There is a precedent for doing it legally, Paypal, Facebook Credits, etc are all digital currencies. They do it by getting licensed as a money transmitter and complying with all AML and know your customer laws. It's an expensive and long process but people are able to do it. Not sure I fully understand the last two bullets. In general I think you're right that this startup will have larger legal challenges/costs than most but building something that is 100% above board and shows you're making a good faith effort to comply/do the right thing buys you a lot of good will. You want to be YouTube, not MegaUpload.
Paypal is more of a wallet service that works with real currency. Even then it's quite heavily regulated in India, where I live. I'm not sure about other developing nations. FB credits have extremely limited use as far as I know, so it's not much of a threat. Another non state-issued currency is food coupons (like sodexo). As long as the new currency cannot be universally used, it's of no concern to the authorities.
You cannot, for example, pay some shady person for a handgun with FB credits or food coupons. From what I can tell, your currency will make that possible. If this transaction happens with a regular bank account (through creditcard or bank transfer), the bank will be able to point the police to the person involved. Will you also be able to do this? The price for reliably collecting, holding, updating such information is quite high.
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Can you link to the paper? Happy to read it. My thoughts/plan in general though: basically do what facebook credits did. Get licensed as a money transmitter, collect info on all users to comply with AML and know your customer laws. It's a pain, and expensive but doable and there is precedent for it (Paypal blazed this trail as well). Then there will be a PR battle where you win hearts and minds by highlighting the benefit to small business owners.
I think Dwolla is a valid approach that is better in the short term (doesn't ask people to change as much) but is not as good in the long term. They are built on ACH which still takes 1-3 business days. The way I think of it is Credit card = fast and expensive, ACH = slow and cheap, digital currency = fast and cheap. So it's the speed of credit card at the price of ach. Also, ACH doesn't work internationally well so there is an opportunity there (Western Union, etc).
Sure, but look at the way Venmo/Square are approaching this problem.
Venmo: You have a venmo balance. Initially, money is brought in from a CC, but they just moved to Bank Accounts. Payments are fast because it's just venmo balance --> venmo balance most of the time.
Square: They control apps on the merchant (register, square) and the client (card case, now pay with square), rendering a physical credit card useless. At some point they connect to your bank account as well (or open their own bank).
I think having a niche currency is just another barrier to success. Not saying that you shouldn't proceed with this opportunity, but you're far from the only player in the space who realizes the magnitude of the opportunity and sees what the future looks like.
Paypal, Stripe, Square etc all use credit cards which cost 2.x% plus 30 cents. Bitbank uses a digital currency with low or no fees. It's more competing with Visa/Mastercard than with Paypal, Stripe, etc. Those companies could become partners actually if they decided to support it as another payment method.
You know how some people pay with credit card simply to get the airline miles or 1% cash back?
Who pays that? The merchant. (Well, the merchant adds it to the price that everyone pays, but I digress).
Now given the option. Pay $100 with your credit card or pay $98 if paying with bitcoin, which are you going to choose.
Stripe and PayPal both are at 2.99% + $0.30, Square is at a flat 2.75%. So giving the customer the 2% discount for paying with bitcoin still yields the merchant more than had the customer paid with a credit or (signature-based) debit card transaction.
But, almost no one seems to offer a discount for cash - which they pay 0% on and they don't have to wait to collect from the credit card companies.
There are so many of these alternative payments systems available nowadays, but none seem to really offer any benefits (or protection or increased warranties) to me over a credit card to change my personal purchasing behavior.
Merchants incur expenses dealing with cash as well, so accepting $0.98 worth of bitcoin might be equivalent to accepting $1.00 in cash and coin after the hassle of dealing with cash in factored in.
It will be some time before we see bitcoin used at retail, point of sale. But it really solves problems for online purchases -- for the merchant. And maybe that's where the the sweet spot is. If you want what the merchant sells and the merchant wants bitcoin (for the reasons you state -- protection from fraudulent customer chargebacks), you won't be given the opportunity to use your credit card.
Thanks! Fixed some grammar items, you're right about that.
For your dry cleaner I would say: How much do you pay now per transaction for credit cards? Would you like to pay x instead?
They probably won't care or think about digital currency, but they might think "low fees". There is value even if only a few people use it at first. Obviously that is just the tip of the iceberg, but for anyone interested happy to talk more.
It's a good point - I was trying to stay semi-anonymous.
For now I'll just say, I've built one startup previously to profitability and 20k users. Have also worked at 2 YC companies, one as employee #2 and the other in a role that is relevant to this idea. I have a masters in CS and studied economics undergrad.
