thejohnnycrypto on Nostr: Ask a shop owner what they hate about taking cards and the fee is not the first thing ...
Ask a shop owner what they hate about taking cards and the fee is not the first thing out of their mouth.
The terminal never shows you the rest of it. When a customer pays with a card, that payment can be pulled back later. They call their bank, say the charge was wrong, and the bank reverses it. That is a chargeback. The shop has already handed over the goods. Now it loses the money too, and pays a dispute fee on top. Card processing in the States runs somewhere around two to three percent, and most owners made their peace with that number years ago. The reversals are what they cannot plan around, because a handful of them in one month can eat a whole quarter of margin on thin goods.
A bitcoin payment works the other way. Once it settles, the person who sent it cannot claw it back. So when someone walks into a shop and pitches bitcoin acceptance by leading with the fee saving, they are pitching the smaller half. What a small merchant gets is an end to the part of the month nobody can forecast.
The case against that is strong and I want to put it properly. The same one way door takes something away from the customer. People have spent fifty years learning that a card gives them recourse when an order never arrives or shows up broken. Ask them to hand that back and plenty will just use the card. The card networks also carry work a shop would rather not rebuild: fraud screening, dispute handling, the financing behind it. A merchant who drops all of that has to replace it with a returns policy people believe, and that is real work in its own right.
One number would change my mind. If merchants who switch are still naming the fee saving as their reason a year later, and their reversal line was never big enough to matter, then I was watching the wrong number.
Bitcoin has settled this way since the first block, with no committee needed to decide it. The open question is who walks into a shop and sells them on the quiet month instead of the two percent.
if this changed which number you would look at, Zap ⚡
Published at
2026-08-30 03:53:08 CESTEvent JSON
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"content": "Ask a shop owner what they hate about taking cards and the fee is not the first thing out of their mouth.\n\nThe terminal never shows you the rest of it. When a customer pays with a card, that payment can be pulled back later. They call their bank, say the charge was wrong, and the bank reverses it. That is a chargeback. The shop has already handed over the goods. Now it loses the money too, and pays a dispute fee on top. Card processing in the States runs somewhere around two to three percent, and most owners made their peace with that number years ago. The reversals are what they cannot plan around, because a handful of them in one month can eat a whole quarter of margin on thin goods.\n\nA bitcoin payment works the other way. Once it settles, the person who sent it cannot claw it back. So when someone walks into a shop and pitches bitcoin acceptance by leading with the fee saving, they are pitching the smaller half. What a small merchant gets is an end to the part of the month nobody can forecast.\n\nThe case against that is strong and I want to put it properly. The same one way door takes something away from the customer. People have spent fifty years learning that a card gives them recourse when an order never arrives or shows up broken. Ask them to hand that back and plenty will just use the card. The card networks also carry work a shop would rather not rebuild: fraud screening, dispute handling, the financing behind it. A merchant who drops all of that has to replace it with a returns policy people believe, and that is real work in its own right.\n\nOne number would change my mind. If merchants who switch are still naming the fee saving as their reason a year later, and their reversal line was never big enough to matter, then I was watching the wrong number.\n\nBitcoin has settled this way since the first block, with no committee needed to decide it. The open question is who walks into a shop and sells them on the quiet month instead of the two percent.\n\nhttps://blossom.primal.net/86a08b8e7d29dbebd9b7a979b9f5a73bc10917f862192f78803713fcfa278a3f.jpg\n\nif this changed which number you would look at, Zap ⚡",
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