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Comment by atulagarwal | Hacker News Reader

I'm still looking for an exchange where I can buy Bitcoins simply with a Credit/Debit Card. I hurriedly read the title as:

Seamlessly Buy Bitcoin using Zinc

Missed the "with"! Anyone else wanting this? Or if it already exists, can someone point me there?

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Buying a cryptocurrency with a credit card is expensive, and AFAIK the online merchants who accept cards for digital currencies don't distinguish between credit or debit cards. The companies that accept cards are going to charge you fees to cover the risk of a reversal (remember if you reverse, the exchange rate may have changed significantly since the original transaction making their managing their cash flow much more complicated), plus you may incur international card fees depending on who the merchant is, and they're still going to charge you their normal spread over and above this.

(This is true for fiat currencies too - cash and cash equivalents are a special case of purchases, and can attract cash advance fees, reward exclusions, etc. Try reversing an international credit card payment some time, too, you can be out by as much as 5-6% in fees even though the charge was reversed!)

If you want to still want to go this route you could try buying Second Life Lindens (SLL) at e.g. VirWox and using those to buy Bitcoin (BTC) - of course you're going to pay the spread twice, making your BTC even more expensive.

The problem with cards and Paypal is chargebacks. You can't get your coins back if someone cancels his currency transaction.

Most people don't abuse them, but a handful does, and that's enough to wreak havoc.

The only way this could ever work safely is if you partnered with a credit card company prepared to treat a record in the blockchain as sufficient proof to refuse a chargeback.

Or if you treated credit-card bitcoin purchases as options. On the surface it's not a good idea for someone to accept credit cards for bitcoins, but why can't I use my credit card to purchase BTC at the current rate for, say, April 15 delivery? Of course, now I have to trust the seller to follow through, but that's a tractable problem that can be solved with either reputation-based trust or escrow services.

I like this. Do you know how long one would have to wait for chargebacks to be no longer an option?

At a minimum, chargebacks can occur months later. The chances of a fraudulent chargeback would go down the longer you waited, though the changes of a legitimate "why don't I have my product yet" chargeback would likely go up.

Haha!

I think it's a pretty solid way of establishing "delivery". But Credit Card company supporting BitCoins, that doesn't sound too probable, since easy availability of BTCs could be a threat to Credit Cards.

You can do this on Coinbase

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