I tend to believe this is being upvoted because people want to believe this, not because it's actually true.
It also has a clickbait title added; which gives it an advantage wrt attention.
Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
141–150 of 237 posts
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#142And 2017 will be the year of Linux desktop.
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#143>For this reason, none of the investors I spoke with engage in short-term trading but instead choose, in the online parlance of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, to “hodl” (“hold on for dear life,” rather than sell off for temporary gains). Someone trolled this author. "hodl" is just a misspelling of "hold," not an acronym.
Saw Chris DeRose troll him. He runs a sceptical crypto-based podcast (changing the name to 'Chris DeRose Uncensored' (the pod, that is))
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to Wikipedia, remittances were in excess of $560 billion last year, faciliated by 250 million migrant workers[1]. You and I are not the user demographic ;) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance
That's his point though, the early internet had many useful applications that where appealing to the mainstream. International money transfers are not a mainstream activity.
Can people in this thread please take a minute to consider demographics outside your immediate circles?
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's his point though, the early internet had many useful applications that where appealing to the mainstream. International money transfers are not a mainstream activity.
250 million people isn't mainstream? These are people sending money to their families on a monthly basis, and where current transfer fees can take the equivalent of a half day of work. That strikes me as an appealing use case.
a highly regulated one too, crypto does not address the complexities of international monetary regulations. If the solution is to not abide by the existing regulations, it not going to be mainstream.
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#146>“If my landscaper ever asks me about crypto, that’s the day I get out,” he said.
My hairdresser spent an hour extolling the virtues of cryptocurrencies to me a few weeks ago, and yesterday an electrician who was in the office was explaining to us his weekend project which was basically a multisig wallet written in PHP.
Perhaps crypto has already reached peak bubble.
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
" What is cryptocurrency going to help these people do that they can't do already today? " International payments confirmed and spendable in minutes not days. Escaping inflation in Venezuela/Argentina/whoeverisnext. Sending remittance to family overseas without 10% wasted in fees. Receiving monetary donations for organizations that might be victim of oppressive censorship. Participating in modern e-commerce for the u…
> International payments When was the last time you made an international payment? I never made a payment outside of the EU and inside the EU I already have free wire transfers. For most people this is not interesting. > unbanked/underbanked You have the right to a bank account in the EU. > Allowing merchants to save 2% in credit card fees Currently Bitcoin is more expensive for typical transactions. And there's dire…
Last week. I'm Canadian and currently working remotely for an American company. I am in Denmark at the moment and need Danish money because they don't do euros. The American company pays me by wire transfer and my Canadian bank skims $15 off the top. Then I transfer day-to-day spending money via the cheapest, best, most reliable service I have yet found - and it still costs $10 per $1000. I do that every month or so. If you're wondering whether a credit card would be cheaper, the answer is no. My credit card is the best one available to me for travelling abroad, and there's no foreign transaction fee - but they do charge 2.5% currency conversion, which is $25 per $1000. And some places don't take credit cards.
All these fees are wasted money from my point of view, and the sooner I can stop paying them, the better.
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When was the last time you made an international payment? About an hour ago. I'm on holiday ftw. But even not on holiday ... Quite often. With an extortionate credit card fee.
You can get credit card with no foreign transaction fees quite easily. It's possible they make it up in the exchange rate spread though; I honestly don't know.
They do. There's a 2.5% conversion fee. $25/1000. It's irritating.
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#149We're a long way off mainstream. Take the Web as an example: When my university lab computer got trumpet winsock and Netscape installed, it wasn't mainstream. When Hotbot was launched and could actually search with some degree of efficiency it wasn't mainstream. When I learned html and javascript from reading Webmonkey posts it wasn't mainstream. When I switched to this new upstart called Google it wasn't mainstream.…
> In the same way that today's web users don't care about html, http, or urls, digital currency won't be mainstream until they don't have to care about private keys, bitcoin addresses, or even (gasp!) the blockchain. We're a long way off.
Not all digital currency has keys. World of Warcraft gold, for example. One would imagine there would be a bank of sorts. Coinbase plays that role, at the moment. They supply cold storage.
It does need to become easier to secure your shit -- given. Most ppl aren't going to be verifying a SHA256 hash function output of their client binaries or use (pseudo)-cypherpunk's public key to verify said hash function is correct against a known good output. Unfortunately!
Re: Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> International payments When was the last time you made an international payment? I never made a payment outside of the EU and inside the EU I already have free wire transfers. For most people this is not interesting. > unbanked/underbanked You have the right to a bank account in the EU. > Allowing merchants to save 2% in credit card fees Currently Bitcoin is more expensive for typical transactions. And there's dire…
" When was the last time you made an international payment? " I love that you asked this question! The very reason it doesn't happen often is because of friction inherent to legacy payment systems. Cryptocurrencies remove this friction in cross-border trade, hence are making such transactions more commonplace. It's like you saying in 1890 "Why buy cars? People don't travel that much." But the invention of cars is pre…
I love that you asked this question! The very reason it doesn't happen often is because of friction inherent to legacy payment systems.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what is meant by "international payment", but surely for a majority of people this is just an irrelevance? I can't imagine my parents have ever needed to make an international payment, for instance.
I have an employee in Iran and my goodness was it hard to work out how to pay him (Iranian banks don't have SWIFT and IBAN and helpful things like that), and Bitcoin did actually seem like a legitimate option at one point, until we realised that between business banking and accounting, it was also going to be really hard to do - so I would love for this new wave of currencies to make international payments easier. But I just don't think it's of very much significance to many people in the grand scheme of things. 54% of Americans apparently don't have a passport; are these people really going to be making regular international payments, more than about once a lifetime?
(The significant number of "digital nomads" on HN who work from a beach in Thailand are really not representative!)
However, if we're taking "international payment" to mean "an easy way to take out/spend money when you're on holiday without getting stung by exchange rates and assorted complexities" then I will certainly grant you that this would be broadly regarded as a mainstream benefit (though, again, I guess those 54% of Americans would probably disagree).