BIT Coins and PayPal

An announcement was made yesterday that Pay Pal is on the verge of accepting Bit coins as a payment consideration as an alternate payment mechanism. The payments group enthusiasts in the Quora group have welcomed this and are happy about the developments.

I am not impressed, as I feel that Bit coin can not replace the 'money" we know. I am making an effort to study the entire bit coin universe and payment mechanism universe.

Meanwhile for those in reading the announcement,

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Apple Vs Google

My comments to the comments to the article  appeared in Linked in:

Reading all the 954 comments is going to be a difficualt task for me unless I will be interested in taking that up as research project. However my comments are :

1. Apple has its own market  and persons who would like Apple will continue to support Apple. ( no arguments on that, but does it mean that Apple will continue to dominate the smart phone market?)
2. Even in India people who can afford Apple buy it and it has a sizable population. ( I do not say that Apple does not exist in India, but what is the market share?
3. Article is not about technology, but about marketing strategy. ( It is both. Mac is popular in US but in emerging markets let us not forget, it is Windows. What is Mac to US, Windows is to the Asian countries. Is it not a fact that the profitablity of Microsoft came , not from US but from rest of the world?)
4. The companies with whom google has tied up source their materials from China and there are not Indian manufacturers of Chips. ( for that matter, even Samsung gets its components from China. How does this matter? I do agree that there are no big chip manufacturer in India on date. But does it mean that there will not be in future also?Incidentally manufacturing chips does not matter as the topic being discussed here is an operating system)
5. (Indian population is very huge and affrodable phone will certainly increase the market share and it will be difficult for Apple to penetrate with such low margin and high volume game. )
6. ( One of the manufacturer with whom Google has tied up is Micromax. This company was nowhere in the horizon till five years back. They are next to samsung in the market share of mobiles in India. There marketing strategy was simple - affordable phones with long battery life. The target segment was average income group from rural and small towns. Today they are expanding into Russia. A clear advantage to Google.)
7. (I do agree Apple though its secure payment method has an edge over others. But how long? The NFC technology is nothing new and others will catch up fast.)
8. ( The article has its merits and rest of the world is larger than US.)

I have provided my views in the brackets against the original comments by other participants. It is a very interesting article resulted in 954 comments.

Read the full article and comments Here

Apple Vs Google

My comments to the post in Linked in

Google is thinking right. Comparing strategy of google with apple is being commented upon as comparing Oranges with Apples. I have read comments referring to " cost" and margin available to Apple compared to the " thin margin" the manufacturers in emerging markets. All these comments can be attributed to loyal Apple followers, who miss the central theme of the article.

Yes, US may be Mackintosh...but Microsoft earned from Windows of emerging markets. The term emerging markets was coined only when it is realised that the local market is getting saturated.

What Google has done is treading the Microsoft way and they are right.


Read the full article here

BITCOIN revisited.

My post in Quora.com

Bit coin- my journey

I had raised some doubts in my last post. Curious, I am, wanted to know more about bit coin and why it is being debated constantly. In a group in Linked in there was a reference to a paper published by the FED RESERVE US.

Page on linkedin.com

The publication was simple and provides a fundamental view on bit coin.

My reaction is that Bitcoin can only be speculative money and can never replace today's currencies. One interesting fact I observed is that the number of bitcoins that can be mined is limited. If that is true, then the value of  bit coin will become phenomenal, of course, with increasing demand of bit coins. Natural corollary is that the original creators of bitcoin will become the wealthiest persons. In fact they will become the rulers of the world if the entire world population is prepared to accept bit coin as the money. Human mind , will not permit such single ruler or group of individuals.  Human mind accepts the GOD because they can not identify him. Religious belief is based on this simple human psychology. We will, as a society,never accept another living individual as GOD. Having said that I do not expect this world to accept an universal currency whose value can be volatile and is purely a function of demand and supply. The trust will cease to exist.

Rightly the Bank of England has to come to the conclusion that Bit coins can never replace the existing currency.

Here’s What the Bank of England Thinks of Bitcoin

Applied Lending Techniques

The chapter 2 of the book deals with personal finance. As he had rightly pointed out, in todays world, credit scoring becomes the most important factor in evaluating such requests. Yet Mr. Rouse goes ahead and presents five case studies, It is surprising that all the case studies advice 'caution." After studying the case studies, you have a feeling that personal finance is not good at all. The advent of credit scoring as a decision tool probably came into being, by virtue of all bankers having such attitude. This is more evident when you read the classification of personal borrowers, by Mr. Rouse. As per him, there are only two kind of borrowing personalities. One credit averse and who has their personal finance in good condition and two , those who spend in anticipation of expected cash flow. All the case studies provide a conclusion that the borrowers do not have financial discipline. A third type of borrower exist: who borrow for the purpose of creating an asset. The chapter does not take those types into account. As  usual, Mr. Rouse has approached the subject in a simple and lucid manner.