

OneBit – Mastercard PayPass Integrated Bitcoin Wallet - tobyai
http://www.getonebit.com

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atiffany
I like the product. I just want to offer you feedback that some of the copy
reads awkwardly.

Consider replacing "Tap & pay anywhere where there are credit-cards.
Interested in early access?" with "Tap & pay anywhere credit cards are
accepted. Interested in early access?"

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adamkochanowicz
Love hearing the phrase "Let's face it. Today, it is still ridiculously
difficult to spend Bitcoin in the real world."

I love Bitcoin but I can't integrate it into my life because it is just way to
complicated in most of my transactions, not due to my lack of understanding of
how to use it.

~~~
litaph91
The issue really is that bitcoin isn't suited for retail transactions.

I work in the payments industry and we took a long hard look at integrating
bitcoin payments into our point-of-sale and determined that it was effort we
would get no reward for.

Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't
guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold.

Working with risk levels and calculations around zero confirmation
transactions work but they still pose an element of risk that isn't
necessarily present with cash and credit.

On the processing side, we're scared to death by anti-retail thinking and
things like replace-by-fee which, in our opinion, would outright kill off
retail transactions using bitcoin. There's just way too much uncertainty that
someone will decide a patch like that is needed and start deploying it even if
it isn't in the core.

It's the upside and downside of decentralized systems really.

~~~
toomim
> Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we
> can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just
> sold.

A _guarantee_ isn't what you want. Cash and card isn't guaranteed either — the
cash might be counterfeit; the credit card might be stolen.

What you _want_ is to reduce the rate of fraud. So let's compare the rates of
fraud between bitcoin and cash/card. Credit card transactions are fraudulent
around .1% of the time. [1] But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud
with zero-confirmation transactions. Have you?

You seem to be afraid of the wrong thing, and you don't seem to be basing your
opinion any facts or statistics. It sounds like you're just untrusting of new
technology. Yet you're on hacker news? This confuses me. How did you get here?

Similarly, your fear of replace-by-fee is very strange — that proposal is
never going to happen. You don't have any faith in the bitcoin community, but
you have faith in credit card companies not to raise fees or block your
business? Why is that? Do you only trust old boys' clubs? Are you from the
east coast? Are you a luddite?

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud)

~~~
this_user
> But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation
> transactions.

Then you are simply not very well informed. Problems with BTC transactions
have happened repeatedly. Here is a great example of a successful 10k double
spend during a chain fork:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372956)
It was was made possible buy slightly different behaviours in the different
client versions. The core developers had to get on IRC with the miner using
the 0.8 version and talk them into giving up their (correct) chain to resolve
this problem. Currency of the future!

~~~
vanzard
This incident had nothing to do with zero-conf txs. In fact okpay did wait for
multiple confirmations, and was still hit by this $10k double spend!

This whole thing was possible because of an accidental fork of the chain which
lasted a few hours. This is the only accidental fork that occurred in the last
3 years.

Details:
[https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki)

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abrkn
One of the founders has made some comments[1] on r/bitcoin

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/31qlwx/onebit_maste...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/31qlwx/onebit_mastercard_paypass_integrated_bitcoin/cq409ij)

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latchkey
Please allow people to sign up with a + in their email address.

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zyrthofar
Isn't that exactly what we shouldn't want, that the credit card companies
_also_ record our financial transactions made via a currency created to be
decentralized?

This basically ends as a bit of convenience for us, at the cost of them
keeping the near monopoly on world-wide transactions...

What's the point of bitcoins if VISA, MasterCard, etc. still know everything
we buy world-wide, conveniently accessible in their databases?

~~~
aqme28
Recording financial transactions has nothing to do with decentralization. I
see nothing wrong with this.

~~~
zyrthofar
Recording financial transactions has everything to do with centralization,
when only a handful of companies control world-wide purchases.

These new electronic currencies are inherently untied from anything. What
happens when the same handful of companies control them also?

Wasn't it Russia who was denied its own credit card by the same US companies?
That's way too much power to have over the world. If we finally have a chance
to decentralize some of these transactions, to remove some of that power they
currently have, we certainly should take that chance.

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Navarr
1\. This isn't possible on an iPhone unless you jailbreak, right?

2\. Aren't those Android screenshots in that iPhone frame?

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schmichael
This product helps people who already have bitcoin convert it to fiat more
easily and offload the bitcoin->fiat conversion fees onto the merchant.

Is there a market for this? It simply uses bitcoin as a store-of-value instead
of fiat in a bank. Unless you're in the tiny minority of people who can
acquire bitcoin but cannot acquire a bank account, I don't see the benefit to
consumers or merchants. Not to mention with bitcoin's current volatility it is
rarely appealing as a store of value.

(NFC seems to be another problem, but other commenters have discussed that
well.)

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litaph91
I sincerely wonder why companies are wasting their effort on the contactless
market, especially smaller companies.

This product will be stillborn in the U.S. as NFC terminals are fairly rare
and even after the education delivered by Google Wallet and ApplePay, 43% of
people who attempt to use ApplePay at a terminal that supports it fail and the
clerk provides no meaningful assistance.

If they won't support ApplePay, they won't support this.

~~~
alexland
As right as you are about the American market, it's extremely annoying that
the rest of the world doesn't get to use services like Google Wallet and Apple
Pay. In Canada, I've been tapping to pay for years, yet there are no popular
3rd party services to use my phone for paying.

So sure, it'll be stillborn in the US. But I don't give a crap about the US,
you guys get enough of the cool stuff. This is a sweet deal for every other
country with the infrastructure in place. This is a great idea for those
countries, and definitely not a waste of effort in my eyes.

~~~
litaph91
I will admit that while scanning through the content on the site again, I
missed an important piece of wording that initially formulated half of my
opinion here.

It is important to note that it does say World-wide. If they are poised to
launch in other countries besides the US then I retract my statement about it
being a waste.

However, I've seen much of this financial tech go straight to US for launch.
If its NFC it's dead. Going that route, they may be out of business before
they can even launch it elsewhere.

~~~
quelhas
Wasn't there recently some kind of legislation in the US that encouraged the
adoption of NFC-based terminals, which was one of the main drivers behind the
release of Apple Pay in the first place? I remember reading about it somewhere
in the middle of a Google Wallet vs Apple Pay flamewar.

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mightypirate
This clearly is a landing page of a non existent product.

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agorabinary
Is it possible to read the amount and currency type from the NFC terminal
rather than typing it manually? I think that would be a sticking point for
credit-card users who are used to just sliding and having the proper amount
deducted without user input.

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Sujan
Anybody knows who is behind this product/company/website? Can anybody
integrate with Mastercard PayPass or does Mastercard choose integration
partners?

~~~
litaph91
You can view their list of apis here
[https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API](https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API)
but they do require you to go through some exercises before you can get to
some of them. With the PayPass program i'm not sure on the specifics but I
would assume a fairly strenuous look at your business and what you intend to
do.

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manymany
With this scheme, the merchant still has to pay for swipe fees (which are
ultimately transferred to the customer through higher prices -- the ultimate
hidden fee!). Swipe fees are evil.

