> It is telling that the first purchases done via MoneyBadger on the Peach Payments platform were for spades at a suburban hardware store and light fittings
I'd love to see better privacy here. The company blogging about the specific items being purchased suggests they have detailed information about each purchase and are willing to share it (in a blog post). Or maybe an employee made the first purchases?
Especially if they are going to be used for hiding a body.
Reminds me of Zuck recently confessing that "people tell llama all kinds of personal things, and they use it for therapy" (paraphrasing). They read your shit.
The stores just said what they sold. They didnât say who they sold it to.
That seems possible too. Are you familiar with the system, or are you also guessing?
I work for MoneyBadger
I mean crypto itself is only as anonymous as your most public link to your wallet too, which is one of the reasons I dislike it despite seeing the appeal of the idea. People like to compare it to cash, but the fact is every hundred dollar bill in circulation doesn't have a list of people's unique if anonymized handles who's touched it since it was printed. And that gets doubly problematic if you use... really any of the wallet managers out there, who now know every wallet address associated with not only your personal info, but likely bank info.
There are techniques for anonyminity in cryptocurrency such as zero-knowedge proofs implemented in cryptocurrencies like monero and zcash (and many others)
These techniques vary in their effectiveness and efficiency. If you look at a monero transaction for example it uses something like 10x the bandwidth and CPU power to verify vs Bitcoin (which is already an inefficient network)
Some banknotes do have identifying markers, but I think you are right. Cash-like privacy should be the goal with all crypto
Relevant documentary (german, auto-translation probably an option) about bitcoin adoption in south africas townships, including pick'n'pay adoption: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O0QpNbDLoQ (pick'n'pay part starting minute 18:01)
This one is also cool! https://x.com/itsmaxdemarco/status/1611019316488536066?s=46
Site appears to be down. Hug of death?
68% of South Africans have bought or own BTC? There is simply no way. Impossible.
happy to answer any questions!
Lots of people who have relatively stable currencies (EUR, USD..) do not want to use bitcoin. What if bitcoin price goes down? How many extra steps is it to convert my USD to bitcoin and then back to USD? Do I only convert the 19.99 USD for my current purchase into bitcoin or do I put in more?
Do you solve these issues for customers? Or are you only targeting people who already are happy bitcoin wallet users? Are stablecoins part of your strategy?
Given how Visa,Mastercard,Paypal are seen as bad actors. Do you think you can capitalize on that, possibly partnering with Valve or something of that sort?
We as MoneyBadger create an invoice for the customer in their local currency e.g. USD. If they pay with Bitcoin Lightning, they have 3 minutes to complete the transaction at our offered exchange rate. We take on the risk of the price moving.
If theyâre paying with one of the exchange wallets we support like Luno.com, VALR.com or Binance.com we do the same, and they can choose to pay with any currency supported by those wallets.
any interest in working with itch or valve given recent events?
steam used to have support but ran into volatility and price issues, so if you've got that handled it could be good press is my thinking
Any interest in adding other, fee-less currencies like nano?
Why bitcoin and not ethereum?
The website says Bitcoin and crypto*
Yeah, it seems kind of inconsistent. But the crypto page on peachpayments only mentions bitcoin https://www.peachpayments.com/payment-methods/cryptocurrency and moneybadger seems explicitly bitcoin: https://www.moneybadger.co.za/ ("Bitcoin payments made simple" "Accept Bitcoin or any crypto in-store or online, paid out in South African Rand or Bitcoin" "Pay with Bitcoin" "Accept Bitcoin" etc)
But I guess the answer is
> According to reported statistics, 68 percent of South Africans own or have bought Bitcoin â one of the highest adoption rates globally.
Bitcoin is wildly unsuitable for small scale payments, at least in it's current architecture
It uses bitcoin lightning, are you referring to that?
You mean the not-bitcoin bolt-on that pretty much mandates using a 3rd party wallet to ensure always online status and has been bleeding capacity for the last few years?
It would be a travesty if society decides bitcoin is the defacto payment crypto, in part because you need to use a totally separate service in order to reasonably send bitcoin.
Bitcoin (BTC) doesn't work at all for payments less than $100 (as by design) and so adding a second layer on to that only makes it MORE expensive, not less.
Like saying I can't afford my credit card fees so I'll just take a cash advance on my credit card, put the money in a bank account, then use a debit card for transactions. It makes no sense and would only work to trick a moron that doensn't understand how the system works.
Bitcoin (now called Bitcoin Cash) solved the problem 10+ years ago, then Blockstream hijacked the BTC GitHub repo and injected the SegWit and RBF code that killed the project.
Bitcoin doesn't need to be usable for small scale payments. That's what a payment processor is for.
I'm guessing that Bitcoin's usecases are mostly large scale speculation and criminal activities.
As is the tax burden -- at least in the US.
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