You could probably pre-deposit a certain amount of btc into an Uber account if they had that option. Then the needed amount would be withdrawn. Definitely not easier than the way they have it set up now though. bTC won't be a payment solution for everything though...

I suppose services could hold a pre-deposited balance, and you just reload monthly or whatever...
Not as easy as allowing charges automatically...but without the protection you get from other payments systems it's probably the best way.

This is exactly what I was going to suggest, but why would you be ok trusting a company with your credit or bank details but not Bitcoin?  There's nothing to stop them draining your account at the moment is there?

well, uh, you could give them your private key, thats pretty much the same as giving them the credit card number, but i dont think anyone would do so unless they had to.

what if your bank balance was empty because your employer messed up with your salary payment. does the company chase after you later with invoices or do they do blance checks before car arrives.

the solution is that regular customers prepay an allotment of bitcoins into Uber's service and they deduct amounts as and when needed. to think of it logically, if you know you need $200 to pay for a weeks transport. right now you have you withdraw a third of a bitcoin to fill up your bank account. so thats 0.33btc not available for you to trade with elsewhere.. so the reality ends up as the same whether its sat in a bank account for use for transport. or sat in Uber's service

no, bitcoin life savings should be self managed. in cold stores of the owner. but daily spend amounts wold be used in third party services for convenience, benefits and features that cold stores do not allow.

much like banks store life savings but crdit cards offer features for daily spends

much like share holders store large amounts of shares as certificates and only play with small amounts on trading platforms

much like many people store 90% of bitcoins cold store and only risk 10% (well they should do) on bitcoin exchanges.

people will learn putting all their wealth into a third party service is stupid. this is why rich people own gold, expensive real estate, antique art, etc. because they do not trust third party services to store all their wealth, but will happily use third party services for daily/weekly spend amounts.

I gotta say, I'm pretty pleased this started some decent conversation...

To go over responses:

Why would I trust a company with my credit card number and not my bitcoin wallet? Because my bank guarantees 100% protection against charges, and the government forces them to back that up. And yes, I've had fraud, and yes I've gotten it all reversed, that's not possible with bitcoins (there is no reversal of charges). And likewise (largely for franky): Credit cards offer a guaranteed payment to vendors up to a certain amount. If you're over-drawn or have insufficient funds, your credit card provider will chase you down for that money, not the vendor. Or in my case, Paypal will since I have it attached to my paypal account.

Regarding pre-depositing some large amount and spending it down...this is similar to what I do for Fastrak (pre-pay a small device that gets charged when driving over the bridges here in San Francisco). It's convenient enough and probably works. The downside is that at most that charge is < $10 (I forget how much the bridges are on weekends these days). I've had Uber drives (again, using that as an example) well over $100.

I'm in a place in life where it's all about convenience, and I happen be interested in bitcoins these days, and it seems like it can do quite a bit to make things more convenient (recently got a new Android device, the ability to send receive bitcoins right on my phone is pretty sweet) and this just stuck out as something...missing if that makes sense.

This is true and I am excited for the future. As most of you probably read today the Apple App store legal language was rewritten to allow certain things like a Bitcoin wallet. As more infrastructure and services make themselves available issues like you mention will have multiple solutions.

All of these responses miss the most important response.

You can already do this with bitcoins.


http://www.gyft.com/buy-gift-card/lyft/

Kasimir Hill talked about using this car service when she was doing her "living a week on bitcoin" piece.