Re: Facebook accepts Bitcoin?

There is no guarantee facebook is thinking about accepting bitcoin. They already accepted whatsapp and instagram. Right now, it seems like Facebook is getting ready for another new technology by accepting bitcoin. The company is ready to provide financial services and electronic money.

It isn't so much that facebook "accepted" instagram and whatsapp but they rather bought them out.

It is already possible to pay for things via bitcoin on facebook and IMO it is only a matter of time that facebook will start to accept bitcoin for payment for ads and likely credits. Also since it is possible to purchase many gift cards on this forum, I would not be surprised to start to see trading of facebook credits on the marketplace sometime in the future.

Facebook credits will slowly fade away. Merchants might decided to by pass payment system and accept and deal using bitcoin directly.

Unless facebook were to change their current policy this would really not be possible. AFAIK all "in-site" purchases must be done with facebook credits. This is very similar to how all "in-app" purchases must be done via the iTunes app store for apps on iPhones, iPads and iPods. I could see facebook potentially accepting BTC for payment for facebook credits in the future, but I would doubt that they would allow users to buy things with BTC directly.

Off platform transaction occur on ebay and amazon all the times.

The only issue is trust. For facebook store with reputation, they can easily convince buyer to send payment first before shipping items.

I am not so sure about amazon but I do know that off platform transactions are against ebay's rules. With facebook sellers/merchants can leverage facebook's trust to get people to pay for their product and be confident they will receive what they paid for. If a sale is done on the merchant's own site then the consumer will likely at least think they are at risk.

Merchant having its own website couple with good feedback on ebay/facebook store normally drive repeat customers away from the 3rd party platform into their own webstore with cheaper price products.

I would doubt this. Both amazon and eBay themselves have a very good reputation as far as buyers are concerned. Even power sellers on these sites would have difficulty selling off platform. Like to the effect that they would not be able to generate much in sales without offring discounts that greatly exceed the amount that sellers pay for selling their goods of their platforms.

Right. And both Ebay and Amazon are well aware of this and hence they are charging seller an arm and a leg just to use their platform.

I wouldn't go this far. They do provide valuable services to both the buyer and the seller. They generally are able to keep the buyer safe from fraud. They provide the seller a way to efficiently advertise their goods to the public and a way for the public to pay for their goods in a somewhat efficient fashion.

The protection is too biased toward buyer. All frauds are automatically assume to be seller side.

There is a recent rise on warranty fraud where buyer claimed the merchandise is broken even if it is not.

This is because it is the buyer who has more power. If the site is not sufficiently trusted then the buyer will not use his funds to buy products on a website. The sellers would have been appropriately advised of these kinds of policies.

It is all about protecting the reputation of the website.