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Ending Bitcoin Support

stripe.com

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Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#451

Post by coldtea »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #363
avenoir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With South Korea trying to regulate anonymous trading on Korean exchanges, makes me wonder how long we have before regulations become more widespread. And if this happens do you think privacy coins even stand a chance?

Not only they will stand a chance, they will grow substantially as the only way to mitigate the governments efforts to enforce surveillance and regulations. Darknet exchanges will emerge if not there yet. People have been dreaming of real electronic cash nobody can know you have or give to somebody for so long and wont give up easily. By the way this can even happen to be the way to the new kind of economy that relie…

>Not only they will stand a chance, they will grow substantially as the only way to mitigate the governments efforts to enforce surveillance and regulations.

Parent meant if it will ever stand a chance as a mainstream, legal, option. Not if it will make a second career as a tool in darkweb networks for buying CP, heroin, and "specialists".

>People have been dreaming of real electronic cash nobody can know you have or give to somebody for so long and wont give up easily.

People have mostly been dreaming of something like that you can easily use to buy regular things, and that wont land you in court if something goes wrong and they find you have it.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#452

Post by [deleted] »

bdcravens wrote: post #302
munchbunny wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In testing phase" is probably not good enough for Stripe to roll out to their customers. I think what they meant was "we're just not seeing enough usage of Bitcoin payments to justify the costs of supporting it." Which is perfectly fair.

In the years we've used the Bitcoin integration, we've never seen a single Bitcoin payment. Next iteration of our customer portal wouldn't have featured it, even if Stripe hadn't pulled support.

[deleted]

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#453

Post by ujal »

notyourday wrote: post #438
ujal wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does use bitcoin to verify the transactions. Point is, bitcoin - currently being the biggest blockchain deployed - is more trustworthy than most governments and therefore most currencies. I am not an economist though and regulations seem to be necessary in the real world. Any ideas as to what technology, giving widespread adoption, would make them obsolete?

If the claim is that the private data unrelated to bitcoin transactions is being published and verified on a bitcoin blockchain then this is a scam . It is absolutely amazing that the person who wrote this article still has a title of a Senior Editor that claims to write on this topic.

It is possible to hash the data and make that hash part of the transaction [0].

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04015

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#454

Post by pcarolan »

koheripbal wrote: post #49
vec wrote: post #18

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.

I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a s…

Here's a good rundown: https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-tren...

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#456

Post by john_moscow »

gizmo385 wrote: post #25
glesperance wrote: post #3

Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense. Too bad they aren't replacing this with another cryptocurrency at the moment.

> 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".

To me it sounds like the kool-aid for those who bought it at $15-19K and now realize that the only way to see that money back is if another wave of irrational buyers creates enough demand to pump the price up.

The pro-bitcoin people endlessly repeat analogies with gold, except gold price has not been growing since its peak in 2012 and it's only used to store value by governments due mostly due to conservativeness (know a politician willing to kill his career by switching the country's gold reserves to any other security?). Aside from that, I don't see anyone else using gold instead of interest-generating assets (stocks, bonds, real estate).

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#457

Post by coldtea »

smallnamespace wrote: post #319
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them Every government has departments of agents adept at tracing cash transactions. Bitcoin offers the advantage of total transactional transparency. Shady wallet? Trace back until you find a known wallet. An exchange, vendor, et cetera . Subpoena, find their counterparty, rinse and repeat. Best case: you find your guy. Consolation: mo…

Of course with enough effort and investment you can probably stop many things, the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society. By that same argument, the US could round up every illegal immigrant and deport them, or every casual drug user and lock them up for life. We don't do that because it'd be ruinously expensive (not to mention immoral) and transform…

>Of course with enough effort and investment you can probably stop many things, the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society.

They have been fighting a war where the "marginal costs of enforcement" are not worth it, with the "war on drugs" for a century now.

And they'll not fight something that cuts the governments and society's tax funds?

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#458

Post by Natanael_L »

naveen99 wrote: post #442
vec wrote: post #18

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.

Takes the same 10 minutes on average per block if you include recommended miner fee. binance credits you after 2 confirmations. waiting for 6 confirmations is really overkill for transactions small enough that you are worried about the fee. So in practice, a transactions will either sit for a long time or be confirmed in 10 minutes. Just pay appropriate fee.

The problem is that the fees grow when there's a large backlog of transactions. And if the transactions grow faster than there's new blocks to process them, then the backlog grows infinitely and no amount of fees will ever get them all into the blockchain simultaneously.

We need second layer solutions like Lightning Network, and the Bitcoin Core developers should have listened 5+ years ago when a huge fraction of the community back then warned about exactly these problems, and asked for a plan for larger blocks. Back then we were told it's not a problem, won't happen, can be solved easily, etc... Right now some people says it's obviously working well because people are obviously willing to pay the transaction fees. These people are ignoring the long term effects of killing off important usecases and reducing demand, and that some only pay the fees so they can cash out. They don't understand psychology, and barely grasp the numbers.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#459

Post by CPLX »

marshray wrote: post #330
nerfhammer wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the modifier "intrinsic" doesn't add anything though. "people intrinsically like" --> "people like"; "gold is intrinsically valued" --> "gold is valued". "intrinsic" seems to imply an innate persistence despite not being able to justify such innateness, just empirical persistence. It just implies things that are arguably not justifiable needlessly. gold has been persistently valuable. The universe doesn't give it an…

'Intrinsic' here means that the property of the object remains even if people's preferences and culture change. Gold's utility for electronic applications is a fundamental property of the number of atoms in its nucleus, whereas there have been cultures that had it readily available yet didn't find it particularly desirable for jewelry.

That's nonsense. People's long term interest in electronics is far more unproven and fleeting at this point than their interest in gold.

Seeing as how cultures that considered gold a highly valued item developed independently in Europe and uncontacted pre-Columbian America, and the preference remains global today, there's clearly something durable about this concept.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#460

Post by kraftman »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #449
stanmancan wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few different ones that have made huge jumps forward; RaiBlocks can apparently do around 7,000tx/s.

Meanwhile, your payment card provider is probably doing that many transactions per second just in the small city I live in.

[citation needed] A quick google says Visa peaks at 4k txs/sec
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