Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

It's fun how hard it is for a layperson to buy a Bitcoin in USA. CCs do not work, you need bank transfer, your funds can be frozen, you have to wait in line, etc, etc.

I live in Russia and it's amazingly easy. First, everyone here owns a virtual money account. It works like this: you put some money into it and then you can pay your bills (especially internet and mobile phone), small purchases over internet and you can donate it to other users of the system. It is denominated in fiat money and that's what you put in. On every corner there is a device with touchscreen that accepts cash.

And that's where it ends: you can buy bitcoins with virtual money at metabank.ru. It probably talks to mtgox, buys some bitcoin there for you and transfers is. There is no trading involved, you buy for whatever the price is. You can actually buy BTC with CC attached to virtual money account, exactly like PayPal works. The catch is 6% fee.

If you want to trade, you go to btc-e. It supports a plenty of ways to move money into and out of the system. Fees are like 2%.

In Europe it's not that much simplier.

What I like is localbitcoins.com (disclaimer: I have ads for selling and buying on there). It's simple, you actually meet some people interested in bitcoins, it's pretty safe (because of the escrow) and a little more decentralized than mtgox/btc-e.

I say "a little", because the escrow is centralized anyway.

>It's fun how hard it is for a layperson to buy a Bitcoin in USA. CCs do not work

Because it's too easy to claim fraud and have your CC provider initialise a charge-back.

I don't know why you can't go to an ATM or a 7-Eleven and use your CC with your PIN to make a purchase. The CC company will know it's probably you because you entered your PIN and the merchant doesn't risk a charge-back.

In the UK this is called Chip and PIN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_and_PIN

Guess what? It's broken as hell ;)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland10chipbroken.p...

Is it really more broken than just having to sign?

Fair point, "as hell" was unwarranted. I mainly just wanted to post that PDF tbh.

It's not that broken. It's still not trivial to clone them like swipe cards.

The thrust of that paper is that using special equipment it's possible to use a genuine stolen card to do a non-PIN transaction, and that banks will often claim that PIN was used in a card-present transaction in order to avoid refunding money.

In the UK at least, and with a credit card, the bank is legally bound to return the money pending investigation, regardless of the circumstance.

(I agree this doesn't help with the BTC situation because chargeback is still a possibility)

And I'm amazed that this hasn't caught on in the US yet. Last time I vistited, I was horrified when they swiped the magnetic strip and asked me to sign for it - felt like I'd jumped back in time.

By 2014-2015 all of the cards should be Chip & Pin in USA.

After I got back from my last visit to the states I kept handing my card to the staff when I was paying. They usually looked funny at me and put it in the machine rather awkwardly.

>Because it's too easy to claim fraud and have your CC provider initialise a charge-back.

First, you can do this with any CC purchase, and I don't see why bitcoin merchants need any special protection against it. Why would a bitcoin merchant be more likely to get a chargeback than any other merchant? Second, this would definitely be credit card fraud, and easily detectable fraud at that; it's highly likely that anyone who attempted this would wind up in jail.

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