>>>> I own BTC, but I'm still wondering what's going to want me to spend it instead of my AmEx for my next purchase.
This is one of the appeals of paper money and credit cards over bitcoins at the moment. You have all the tactile experiences with money and credit cards. With BTC, people can't grasp the algorithm or the fact you can print out the promissory note, but its not the same.
Retailers will have to provide discounts for using btc, but all the major CC companies have it in their contracts with businesses they must sell stuff the same price regardless of using a CC or not. It makes it hard for bitcoin to gain traction on its principle benefit - no / minimal fees.
> all the major CC companies have it in their contracts with businesses they must sell stuff the same price regardless of using a CC or not
Those clauses were recently struck down due to a class-action lawsuit. Retailers are now pretty much free to set different prices for any payment option as they see fit.
Most of them won't though. It's a disincentive to your customers to dangle a cheaper, but more difficult option in front of them. When the customer is ready to buy, you don't want them to think "wait, maybe I'll get this tomorrow when I pay in cash..."
Because they may decide in the intervening time not to bother buying it at all.
Didn't know that. It does mean, though, that these companies need to pass the savings on to the consumers. And if they are using coinbase and taking out fiat they aren't saving as much as they could going strict btc and only paying a 0.01% or whatever fee to get expedient confirms in the blockchain. Or hell, wait the hour and don't ship until payment is confirmed, and pay absolutely no fees ever.
1) Flooz was billed as magic Internet money, but provided no benefits for effecting transactions in Flooz versus transacting them with credit cards, which Internet merchants had begun to accept. Flooz' primary customer acquisition strategy was giving people free money. That was pretty popular, but also costly, and -- unlike Paypal -- Flooz never successfully convinced meaningful numbers of customers to transition from "spending free money" to "spending their own money."
2) Flooz had far insufficient transaction volume to justify the ongoing engineering and operation costs of keeping it around. At the peak, it was generating "thousands" of dollars of transactions a day. You can do the math on that: $200k volume per month times the pick-your-teeth-with-them margins in payment processing means you can't pay even a single engineer to keep the lights on.
3) Flooz, like most early payment processors, got their pockets picked by fraud to the tune of millions of dollars. Their merchant processor responded by requiring a $1 million rolling reserve. This caused a cash-flow crunch which was the proximate cause of their bankruptcy.
4) Flooz could have postponed death if they had access to the capital markets but the dot-com crash happened and, as a consequence, nobody wanted to throw more money at an e-commerce company whose core line of business was selling fake money for real money.
But bitcoin is, as you say, decentralized.
[Edit to add: I'm being a bit unfair there. Bitcoin has several advantages over Flooz. One is that Bitcoin, considered as an entity, awarded free money via seigniorage to early adopters and never had to back that free money with actual cash. Another is that Bitcoin structurally encouraged the creation of a widely distributed self-coordinating Internet boiler room to act as Bitcoin spokesmen and salescritters, via the aforementioned seigniorage and tapping into pre-existing networks among people with complementary political opinions regarding e.g. banking, self-government, privacy, etc. A third is that Bitcoin was, happily for Bitcoin advocates if not expressly hoped for, actually an improvement in the state of the art for small-scale drug smuggling, a business which turns out to be quite lucrative and underserved by other payment processors. This lead to people who had acquired essentially free bitcoins getting paid actual money by folks who wanted to buy very-much-not-free contraband, which helped provide a bit of kindling for the speculative bonfire.]
I own BTC, but I'm still wondering what's going to want me to spend it instead of my AmEx for my next purchase.