23 January 2014

Bitcoin MyWay Recharge?

23 January 2014 | imagineteamsol

Hey everyone,

We’re super excited to announce we’ve crossed the 50,000 active user mark for our MyBus 2.0 app.

We wanted to do something special to thank everyone for their support, and we got tired of waiting for the real-time feeds to become available (the launch date has been a roving target…), so we decided to focus our attention on the MyWay recharge.

We’re trying to see what we can do to let users recharge their MyWay card in real-time (think tap your card to your phone type thing) rather than wait for 3-5 business days, but while we try to find the legitimate way to do that, we were wondering if any of you would be interested in recharging your MyWay cards using Bitcoin? Asides from the novelty of the idea, we’re strong supporters of the currency, and would love to bring some legitimate use cases for Canberra. It would also be interesting as it’d be the first transport agency in the world that (indirectly) allowed for use of Bitcoin for public transport.

We’re rolling it out over the next week or two, but wanted to know if it was something anyone thought useful? If not, what would you like to see added?

Thanks everyone!

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imagineteamsol5:52 pm 30 Jan 14

davo101 said :

imagineteamsol said :

Firstly, our privacy policy is quite clear. http://imagineteamsolutions.com/privacypolicy/

Your definition of clear seems to deviate quite widely from mine. Is that something like a 2000 word paragraph? Where does it address my MyWay login details as compared with my MyBus login/account details? To quote your “about the app”:

Your MyWay login details are kept private only on your phone, and used only with the official MyWay service.

Or to put it another way: Bullshit.

imagineteamsol said :

Lastly, you do know that the whole point of the MyWay system was to collect information on your travel habits? Or do you wear a tinfoil hat?

I’m quite aware of that and I’m quite happy for the ACT Government to know which buses I use and when. As for you guys…….

We do exactly that: “Your MyWay login details are kept private only on your phone, and used only with the official MyWay service.” We pass them through and do not store them anywhere. If you’re uncomfortable using the app, or don’t understand what I am quite clearly saying, its a free app, don’t use it.

davo1014:19 pm 30 Jan 14

imagineteamsol said :

Firstly, our privacy policy is quite clear. http://imagineteamsolutions.com/privacypolicy/

Your definition of clear seems to deviate quite widely from mine. Is that something like a 2000 word paragraph? Where does it address my MyWay login details as compared with my MyBus login/account details? To quote your “about the app”:

Your MyWay login details are kept private only on your phone, and used only with the official MyWay service.

Or to put it another way: Bullshit.

imagineteamsol said :

Lastly, you do know that the whole point of the MyWay system was to collect information on your travel habits? Or do you wear a tinfoil hat?

I’m quite aware of that and I’m quite happy for the ACT Government to know which buses I use and when. As for you guys…….

imagineteamsol3:16 pm 30 Jan 14

davo101 said :

imagineteamsol said :

Our server processes a MyWay balance check every 0.8 seconds on average, with peak traffic hitting 2000 MyWay balance checks a minute.

WTF!? Where does it say in your terms and conditions that my login details are being sent through your server? Forget trusting you guys to handle my topups I’m uninstalling the App; I don’t want to be part of your data harvesting exercise thank you very much.

Firstly, our privacy policy is quite clear. http://imagineteamsolutions.com/privacypolicy/

Secondly, we don’t “harvest” anything. Your details are passed through our server, and the response is parsed to be passed back to the phone in a meaningful way. The information is only kept in memory for the time that it needs to be there (~half a second if I was to guess)

Lastly, you do know that the whole point of the MyWay system was to collect information on your travel habits? Or do you wear a tinfoil hat?

davo1019:08 am 30 Jan 14

imagineteamsol said :

Our server processes a MyWay balance check every 0.8 seconds on average, with peak traffic hitting 2000 MyWay balance checks a minute.

WTF!? Where does it say in your terms and conditions that my login details are being sent through your server? Forget trusting you guys to handle my topups I’m uninstalling the App; I don’t want to be part of your data harvesting exercise thank you very much.

watto239:18 am 29 Jan 14

I’ve been also reading about bitcoin and the silk road website. Its very interesting, and the idea of a digital currency is great. I just cannot see it ever replacing hard currency in a digital form, because there are many issues that make a governments job more difficult. No doubt that is part of the reason it was created. Why not let people recharge with paypal or another digital payment platform. Just as easy and heaps more usable.

imagineteamsol11:20 pm 28 Jan 14

davo101 said :

But I can see how this is not an attractive option for you as there is no way for you guys to make money from this.

