 Square has a market cap of over 5 billion dollars. What have you been up to the last five years?

” Bitcoin is a stupid idea “.

You have the “idea” part correct.

Bitcoin is an “idea” who’s time has come.

Try getting out of mommy’s basement and see whats going on in the world.

[TsonicTsunami08]

The distributive autonomous encrypted public ledger also known as the blockchain is the greatest breakthrough in computer science history. Everyone looks at Bitcoin the money, over looking the life changing technology.

Jeff Garzik. Bitcoin core developer said in an article today:

” Bitcoin was something that I, as a computer scientist, thought was completely impossible”.

Heres the rest of the article.

http://www.bupipedream.com/news/33369/garzik/?fb_action_ids=650305521673449&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B277348555758251%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.recommends%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

[DoughtyOne]

I’ve been following the bitcoin saga for a while now. To be quite honest, I thought it might be done-for recently. Guess what, it’s taken a licking and has kept on ticking.

It’s not as shaky as some folks thought.

If it can take a hit like the negative publicity over the last four months, and still remain at it’s current levels, it’s something that isn’t a flash in the pan.

It may die yet, but I’m certainly not predicting it.

There are valid negative observations to be made, but then those haven’t caused it’s demise yet.

[no-s]

Not one of these sellers is stupid enough to bank these things, account with them, or do anything more than rapidly exchange them for actual dollars.

That's all that's necessary. It's not intended to be a unit of account or a store of value, just a medium of exchange. The more exchanging that happens, the more stable it is.

BTW distributed ledger has some cool implications on authenticating transactions in digital book-keeping. There's a wealth of useful ideas in BitCoin that would be applicable in bookkeeping and auditing and ensuring the legitimacy of transactions, or in revealing tampering or unauthorized activity.

[no-s]

The distributive autonomous encrypted public ledger also known as the blockchain is the greatest breakthrough in computer science history. Everyone looks at Bitcoin the money, over looking the life changing technology.

It's so totally cool. I had to just sit and reflect for a day or two after I grokked it. It makes a number of problems I've reflected upon in the past suddenly quite malleable. I have to admit, I also never gave cryptographic hashes proper due in the last 25 years, and now it's like oh wow, e.g. Merkle Trees (from '87!), that's all so obvious in hindsight. Actually I also knew intuitively why group consensus was subject to relativity ages before Paxos (isn't it just obvious?). I was notorious for drawing light cones on data flow and sequence diagrams for a while...

[bolobaby]

Assuming you are correct, bitcoin is proving to be an effective "medium of exchange..."

So is a credit card, but better.

[bolobaby]

Yeah, count me out of any currency whose genesis is WASTE.

We now place value on wasted computational cycles. How novel.

[TsonicTsunami08]

“Yeah, count me out of any currency whose genesis is WASTE.

We now place value on wasted computational cycles. How novel”.

I have not a clue of what you speak of but I’m sure it’s brilliant./s

[Greysard]

But its ability to act as a medium of exchange is without question.

It's not questioned. You can use baseball cards - or even candy wrappers - as a medium of exchange.

Now, what is questioned?

1. Simplicity, or availability of an official to help you
2. Convenience
3. Reliability and dependablity
4. Security
5. Cost of the exchange itself
6. Stability of value of the exchange token (BTC) during the exchange
7. Money back guarantee in case something goes wrong
8. Paper trail and records at a 3rd party if you need to trace your transfer or to file a claim
9. Compliance with tax rules (such as FinCEN form 114a)
10. insert more here
11. Superiority over existing solutions (Credit/Debit cards, checks, wire transfers, PayPal, etc.)

Note that this list only includes items that are relevant to using Bitcoin to send USD $100 from San Diego, USA to Niigata, Japan (as an example.) The Bitcoin will be in use only during the transfer. If you hold the Bitcoin then additional questionables show up.

[Greysard]

“Yeah, count me out of any currency whose genesis is WASTE. We now place value on wasted computational cycles. How novel”.

I have not a clue of what you speak of but I’m sure it’s brilliant./s

You have to spend (waste) a lot of electric power to compute one Bitcoin. This energy is a complete waste, since there is no other use of the calculated number. As the cost of one Bitcoin is roughly tied to the cost of energy that it takes to produce, miners are not supposed to get rich on mining (they still can, but that requires advanced hardware and cheap power, like in Iceland.)

In comparison, mining of gold is also expensive; but the gold is useful in other ways. Paper money is not useful for anything other than money - but it is very cheap. Bitcoin combines the two worst aspects of those: it is expensive to mine, and is not usable for anything else.

In the modern world most of the money in circulation are purely electronic; they have zero cost, and as such they require no effort (or waste) to generate. The other side of this advantage is unconstrained generation of new money. Bitcoin, as it has no government oversight, had to demand some "proof of work" before a coin is minted. This is logical for a hobby currency, but it is wasteful for a worldwide monetary system. Right now there are gigawatts of power consumed by Bitcoin servers, miners, and other equipment, with no obvious advantage to anyone (outside of the hobby value.) Well, I have to take that back - whoever stole the money of Mt. Gox's users definitely benefited from the process :-)

[bolobaby]

The prior poster is spot on. Bitcoin is generated through complete waste. At least I can use gold as a paperweight or a dollar bill to wipe my arse. I can’t do either with Bitcoin. It has zero intrinsic value and was made by wasting electricity and computational cycles. I can’t transact with them without a medium of transaction which requires more waste.

It is worse than a fiat currency. It doesn’t have zero value. It has negative value.