Author: Mike Hearn 2014-06-24 13:27:57
Published on: 2014-06-24T13:27:57+00:00
Coinbase has started allowing merchants to offer discounts for purchases made with Bitcoin. However, these individual discounts are often small and not very motivating to customers. To address this issue, businesses often use loyalty points or other incentives that stack up over time and feel like free money. The author suggests that Bitcoin should do the same by showing users how much they're saving by using Bitcoin instead of credit cards. To implement this idea, the author proposed a minor BIP 70 extension that includes a field for recording the size of any discount provided by the merchant only because the user chose to pay with Bitcoin or other digital currency. This field would allow wallets to display a running total of how much money users have saved by avoiding credit cards and bank payments, thus encouraging more people to use Bitcoin. Wallets could then persist this data to disk and compete on cool visualizations for how much money users saved over time. However, the author acknowledges that formalizing how to extend BIP 70 has not yet been done and needs to be addressed. Overall, the proposal aims to make Bitcoin more appealing to customers by providing a tangible incentive for using it as a payment method.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T00:34:55.529330+00:00