BitPay, Toshiba Partnership Brings Bitcoin To 6,000 New Merchants 85
Raystonn (1463901) writes "Toshiba has announced the integration of Bitcoin support in their touch-screen point-of-sale platform, VisualTouch, used by over 6,000 merchants. The merchants will now be able to accept Bitcoin payments at the register from anyone with a smartphone or any other QR code reader. Acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment method frees merchants from worries of fraudulent chargebacks, as Bitcoin payments are non-reversible just like cash, while allowing settlement deposits in any of 9 currencies, including USD and Bitcoin."
Re:Wait 10 minutes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have to stay 15-90 days in the restaurant after you've paid with a credit card before you can go?
After all, nothing's stopping you from later calling up your bank/credit card company and getting the charge taken off for reasons ranging between fraud and "I didn't like the way that waiter looked at me, but I paid anyway, but after some more thinking I believe he was staring at my ass".
Bitpay is a bit like the credit card companies in this - they actually deal very little 'in' Bitcoin, they just exchange it, and they give vendors some guarantee that they in fact get paid, even in the unlikely event of a customer trying to perform a double spend.
Similarly, it's in merchants' best interest to take the money and run the small risk of fraud - same with credit cards. Of course, if you're selling a car, house, yacht, private jet.. you may want to wait those 10 minutes.. or maybe a day, just in case.
Re:What about taxation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the government wants to control all financial transactions down to the penny. They don't like cash either. And no, it's not just about taxes. It's about controlling the populace.
Re:What about taxation? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand chargebacks are not that prolific for honest sellers. I've used two in my life and both for cheats.
I used to work for a small retail chain (75 stores) working specifically on the POS system (including CC processing). Chargebacks are a huge issue.
Our staff had to deal with 30-40 chargebacks a month during our busy times. Each of those required at least an hour of research on the transaction, filling out forms and then getting the information back to the credit card processing company. All of which typically resulted in money coming out of our account, even though the customer was in the wrong (Along with other things, we sold monthly subscriptions to our service. A customer would dispute charges because they went to a store that started with the same first 4 letters of our name and didn't recognize the charge.).
Chargebacks cost us 1 employees time for an entire week every single month, and we where an honest retailer (refunds for anything even have way reasonable).
I am here for the pain (Score:2, Insightful)
Bitcoin was supposed to die years ago. Right? But it didn't. And now big names are getting on board. Shouldn't you start learning a little bit about how this works? eBay is looking at it, after all, and the founder of PayPal is watching.
If only you had bought in early, you could be taking a trip to space on Virgin Galactic, like that flight attendant from Hawaii who was Branson's first public bitcoin customer. Ouch.