These donations would not have been possible using today’s conventional payment processors which usually charge flat fees of between $0.50 and $1 per transaction, plus between two and five percent of the total; if the $11,000 donation had been processed by a well known payment processor, fees for this donation alone could easily have reached more than $500.
I was looking at a credit card statement the other day (the bill a merchant receives from their visa/mc processor) and this particular business payed over $23,000 in fees that month to accept credit cards. $23k! In this day and age, for a business to pay that much for something that is seemingly automated is crazy. Also, it normally takes between 2-3 business days for businesses to receive their funds. How does that make sense in the digital age? For these reasons, I think that we will begin seeing more and more businesses accepting and even offering incentives for consumers to use bitcoin to purchase goods/services.
When creating my tabletop RPG book, a few artists that I commissioned requested that I pay them with personal check rather than PayPal since PP takes such a significant cut. Rather than signing a piece of paper and sending it to them in the mail, I could pay them with BTC for almost no cost, and they could feel free to spend it within 10 minutes. There are many scenarios where the blockchain wins over clearing houses that siphon off each transaction.
That is a good example. PayPal is notorious for holding funds too. If they find anything suspicious about the transaction they can hold the funds in limbo for a seemingly indeterminable amount of time. Even if they find nothing wrong at all they will hold funds for 3-5 days or longer. Think of the amount of interest they earn by floating those funds. It seems insignificant given the $100 you paid the artist, but when you figure there were 500,000 other $100 transactions made that day, the float becomes extremely significant. The amount of hands that touch money between sender and receiver and make money off of the transaction is silly. It will change.
I am Jimmy Swill. Mongoose stopped carrying us after selling out the first dead tree run (they are still charging too much for our PDF), and I am working on a new print version that will put everything into one ridiculously large book. I'll post about it when I get there. If you want a PDF, send me a PM. Here's the post I made when Mongoose picked us up.