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A comment on Coinbase Debit Card. Parent comment

Re:Coinbase Debit Card by simias on Friday April 12, 2019 @05:44AM (#19643419)
Beyond the point made by siblings comments about selling fractions of stocks I also want to point out that selling small amount of bitcoins or ethereum on-chain is also prohibitively expensive. I'm sure those debit card transactions won't be directly settled on the actual cryptocurrency, they'll just keep a balance internally and make big transactions on the blockchain if they need to balance their accounts. You know, like a bank.
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Re:Coinbase Debit Card by chrisco255 on Friday April 12, 2019 @03:05PM (#19647984)
ETH transactions avg like 10 cents: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfee

But also, Coinbase owns an exchange, so they don't have to commit every transaction to the blockchain, so it's peanuts for them.

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Re:Coinbase Debit Card by simias on Friday April 12, 2019 @03:36PM (#19648263)
> ETH transactions avg like 10 cents: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfee

That's still significant for small transactions. Beyond that, will it scale well enough to cost only 10 cents if it becomes the new Visa/Mastercard? The transaction rate of BTC/ETH is still almost negligible when compared to mainstream payment processors.

>Coinbase owns an exchange, so they don't have to commit every transaction to the blockchain, so it's peanuts for them.

My point exactly. It's not a Bitcoin card, it's a Coinbase card, the cryptocurrency aspect is tangential. This is not cryptocurrency going mainstream, it's the mainstream taking over cryptocurrency because it's just so much more convenient to have a Visa card than a Bitcoin or Eth wallet.

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Re:Coinbase Debit Card by chrisco255 on Saturday April 13, 2019 @12:35AM (#19651143)
At 10 cents it is cheaper than debit card transactions. And credit card processors charge 2-3% on average for transactions... maybe as low as 1.5%.

Visa is more convenient today but it took decades for Visa to get to the scale and scope and convenience it has today. If people start parking more money in crypto and using crypto credit cards it's only a matter of time before merchants start accepting direct payment from coinbase wallets. At that point, Coinbase can bypass Visa and charge a fraction of the fee for facilitating the trade from USD to BTC.

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