171–180 of 237 posts
If nothing else, cryptocurrency might do one thing that is needed, if only roughly and imperfectly, and is to distribute wealth from the the old to the young. It's the one counterbalance to the debt based asset bubbles of the last 40 years that have transferred wealth to pensioners at the expense of the young
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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.
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> 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…
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
Some of the top receiving countries include France, Germany or Belgium (over $1000 per inhabitant) and the top sending countries include Luxembourg ($12B for a population of 575K).
So the numbers probably include cross-border workers. People living in France/Germany/Belgium but working in Luxembourg. Transferring euros within the SEPA region (for free) for at least $50B out of the $560B mentioned.
The article asserts that currency will always go up because people will want it as an investment strategy. Sounds like the idea that real estate value will always go up
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Same as what would happen in case of USD - price would drop to zero.
Well, someone has to be buying all those btc at the other end. It might drop a lot but I find zero unlikely.
We'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.…
> When I switched to this new upstart called Google it wasn't mainstream. It was in schools by that time. Youngsters could well embrace crypto long before the rest of the normies. I would have loved it when I was a kid. Anyone got kidos who grind crypto? If you're reading the nytimes for crypto, then you're behind the curve. Bigly. Digital coins. Fucking morons. & if you're reading the nytimes for crypto investment a…
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If everyone wants to take their $2000 out at once, can they? In most countries that's highly unlikely, so is it really $2000? Or something entirely different?
> If everyone wants to take their $2000 out at once, can they? They'd stand a better chance than everyone trying to withdraw their bitcoins from the various ~bucket shops~ er, bitcoin exchanges.
Also, there's no requirement that you keep your coins in an exchange unless you're, well, exchanging them. That's kinda the point.
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The web was mainstream when I was like 10 on AOL doing who knows what with all my classmates. My grandparents even got into it and sent me emails and chatrooms. Geocities was more or less main stream and kinda like pre-social media. Those communities were a little different. I can also remember using Altavista and Lycos before I ever heard of a Google. My mom introduced me to google to help me research papers for sch…
Your mom is an outlier.
That comment is funnier when you haven't read the parent comment. I imagine it as a statistician's snub.
We'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.…
> When I switched to this new upstart called Google it wasn't mainstream. It was in schools by that time. Youngsters could well embrace crypto long before the rest of the normies. I would have loved it when I was a kid. Anyone got kidos who grind crypto? If you're reading the nytimes for crypto, then you're behind the curve. Bigly. Digital coins. Fucking morons. & if you're reading the nytimes for crypto investment a…