I’m in the progress of thinking through how we should be approaching merchants in the near future. I think after a couple more weeks of stability at $1.00 (along with the inevitable public exchange listing of NuShares) we will have a stronger case to begin a targeted campaign towards businesses. I also think Cybnate’s recent Android mobile wallet proposal will make things much more attractive for brick-and-mortar businesses too if it gains traction.
As part of this I’d like to put up the first merchant bounty to give us a goal to shoot towards. Whoever convinces the first business with over $1M in annual revenues to accept NuBits as a payment option will get 100,000 NSR from me, after the business has NuBits payments operational for 30 days minimum. This might be some distance in the future but I’m confident we’ll get there.
Let’s brainstorm some ideas about how to approach businesses soon.
Before going to merchant we need a platform that supports payments in nubits. We cannot ask merchants to manually process orders (although with NBT its gonna be very easy doing the math).
Not in the end.
But it might help with merchant adoption if payment providers handle the NBT transactions.
My understanding is that as soon as NBT’s adoption process is beyond a critical level, payment providers are technically not needed any more because the NBT needn’t be exchanged for fiat money (due to the price stability).
But even then they might be useful for merchants that don’t want to handle the payment themselves. The payment providers would provide a service for a fee - why not…
In difference to now that would be a “free” decision (to use the service of payment providers) and wouldn’t be necessary due to the volatility of the currently used “currencies”.
for businesses who don’t have the skills it could be useful, when they want stuff like new address for every payment, maybe some administration etc, it is not needed: they could just use one address, or at least one address per customer or something, depends on the size of the company how much effort it is going to cost them (bakeries, icecream carts, vs wall-mart etc) , im sure at least until they have learned how to do it themselves there will be demand for something like this, lets call it NuPay
It’s only a matter of time before payment processors begin considering alt-coins. In everyone’s opinion, who would make a suitable first target based on their receptiveness to the idea? This is something I would like to prioritize pursuing.
Coins like NBT are a perfect match for payment processors, because the services they can offer when executing a NBT payment will be cheaper, because they don’t need to calculate with a buffer (for coin volatility) when selling the coins at an exchange.
Either they are able to instantly sell the coins at exchanges (which requires that they have bought a bunch of coins before and transferred them to an exchange) or
they transfer the coins to the exchange after they have received the payment.
Both ways put a coin volatility risk at the business of the payment processors which needs to be covered by the fees they charge (bad for the merchant) or the exchange rates (bad for the customers) that are offered.
In the end it should be cheaper for merchants and the customers if payment providers handle payments with NBT (compared to xyz coin).
Here is a complementary idea: how about offering a bounty (payable in either NuBits or NuShares) to the first business that:
Decides to use NuBits as a payment option.
Continues to use NuBits as a payment option for at least 6 months.
They get half of the bounty upfront, when they start using NuBits. They get the second half after they have used NuBits for 6 months.
Here is my experience that encouraged me to offer this alternative idea: I recently had a computer software problem that I could not fix myself after trying for several days. I offered a direct bounty to anyone who could help me fix it. Within about 4 hours of posting the bounty, someone posted saying that he could fix the problem, and that he was already working on it. Within another few hours, I had the solution. I suspect that your bounty is a very good idea, and there will be strong responses, but I think that offering a bounty directly to the first few businesses that sign up might not be a bad idea as well.
Merchant adoption is what should keep NuBits alive, this topic has surfaced numerous times on Peercointalk chat. Making NuBits popular as a payment system should be high on the priority list. I see great potential for Nu, personally I’d like to launch an asset that would be tradable for NuBits as its stable value eliminates a lot of problems.
The best would be that the merchant is able to set up a NuBits wallet and accept payments in NuBits directly from customers into the wallet.
But some merchants do not want to deal with cryptos themselves but want to increase their sales.
In that case, we would need a simple payment processor that would make the interface between the customer and the merchant, by taking the nubits from the customer, converting them into USD or a local currency for a fee via an exchange and deposit that fiat into the merchant bank account.
What would be the differences with Bitcoin and Coinbase?, you may ask.
Well, in principle no differences except that the number of customers using NuBits should be greater by several orders of magnitude that the number of customers using Bitcoin as a way to pay for things online and offline.
The main reason for that being obviously the stability of NuBits.
I believe that the number of users using Bitcoins as a way to purchase things does not grow despite the many processors we have, because most of users are not interested in using a so-called currency whose price may be lower the next day…
