91–100 of 659 posts
Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182 (Dec 2017)
Barely related, but in case you missed it earlier this month:
Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123496
Stripe’s entire business is built on credit card transactions. They added half assed bitcoin support and then killed it. This makes sense for a company that has every incentive to prolong a move away from credit cards. As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.
You say this as if a large-scale, mainstream switch to a decentralized currency is right around the corner. With how volatile the market has been, what makes you think a switch like this is even remotely near-term?
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Store value / Investment. You can buy gold, stocks, foreign currencies as means of investment. You can't pay your restaurant bill with them but that doesn't mean they don't have a future.
Gold, unilike Bitcoin, cannot be forked overnight with minimal effort, which makes gold much better store of value.
Ok, so the Fork will have the same/similar technology behind it, and will be distributed to the same people at the beginning. But, it's not like it's being supplanted. Bitcoin will still be Bitcoin.
I suppose the real world example would be to send an amount of copper to people with gold, it wouldn't change the value of the gold much. Bitcoin has many issues, but I don't see this as one.
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> Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense. Can someone bother explaining what this actually means? 3 weeks ago everyone is hype about how Bitcoin is going to be the future of currency and now that it's tanking and vendors are dropping it like a hot potato, its no longer a transactional currency and it's now a "store of value".
Bitcoin is currently the crypto equivalent of gold. It's not reasonable to use it to buy a coffee. However, Bitcoin is trying (but many would argue, failing) to upgrade the network with something that will allow cheaper/faster transactions and make it a reasonable currency again. However, (imo) in-fighting has seriously hampered this. That being the reality, many people hope that Bitcoin will remain a store of value…
For what it's worth, we just spent two weeks trying and failing to get Stripe's Bitcoin integration working on our site. The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.
If they "cancel" the transaction but it later ends up getting mined, who pays the fee for the return transaction? Regardless of the answer, variable and large fees really do make this sort of transaction a minefield.
We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers.
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Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
How about stock.
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> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though. Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration…
Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
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Bitcoin is functioning exactly as designed. Satoshi planned for this; it's in the whitepaper. Most people just don't like the idea of Satoshi's endgame vision. But it's working as intended.
Can you highlight the part of the white paper you're referring to? https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
It's the design, folks. Read the paper and think about what it's saying.
Satoshi was acutely aware that 1MB blocks could only encode a couple thousand transactions. So what do you think "the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees" means in practice?
Not a <$100 fee, that's for sure.
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My reading of this post is that Stripe has no particular love for Bitcoin, but wants to avoid the ire of the Bitcoin fans on the internet, and so it's coated in "Bitcoin is great, we were the first people to adopt it, we can't criticize it at all" etc. etc.
Stripe cofounder here. I think you're reading too much into it. We do think Bitcoin is cool. We're just trying to be as plainspoken and clear as possible about why we're doing what we're doing.