Our team of BitcoinVN News* had recently the opportunity to catch up with Vietnam's "Bitcoin OG Merchant" David Watson of Future Travel.

David was the first business owner in Vietnam to accept Bitcoin in a professional way** almost a decade ago.

Back in 2016, he "battled" on stage on behalf of Bitcoin at Vietnam's first Bitcoin-centric conference with the local directors of Visa or Standard Chartered bank, and he hold up pretty well (old footage included in the article!).

David has been looking back on his experience of accepting Bitcoin (and more recently: Lightning) for the past decade as a merchant.

A man from the trenches, talking about the practicalities of Bitcoin as a merchant in the competitive & combative world of online commerce.

Besides that he also gave some updates on Vietnam and for who the place might be a good fit (and who will likely fail in Vietnam!).

Quote

If you do the numbers of say 20 fraud attempts a day on average, over 365 days a year and take it to 10 years in business, we have weathered more than 73,000 fraud attempts via credit cards.

While we see uncompleted Bitcoin/Lightning transactions over the same period as being less than 1000, and 90% would be attributed to non fraud factors if it was possible to track.

So we are looking at maybe 100 possible fraud attempts over 10 years (less than 1 per month) for Bitcoin versus 73,000.

As a merchant we have no worries with Bitcoin or Lightning payments for fraud. We have never had one successful fraud attempt on the platform when we accept Bitcoin or Lightning as a form of payment.

Vietnam has picked up its game for 3D security on cards and now most credit card fraud for banks here are seen (and always has) as being offshore bad players trying to defraud local merchants.

Full interview: https://bitcoinvn.io/news/david-watson-interview/

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*Part of BitcoinVN, Vietnam's premier Bitcoin Exchange since 2014

**Read: Not the all-too-common setup of the early days: The owner has a wallet app on his phone and if he's gone nobody knows what to do