Apple's new payment system is igniting interest across the payment industry, but it's important to note that it doesn't represent a major change over the legacy payment process.

Bitcoin, even as it suffers another price slump, is disruptive— particularly from the perspective of merchants. When it comes to accepting electronic payments, they have a number of pain points. The two biggest ones are paying acceptance fees and fighting chargebacks.

Acceptance fees are charged by a number of players in the payments value chain, from payment processors to banks. For credit cards the fees hover around 2-3% of the value of a transaction. The fees have are charged by a number of players in the payments value chain, from payment processors to banks. For credit cards the fees hover around 2-3% of the value of a transaction. The fees have sparked litigation from retailers against the card networks who set the fees. Apple Pay feeds off this system, in essence adding another intermediary. Bitcoin does away with middle-men.

Chargebacks occur when a cardholder successfully disputes a charge. Fighting chargebacks is an expensive process for retailers and many opt to take the loss rather than deal with the hassle. Apple Pay is still subject to chargebacks, since it's still a credit- or debit-card mediated payment.

Though still nascent, BI Intelligence notes in our Bitcoin report that a Bitcoin-based payments system promises to solve these problems. It's comparatively inexpensive for a merchant to accept Bitcoin payments even if they use a third-party processor like BitPay or Coinbase to process transactions. Bitcoin transactions are also irreversible. Once the transaction is completed the merchant possesses the money. So for businesses that experience lots of "friendly fraud" — when a customer buys something and then claims falsely that they never recieved it — Bitcoin is appealing.

In the full report from BI Intelligence we give a high level explanation of how Bitcoin works, whether it has the potential to disrupt the legacy payments system, and explain the obstacles Bitcoin will have to overcome to become a force in payments.

Here are some of the key elements from the report:

In full, the report:

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