

Xapo – Bitcoin debit card - gmazzotti
https://xapo.com/en/wallet/

======
sinzone
FYI:

Unfortunately, due to financial regulations in the U.S. and India, Xapo cannot
currently ship debit cards to addresses located in the U.S. or India. -->
[http://help.xapo.com/95428-Is-the-Xapo-Debit-Card-
available-...](http://help.xapo.com/95428-Is-the-Xapo-Debit-Card-available-in-
every-country)

~~~
eruditely
It's sad to see that the united states has to be mentioned like this now.

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deftnerd
A lot of people are also upset because they signed up for the beta paid a $15
fee with the promise that there wouldn't be any additional fees. 2 days ago,
they decided to institute a $5 a month account fee.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
True, although they did waive the $15 fee for these early-birds, and of course
the product is completely optional. You can say no thanks whenever you want. I
also wouldn't say THEY decided. You can't create your own debitcard, well you
could but no merchant would accept it. You need a partnership with an existing
network, they have one with VISA, which means they had to negotiate terms on a
card and this is probably the best they could come up with given they're a
relatively small unproven company in the debitcard space. Although it was
naive and sloppy to not have communicated earlier that it'd be unlikely to be
able to negotiate a completely free card with a partner like VISA, sure.

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abalone
So they charge a 1% fee to fund the account with a wire transfer.

Can someone explain -- I am not attacking this, I am seriously wondering --
why anyone would wire funds into this account, pay a 1% fee, and then pay with
a debit card like they could from any other bank account?

(I get if you already have bitcoin, but I'm wondering what the point of the
wire transfer support is.)

Source: [http://help.xapo.com/questions/94070-Does-Xapo-charge-a-
fee-...](http://help.xapo.com/questions/94070-Does-Xapo-charge-a-fee-to-make-
a-deposit)

~~~
baddox
People might want to participate in and support the Bitcoin ecosystem, for
economic, political, or technological reasons. People might just be curious
about the technology and want to play with it.

~~~
abalone
That's a little abstract.. Without deep diving is there a quick summary of the
economic/political/technological reasons why one would pay an extra 1% fee to
pay this way? Apart from curiosity.

~~~
lvturner
For me that's actually cheaper than what my bank charges for international
transactions and transfers. I need this often enough that it would save me
quite a bit of cash. Also there's no fee if you have existing bitcoins by the
looks of things, so the 1% is just a convenience tax, afaik there are cheaper
ways to buy bitcoins that circumnavigate this. I admit to not knowing much
about bitcoin, but this product has piqued my interest as it might solve a few
of my banking woes

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twodayslate
> Request early access... invite 20 of your friends!

No thanks

Also, your password to the account is a 4-digit pin? What?

~~~
javert
If that's really all the security they have, it's kinda bad, but it does
encourage the right attitude for early bitcoin adopters, which is only put as
much bitcoin in any online wallet as you would in your actual wallet.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
It's not the only security. In short there's a rate-limited pincode, 2FA,
spending limits plus a password for your vault, and they offer insurance
against lost bitcoins that you didn't cause.

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Renaud
Xapo isn't the first to do this. ANXBTC[1] in Hong Kong has been doing this
for a couple of months now.

And they ship the card to the US, among other countries.

[1]:[http://debitcard.anxintl.com/](http://debitcard.anxintl.com/)

~~~
sly_g
Fees are here: [https://anxbtc.com/faq#tab4](https://anxbtc.com/faq#tab4)
under "What are the fees?"

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tgraham
This is interesting, an odd mishmash. whilst the FAQ is big it is not specific
- eg 'we are not a prepaid debit card' (do you have a deposit license?) ...
'We automatically withdraw money from your xapo wallet' (and that doesn't
count as preloading?).

To me, it looks like they've taken a standard visa backed prepaid debit card
(although not putting visa logo on it I thought was a breach of scheme rules).
They've added a nice ui, and wrap around of saying you can use bit coins.

However. Bitcoins stops at the point of actually using the card, where they
convert it into the issuing country's currency (assume here: Usd). You're
still using visa / other scheme network to transact and they don't take
bitcoins.

