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Bitcoin The Almighty Buck

Paying For Taco Bell With Dogecoin May Be Soon Be a Reality (bloomberg.com) 66

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: How about paying for your Taco Bell order with Dogecoin? Or some of Whole Food's avocado ice cream with Bitcoin. That's the goal of a new partnership between crypto payment processor BitPay and Verifone, one of the world's largest providers of those little machines you use to pay via a credit card or Venmo at a checkout line. Later this year, the newest Verifone terminals will start accepting payments for U.S. merchants from a range of cryptocurrency wallets and tokens, the companies said in a statement Tuesday. Terms of the agreement weren't disclosed.

Widespread use of tokens for purchases has been a goal that has long eluded the crypto industry, with most users focusing on speculation and merchants scared off by the price volatility of the digital assets. BitPay said it will provide greater protection from price swings since the funds will be settled promptly into the merchant's bank account in traditional currency once a transaction is completed. BitPay already processes more than 60,000 transactions a month, more than half of them in Bitcoin, according to the company. By comparison, Visa handles an average of 150 million transactions a day. While the companies didn't say which merchants will be included, some brands that Verifone works with already include American Eagle Outfitters, Macy's, Williams Sonoma, Taco Bell and Whole Foods.

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Paying For Taco Bell With Dogecoin May Be Soon Be a Reality

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  • Stop It (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Stop posting links to paywalled shit.

    Just. Fucking Stop. It.
  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:04PM (#61842611)

    nope, those businesses will only be taking cash while your gambling token is exchanged for actual money. Plus you'll not even get the going rate for gambling token as middlemen take some of the cash

    really, what is the benefit of this stupidity?

    • It is a way to 'compete' with transaction processors such as Visa for some of the middleman profits. It's like having a debit card without the card - but there is already Apple/Google/Paypal for that. They aren't actually transfering BitCoin or DogeCoins, they are acting as a bank for the transaction itself.
      • visa doesn't take any of my money though, bitpay and company do.

        • Re:fallacy (Score:4, Informative)

          by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @07:09PM (#61842769) Homepage
          Credit and Debit card transaction costs are built into the price of everything you buy. Just because it isn't on the receipt doesn't mean you aren't paying for the convenience.

          They get some of your money even if you are a Cash payer, because the retailer just spreads the costs evenly by increasing everything. They mostly have to do this because it is in their contracts that they can not show the transaction cost as a line item on the receipt or they lose the contract and can't take credit cards anymore.

          Using these Coinery services is actually a double whammy, you are paying for them and for the built in costs to cover the credit card companies.
          • it gets even more fun than that, you've cashed in part of a coin and now might have to pay taxes on appreciated value if thing has gone up in value since you bought or mined it. tsk tsk what a pain in the keister.

          • so, do you think companies will lower the price of their products 1.5% since they won't be paying the credit card fee if you buy with crypto? think again

            they will still need to pay fees for converting the crypto to actual USD and withdrawing the coin. each crypto purchase will have at the very least network fees. and you can be sure bitpay will have additional fees in the form of spread, so if bitcoin is worth 45K, they will convert it at 44K so you end up paying fees twice.

            and let's not forget that you nee

    • by jsicolo ( 863775 )
      Plus, you have to eat at Taco Bell.
    • Everything that is not Bitcoin is indeed a gambling token, but BTC is a decentralized unit of account that the government can't confiscate or inflate. That is the point of it - divorcing the government from ability to steal savings via fiat moneyprinters going brrrr.

      • by swilver ( 617741 )

        This comic seems to apply: https://xkcd.com/538/ [xkcd.com]

        In your fantasy world, eventually everyone uses crypto tokens and governments all over the world will look back on the good ole days when they could tax citizens for income.

        In reality, once this becomes big enough to impact the governments bottom lines, the use of such tokens will simply be made illegal. Companies accepting them will become criminal organizations and dealt with as such. As there are no legal ways to spend these tokens anymore, and can only b

        • This applies to USD also. Bill Gates must have a lot of money, don't crack his supercomputer, use a $5 wrench to force him to Venmo you some funds.

          • by ink ( 4325 )

            No. USD (and most currency) is fiscally managed using formal methodologies from the scientific study of macro economics.

            Not sure what Bill Gates has to do with it -- but it does make you sound like a conspiracy nut.

    • You can create tokens at a fraction of the cost of what they are worth.

      I produce ~$5/day in the last 3 months with a 150W space heater (total cost of running is 8c/day at current electricity rates.

      In the winter I can heat my house with it, producing $500/week. That is enough for all my groceries and then some.

      All the same, the dollar is inflating quickly, if you can get away from fiat currency, this is best for all, it stops the government from stealing from the poorest in society by printing worthless pape

    • nope, those businesses will only be taking cash while your gambling token is exchanged for actual money.

      Our "real money" is digitally created out of thin air by people who sound more like voodoo priests than economists and mathematicians these days. When we dropped the gold standard, we all went to systems that were glorified alchemy. So "real money" at this point is whatever people put value in. We're all playing a game of pretend now.

    • really, what is the benefit of this stupidity?

      OMG, like, do you even disrupt?

      Fashion has no need of purpose. Fashion exists for Fashion's sake.

  • by Major_Disorder ( 5019363 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:05PM (#61842615)
    Fake food for fake money.
  • ...but I can't tell if it's the food or the crypto crap. Either way I'm gonna be sick.

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:21PM (#61842653)

    How long does it take to process a Dogecoin / Bitcoin transaction? A quick Google search says:

    How long does a Bitcoin transaction take 2020?

    In general sending Bitcoin can take anywhere from seconds to over 60 minutes. Typically, however, it will take 10 to 20 minutes.

