Stripe is an expensive acquirer. I'm working with Heartland and we're getting a hair over 2.1%. I suspect this is going to fall even farther as EMV gains wide acceptance and skimming/other forms of fraud become a thing of the past.
I'll admit, that's a tighter market than I thought (CB exchange) but I'm still having a hard time seeing how those economics work long-term without tons of VC. You'd have to get below 2% on an ongoing basis and with all the fraud/rewards/other stuff cards provide, 2% still seems cheap.
2.1% isn't your whole acquisition cost. You will have to eat the inevitable chargebacks and associated fees too (which is not an issue with Bitcoin).
> You'd have to get below 2% on an ongoing basis
I'm not sure what you mean by this. We've never charged more than 1% for merchant processing and I doubt we ever will.
> with all the fraud/rewards/other stuff cards provide, 2% still seems cheap.
Why would I use my 1% cashback credit card at a trusted merchant when I can get a 2% rebate from the merchant instead? I'm not alone in this thinking, many Americans choose the 'cash price' when pumping gas every day.
You make some good points about cash back and gas, but you can't deny there's value in the extra layer of protection between you and the merchant provided by the credit card. I don't know whether it's worth 1%, but it's not worth zero. BTC payment is more like handing a stack of notes, not payment via card.
That's how transaction costs are so low.
I bought and sold bitcoin and paid for things with bitcoin, but the associated paperwork to account for the gains and losses incurred by the inherently fluctuating price was onerous.
I believe in the premise of bitcoin, and still own some, but it's way easier to pull out my credit card to buy a cheeseburger than it is to use bitcoin and then compute the capital gains tax owed on my cheeseburger the following spring.
You can already hold USD at Coinbase and send USD to BTC addresses with an on-the-fly conversion (although it will run you 1% today). Or conversely, generate a BTC address for your USD wallet and have all incoming BTC converted on-the-fly (also 1%).
For a local cheeseburger in your own country it's never going to make sense to use Bitcoin but there are plenty of other applications where it already makes a lot of sense (remittances, online purchases, goods and services with a high risk of payment fraud, etc.)
Bitcoin is already cheaper as a medium of exchange than credit cards and pretty much all international remittance providers.
Coinbase Exchange has a $0.01-$0.02 spread and charges 0.25% for removing liquidity.
Stripe costs 3% + $0.30 and Western Union / Wire Transfers are multiples of that.
Disclosure: I work for Coinbase