We never set out to make money from MyBus – the app is free. Our server processes a MyWay balance check every 0.8 seconds on average, with peak traffic hitting 2000 MyWay balance checks a minute. For this, we’re spending ~$100 a month of our own money on the server costs. We decided to go down the MyWay recharge road seeing that it didn’t cost anything for our users, and made it more sustainable for us to keep this in the long term. Obviously this doesn’t include the countless hours with people emailing/calling us for support, and the bug fixes and timetable updates.

If you’re going to complain about 5% that doesn’t cost you anything, I hardly think you’re keeping things in perspective/realising the real costs and efforts of keeping this all running.

davo1011:24 pm 28 Jan 14

imagineteamsol said :

I reiterate- we are a private business and the ACT Government has no part of MyBus. I also reiterate, what on earth is there to lose? For such negative backlash, you’d think there was some concrete negative outcome for all the whinging going on. People can recharge with BPay, Credit Card, Direct Debit, and in stores. Each have their pluses and minuses. How is anything but good that you can add Bitcoin as an option to all of that?

Keep things in perspective people

As several others have commented you are free to accept whatever you like as payment. You’re biggest stumbling block will be convincing the ACT Government to let you be a MyWay recharge agent.

As a user I would find that a far more useful feature would be to have the App tell me when my balance drops to a certain level so that I can recharge by BPay and get the 5% discount. But I can see how this is not an attractive option for you as there is no way for you guys to make money from this.

Deref3:17 pm 26 Jan 14

oh_ said :

Yes Bitcoin is a new phenomenom lots of people need to get their head around…

The people who have their head around it won’t touch it with the proverbial bargepole.

oh_10:05 am 26 Jan 14

I think this is a great idea, and if a Canberra company pioneers it think of all the mass transit systems in the world it could be deployed to. We should be backing this peeps, not knocking it!

Yes Bitcoin is a new phenomenom lots of people need to get their head around, but in the early 1990s the internet and mobile phone were curiosities and people said then both were a waste of time…

Besides which my understanding is that the ACT Government wouldnt be taking any risk or exposing itself on this as what we’re talking about is a third party app that accepts bitcoin and credits your MyWay pretty much instantly by exchanging on the markets at live rates…just another payment option really.

BimboGeek10:04 pm 25 Jan 14

This is all very interesting but how many of Canberra’s bus commuters do you realistically believe own bitcoin and wish to use it to pay for everyday things like bus tickets?

And of those who do, how many of them consider using AUD an actual difficulty or disadvantage?

Because if the answer is a very low number, you’re just throwing your budget at a curiosity.

Mordd3:28 am 24 Jan 14

davo101 said :

Mordd said :

And to those saying Bitcoin is not a currency – it is a fiat currency just like the money we use every day.

It is not. Fiat means authoritative decree as in “he ruled by fiat”, fiat money is money that has value by means of fiat (such as this). Bitcoins are money but not fiat money. If anything Bitcoins are just a modern form of rai stones: they’re hard to make, there is a limited number that you can make, they have no intrinsic value, and they’re traded virtually (ie: people only swapped ownership they didn’t actually move them). Perhaps we could convince the ACT Government to let us top up our MyWays with rai stones.

Mordd said :

Some RiotACT readers could do well to educate themselves better about Bitcoin imho.

Yes, they probably should.

Bulls***! Where do you get your info from? Let’s go to the biggest source of data on the net and see what Wikipedia has to say and wether it backs up my stance or yours:

Fiat money has been defined variously as:

any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[1]
state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[2]
money without intrinsic value.[3][4]

The term derives from the Latin fiat (“let it be done”, “it shall be”).[5]

While gold- or silver-backed representative money entails the legal requirement that the bank of issue redeem it in fixed weights of gold or silver, fiat money’s value is unrelated to the value of any physical quantity. Even a coin containing valuable metal may be considered fiat currency if its face value is defined by law as different from its market value as metal.