    Results for Dogecoin generally say faster than for Bitcoin (or 10x faster), but notes it can be much longer.

    That's going to make the checkout / drive-thru line super fun.

    • ...this is like when blockbuster said, boy that VIDEO FILE sure is going to take a long time too load, good luck with that netflix foolishness
      • Re:Raises hand... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @07:20PM (#61842791) Journal

        The difference is that proof-of-work crypto transactions are slow by design. It's kind of like the "better, faster, cheaper. Pick any two". I looked in to Nano at one point because it promised transactions that were not only free but fast. But then... the Nano network has problem with spam. There's absolutely no trace of irony there at all, because the "hash cash" algorithm upon which BTC and DOGE are based was deliberately designed to make verification difficult (and thus slow) so that the network couldn't be easily spammed. I'm given to understand that the Nano folks have been working on this, although it's been a while since I've looked in to it; but I'd be surprised if they had finally hit the "better, faster, cheaper" trifecta.

        • This makes me wonder: if you had a really good rate with VISA, like 1 cent per transaction or so (like what big business pays), could you spam their network to the point they are crippled and all other transactions are seriously delayed or fail?

          • Maybe, but for a crypto network all you need is a bunch of VMs in Russia. To spam the CC companies you need actual cards, or you could just use a regular old DoS attack that didn't even involve transactions but they're almost certainly hardened against that too. It's not like their networks never go down, but they've never gone down long enough to inconvenience me personally so I don't know how many 9s they've actually secured. Followed by... real criminal penalties for attacking an established financial

        • by ink ( 4325 )

          If there's one constant in the crypto-currency world it's this: "They're working on it, and it'll all be great in about six months."

    • I don't think this is the way it happens, how I think it works is you have an exchange and they settle it for you, so what happens is your transaction is batched and done later by your exchange. This is just my guess, I have seen articles that state bitcoin purchase are instantaneous, and ones that say the take between 10 to 60 minutes, so unless someone is lying something else must be happening, that is just the way I would implement it.

      This seems to me to violate the fundamental reason for bitcoin that yo

      • I am all for removing government and introducing a digital currency, but bitcoin is definitely not the solution.

        Those two things don't necessarily go together as governments can issue/support digital currencies, but I not sure removing the government from the equation really guarantees anything useful, especially with regard to value and/or stability, unless your goal is to avoid scrutiny, for which cash is better though it's less easily transported/transferred ... Taxes are still going to be paid as businesses have to track and report income and expenses, etc... digital wallets are still going to show on the ledge

    • by Xenna ( 37238 )

      Have you guys missed the lightning network? Bitcoin payment in milliseconds to seconds, cost virtually zero.

      It's what they're rolling out in El Salvador. These people aren't waiting 10 minutes for their lattes.

      https://coinshares.com/researc... [coinshares.com]

      If you can stand the super enthousiastic Jack Mallers:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • I remember in Demolition Man that in the future, people would go to Taco Bell, but I don't remember them mentioning it would be paid with Dogecoin....
  • by timholman ( 71886 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @06:54PM (#61842745)

    Note this very important point from the article:

    BitPay already processes more than 60,000 transactions a month

    Bitpay in one of the major players in BTC transactions and has been around for years, yet they only perform 2,000 transactions per day worldwide. If you ever needed proof that cryptocurrency is useless for actual financial transactions, and is strictly a speculative tool for greater fools, here it is.

    No BTC true believer is ever going to spend his precious cryptocurrency on a taco when he could hold on to it and get even richer. A deflationary asset by design is one that people hold on to, not liquidate.

    Bitpay is grasping at straws, desperately trying to create a market for something that the holders of BTC want nothing to do with.

  • Bogus food for bogus money.

  • as a short term publicity stunt, but I worked Fast Food back when the industry started taking cards 30 years ago or so and it was like pulling teeth to get the franchises to do that. Good luck getting them to take something with as many fees as a crypto currency. And if they take the currency directly (e.g. little or no fees) the transactions either take too long and/or are super high risk because of the extreme volatility of crypto.

    But hey, we're all talking about mother farking Taco Bell, so mission a
    • Do you even know how BitPay works? Customer pays the crypto fees through a shitty exchange rate. Merchant gets paid in USD as BitPay executes a sell on the exchanges they use as soon as the crypto is received. The shitty exchange rate is carefully chosen to also factor in volatility. (Assuming its not too extreme.)

      • because if they're only feeing the payer then it's not going to be all that popular. There aren't that many drug dealers out there willing to shoulder a 5% or 10% fee. Usually the way Credit Cards do it is they split the fees between the business & customer to lessen the impact on both.
  • Enjoy that $1,000,000 taco in 2040 $$

  • Now that almost a quarter of the world’s population was banned from joining the bitcoin pyramid scheme, more American fools must be suckered into the game.

  • Serious question:
    Why dont we see hordes of criminals making or passing off counterfeit crypto currencies to unsuspecting users ?
    Like they do for fiat currency. Say, Dojcoin, Betcoin, Ripper, Montero, Slashcoin, Redicoin..

  • Eating at Taco Bell is still a death defying act.
  • ...later in the bathroom already a reality.

  • Nothing like paying for fake food with fake money.

  • China recently outlawed all cyber coins. It's just a matter of time before all the governments ban them. That's good as bitcoin burns up an incredible amount of energy every hour. I think it's well over 30 hoover dams worth of electricity a year.

    They need to redo the coin into something that doesn't cost much to make a journal entry and is secure. Something that is also traceable with government rules. No rules mean you're ripe for fraud. Right now there is no assurance you'll get anything back for what you

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