The other comments are bang on and prepaid cards are immensely profitable with
trxn fees to load them up, and 'hidden' fees for doing fx. What's odd here is
that people using bitcoin are presumably doing it because they like the idea
of not having to pay for all that crap! Much comment about how the funds are
insured for 100% against _any_ loss - but no mention of FDIC...

~~~
IkmoIkmo
My intuition for their setup was something like this: You know how a company
like Oracle might give its top sales people creditcards with spending limits
(for sales dinners with big customers), and Oracle pays for this?

I think Xapo is similar. But instead of giving the card to its employees, it
sells it for $15 to its customers. And the spending limit? That's dynamic,
based on the amount in the bitcoin wallet.

At the moment a payment is made, Xapo pays for it and it's a regular debitcard
transaction. No bitcoin involved.

And then Xapo goes and removes the equivalent value in bitcoins from the
respective user's wallet, which is not much more than earmarking those coins
in their internal accounting as being 'company funds' now, no bitcoin
blockchain involved.

That means there's no bitcoin or blockchain technology involved anywhere in
the process. And yes, it's just as expensive as legacy banking products.

Why is it cool? Because it allows people to store their wealth in bitcoin, yet
use a debitcard as they normally could. They need not a bank, or trust a bank.
They need not a national currency or indeed trust monetary policy. If you're
in Cyprus in 2012, that means your money wasn't seized by the government. If
you were in Argentina in 1990, you wouldn't have suffered from 300% annual
inflation. This debitcard is really to plug bitcoiners into the existing
payment channels, and allow them to store wealth not in fiat but in bitcoin,
for reasons similar to those of goldbugs. (e.g. it'd be no different from a
debitcard connected to an account with gold-deposits/certificates)

I see it as a temporary product. IF and when bitcoin gains mainstream traction
(if everyone follows Newegg, Expedia, Dish, Overstock, Tigerdirect, Reddit,
Wikipedia etc) then one could not only store wealth in bitcoin, but also pay
cheaply and securely and quickly with actual bitcoins. At that point, a
debitcard will be redundant. But that's a long way away. Until then, a
debitcard allows those who wish to hold wealth in bitcoin (again akin to
goldbugs) needn't inconvenience themselves by being disconnected from the
regular payment system everyone uses, they can now use a debitcard that's as
shitty/brilliant as usual.

~~~
tgraham
It's a thought - but I'm not convinced on scale. The market needs to be liquid
enough to convert btc into target currencies easily. Otherwise, banks
basically get btc, convert to domestic (regulated / 'insured') currency at
point of receipt and then you're back in old world payments. N.b. I am
straying from my area of knowledge but I am confused as to what would stop a
btc based bank going bust or suffering from the same currency controls Cyprus
put in place if you have put it in a wallet somewhere (we used to call this a
deposit!).

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rwinn
They charge a 3% fee for currency conversion, and that's every transaction
since you are paying with bitcoin.

~~~
kseistrup
Also: “Note that there is a fee to store your coins in Xapo's Vault of 0.12%
per year. The storage fee is charged in bitcoins and is calculated based on
the number of coins you are transferring into the Vault.”

~~~
megapatch
Now that is just cute. Paying fee for them "storing" my deposits?? Seems
wrong. I assume they themselves lend the bitcoins in their possession to
others, this is where banks make most money after all. Unless of course Xapo
actually has tunneled vaults deep in the mountains of Tai Mo Shan where they
store shiny piles and piles of bitcoins...

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Unless you're licensed as a bank, it'd be illegal to lend out these funds. As
a mere money transmitter you are required to hold 100% of custodial funds,
fractional reserve banking is not allowed.

Seeing as they've not ever communicated any lending product and as there's no
hint of that anywhere, and seeing as they're the most funded ($40m) bitcoin
company by reputable VCs who do due diligence and stress regulatory
compliance, I doubt they'd be so blatantly breaking the law on this point.

The fee is indeed for the wallet service of insured storage with easy
configurable pincode, password, 2-factor authentication and daily spending
limits. If you can do all that yourself, awesome. But there's plenty of
mainstream users who haven't a clue of proper security measures, and paying
0.12% annually for secure and insured storage, sounds like a decent deal.

I don't use it myself, I can easily set up my own secure cold storage. But
it's a nice product, particularly for securing something many see as an
investment vehicle that can easily do 10x, perhaps 100x value increase in the
next 10 years. Paying 0.015x every 10 years to store, secure and insure that
vehicle isn't such a big deal, and that's their fee structure.

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prawn
Is this similar to CoinJar's Swipe?

[https://www.coinjar.com/dna](https://www.coinjar.com/dna)

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dmix
Does it have chip & pin? It will need that to work well in Canada.

~~~
iancarroll
I was in Ontario for a few days and saw no problems using a mag stripe instead
of a chip. (We do use a chip when we can thanks to Amex though)

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jalada
Fees. Hundreds of bloody fees.