The Nixon Shock of 1971 ended the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold. Since then, all reserve currencies have been fiat currencies, including the U.S. dollar and the Euro.[6]

So lets see that seems to suggest the definition of Fiat currency I quoted was fairly spot on, and that Bitcoin does qualify as a Fiat currency.

Now how about you show a source for your wacky form of the truth? And try and quote from a well known source please like I did, except im betting the only source you will find to agree with your false view is as obscure as they get.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency

I don’t have to be an economist to know how to understand what a Fiat currency is.

c_c™4:09 pm 23 Jan 14

Mordd said :

Well reading this just shows how grossly ignorant the majority of RiotACT readers are regarding Bitcoin and how it works, which is a shame, I would have expected more educated responses here but oh well.

To point out a practical issue rather than a moral/philosophical one – there are almost no bitcoin exchanges that allow AUD > Bitcoin or Bitcoin > AUD transactions, meaning you would need to convert AUD to USD first, then to Bitcoin to use this.

Although I fully support bitcoin as a concept, I don’t think there is a practical benefit to the OP proposal at this stage, mainly due to the limited use of Bitcoin in Australia so far compared to the USA or Europe.

And to those saying Bitcoin is not a currency – it is a fiat currency just like the money we use every day. Apart from the fact that the US Government recognised at as a currency a few months ago – http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/federal-judge-bitcoin-a-currency-can-be-regulated-under-american-law/ – there is also this explanation which might make more sense to some readers:

[blockquote]Bitcoiners famously like to talk about the fact that like most modern currencies (like the US dollar or the euro), it’s a fiat currency. It essentially works on faith. There’s nothing inherently valuable about a piece of computer code more than a piece of green paper. We know that $1 is worth $1 because that’s what we’ve decided as a society. I get paid in dollars, and I can buy stuff with dollars. There are shops on the Internet and in real life that will take my physical paper dollars and my digital (debit/credit card) dollars. We have an innate sense of what things are worth because of it. By contrast, precious metals like silver and gold also have inherent worth too, but that’s more due to their industrial and aesthetic properties. Bitcoins are physically just bits of code.[/blockquote]

So yes Bitcoin is a fiat currency like AUD or USD, although some of its early behavior might have more closely reflected an amortized security or derivative, it is at the end clearly a fiat currency. Some RiotACT readers could do well to educate themselves better about Bitcoin imho.

Fail.

Mordd2:07 pm 23 Jan 14

Well reading this just shows how grossly ignorant the majority of RiotACT readers are regarding Bitcoin and how it works, which is a shame, I would have expected more educated responses here but oh well.

To point out a practical issue rather than a moral/philosophical one – there are almost no bitcoin exchanges that allow AUD > Bitcoin or Bitcoin > AUD transactions, meaning you would need to convert AUD to USD first, then to Bitcoin to use this.

Although I fully support bitcoin as a concept, I don’t think there is a practical benefit to the OP proposal at this stage, mainly due to the limited use of Bitcoin in Australia so far compared to the USA or Europe.

And to those saying Bitcoin is not a currency – it is a fiat currency just like the money we use every day. Apart from the fact that the US Government recognised at as a currency a few months ago – http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/federal-judge-bitcoin-a-currency-can-be-regulated-under-american-law/ – there is also this explanation which might make more sense to some readers:

[blockquote]Bitcoiners famously like to talk about the fact that like most modern currencies (like the US dollar or the euro), it’s a fiat currency. It essentially works on faith. There’s nothing inherently valuable about a piece of computer code more than a piece of green paper. We know that $1 is worth $1 because that’s what we’ve decided as a society. I get paid in dollars, and I can buy stuff with dollars. There are shops on the Internet and in real life that will take my physical paper dollars and my digital (debit/credit card) dollars. We have an innate sense of what things are worth because of it. By contrast, precious metals like silver and gold also have inherent worth too, but that’s more due to their industrial and aesthetic properties. Bitcoins are physically just bits of code.[/blockquote]

So yes Bitcoin is a fiat currency like AUD or USD, although some of its early behavior might have more closely reflected an amortized security or derivative, it is at the end clearly a fiat currency. Some RiotACT readers could do well to educate themselves better about Bitcoin imho.

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