Kirk's cogitations
PayPal Attempts Its Own "Bitcoin RoadTrip"
PayPal president Scott Thompson is excited over the future profits PayPal will earn when its customers embrace further the use of PayPal as a “digital currency”.
From his three week long
sabbaticalvacation in Cape Cod the PayPal executive describes his own attempt to switch from using a wallet and describes the company’s digital currency employee challenge.“Five employees will try to use PayPal for everything they do” he states, in a video address. ”We know this will not be easy since it’s going to be an entirely new way of living for these five employees” writes Sam Shrauger in a post on the company blog.
Perhaps Mr. Thompson has been following Bitcoin. Several months ago Bitcoin community member Plato (@TheRealPlato) began his #BitcoinRoadtrip, a journey that took him coast-to-coast in which all purchases were made using only bitcoins.
After reaching the trip’s initial destination, Los Angeles, Plato then continued up the west coast. After spending some time the the Bay Area he then continued north with the intention of reaching Seattle and possibly Vancouver even. Those plans have now changed though, as Plato recently shared, as his experience in Portland has been so positive that he has decided that this is where the road trip ends. Plato is now attempting to secure housing in the area and though he would prefer to pay his rent using bitcoins, he no longer keeps his self-imposed “bitcoin-only” restriction.
Mr. Thompson refers to PayPal as a “digital currency” PayPal’s attempt to co-opt this term is not new. VISA uses that term apparently to mean any financial transaction that is other than a paper check, for instance. But similar to VISA, PayPal does not issue currency. PayPal isn’t even a bank. Funds in a PayPal account are simply representative of funds deposited with other institutions. For U.S. funds, customer balances are pooled and deposited in pass-through accounts at other banks or savings institutions.
PayPal would love to see its customers embrace the concept of moving more and more transactions online or to mobile. Accepting PayPal payments for commercial purposes generates huge fees earned by the company — $0.30 plus 2.9% for a typical domestic sales transaction.
That means paying for a $7 hamburger and soda using PayPal results in PayPal taking $0.50 and the burger joint getting just $6.50.
These fees are now contributing to revenues of over one billion U.S. dollars per quarter for PayPal’s parent company, eBay.
With Bitcoin a transaction fee is paid only if a fee happens to be necessary and even then so, it is paid by the customer instead of being withheld from the payment that the merchant receives. That fee expense is hardly a problem for customers though as the transaction fee when using Bitcoin is not just a little less, but is instead a lot less.
At the present time, most transactions are processed without a fee whatsoever. When a fee is required it can be as little as 0.0005 bitcoins (an amount worth less than a penny, at the current market exchange rate).
Additionally, bitcoin transactions are irrevocable so accepting Bitcoin for payment will never cause there to be an unexpected chargeback transaction later on. PayPal is seen as being merchant-unfriendly for the way the service handles chargebacks including placing immediate temporary holds and for their practice of imposing “reserves” (payment revenues that are automatically set aside) that can become devastating to a growing business.
Mr. Thompson may be correct in expecting that we’ll be moving to an all digital lifestyle thanks to the smartphone and other technological advancements. That helps to explain why there is so much excitement for the still-experimental Bitcoin-android client, the recently launched mobile app BitPay and the upcoming WebCoin/BitcoinJS project which will work on iPhones as well.
What Mr. Thompson may be overlooking though is that merchants don’t particularly like funding his Cape Cod vacations and other efforts such as this employee challenge publicity stunt. Instead, those merchants might like to keep more of their own money.
Merchants will begin to learn what the term digital currency really means. They will learn that Bitcoin is a digital currency that delivers benefits that PayPal couldn’t even consider offering because PayPal simply isn’t a digital currency.
What they’ll learn is that Bitcoin is a game changer.
Domo mosh pit
“ Colleges are focused on teaching kids content, not on teaching them skills, and too many students are focused on passing the multitude of tests in the multitude of classes they take, rather than really learning.
Robert D. Atkinson, Ph.D.: The Failure of American Higher Education
Thoughts?
(via world-shaker; infoneer-pulse)
I think this is a broad generalization, but not without truth. I was fortunate in many of my undergraduate classes and most of my graduate public policy classes to be taught how to draw connections between unlike facts or theories, how to write clearly and succinctly, and how to think critically. Without a professor who emphasizes the development of those skills, however, students must rely on their own initiative to apply lessons beyond the immediate content.
A strong liberal arts core can develop those skills, but a series of general education requirements with no connection to each other entrusts this skills development to professors who are not often asked to focus in skill development (and some of whom have never thought much about pedagogy in their own academic path).
(via jacquesofalltrades)
A fish? No, it’s an owl in flight!
(via lukees)
(via nekodesu-jp)
“ i want to get a twitter feed directly to my balls… so every time i get a twitter, it microengraves the tweet on a single sperm (like a sperm tattoo)… that way, long after i am dead, anthropologists and archaeologists can collect my little white towel collection and decode a generation’s worth of culture
From a Skype message by Nathaniel Green.
Philadelphia cheesesteak I made the other night for a few rookies. Being in Japan, we had to improvise when it came to the bread, but it worked! Oishii!!!
“ Another outcome of the social nervous system is that we see the shift away from privacy as an inalienable right to an individual responsibility. In a social nervous system there will be increasing pressure to be connected 24/7 to the hive mind that is Facebook, Twitter and so on. Those who do not connect, share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life.
The Rise of the Social Nervous System (via girk)
