Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 369 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#61

Post by tom_ »

wgerard wrote: post #49
wslh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had to send a payment to someone who lives in a commonwealth country I use it for that purpose all the time. In general, People in developed countries don't have a clue about how painful and time consuming an international payment can be. Even with credit cards banks put very low limits that are unrealistic for someone who travel often and consume cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud. That is why I think the…

> I use it for that purpose all the time. Not to dig into your business too much, but: Any weird tax/legal implications around that? I didn't want to dig into it too much (just because often these things are rabbit holes with unclear answers), but I'm really curious about it for the next time we have to send a payment. > In general, People in developed countries don't have a clue about how painful and time consuming…

In the UK a capital gain (or loss) may occur when you use Bitcoin to buy something, whatever that thing is. (Buying something with Bitcoin is effectively selling Bitcoin for that thing. The thing has a value, and that is some evidence that the Bitcoin is worth that much.) This is a taxable event and if the gain is large enough then you'll need to pay the tax on it.

I imagine many countries have rules that are quite similar.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#62

Post by amelius »

ttul wrote: post #55

When I was starting a BTC ASIC company (don’t worry - it failed to attract investment) in 2011, one of the things that always spooked investors was the slide showing transaction volume. Even in those early days, one had to really stretch one’s imagination to believe that Bitcoin could one day take over from Visa/MasterCard as a payment method of choice. But we did understand its value as an alternative store of wealt…

What does it take to actually make BTC ASICs?

In my understanding, the hash functions are quite simple and just do things like XOR, and SHIFT, and perhaps ADD/SUB, but not multiply or divide. So the main difficulty would be to do everything at the lowest possible amount of power.

But I could be wrong.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#63

Post by hk__2 »

Tim_cas wrote: post #22

How Google is entering the crypto space is https://blog.usejournal.com/google-entering-the-blockchain-s... very telling. Bitcoin is not going away. Get over it.

Google is not entering the crypto space. Quoting from the article:

> Google finally officially entered the blockchain space, announcing on its blog just before the Google Cloud Next ’18 conference in San Francisco in July 24–26, to be supporting distributed ledger technology, aka blockchain

Adding a blockchain service to your cloud platform offering is far from "entering the crypto space".

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#64

Post by jandrese »

luckydata wrote: post #50
Scaevolus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than just power, you have depreciating assets (mining chips, servers, buildings) that are effectively losing money constantly. Operating them at a small loss is better than leaving them idle for a huge loss. You see similar economics when farmers sell crops at a net loss.

So slightly negative margins but making it up in volume?

Think of it more as cutting your losses. You've already lost the money, so even if you can't make it all back you can make back part of it by selling the product at a loss.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#65

Post by ehrtt »

pjc50 wrote: post #59
comboy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currency that is guaranteed to be deflationary sure has its problems. But taking ideology and using it for every day stuff aside, why wouldn't you want to own some?

... why would you?

..because in this thought experiment it's guaranteed to be deflationary...

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#66

Post by klodolph »

jstanley wrote: post #34
TACIXAT wrote: post #21

A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted. Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their keys. For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price. So yo…

> The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price. That's not how it works. If you spent $100 in electricity and you have an asset that's worth $50, you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on your electricity, or you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your electricity. Electricity cost of mining does…

> That's not how it works.

Obivously, the meaning of the original sentence is that miners will turn off the mining equipment when they decide that it's more profitable to leave it off than leave it on.

> …you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on your electricity, or you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your electricity.

This is a false dilemma, the question is not just whether you sell the coins, but also how many, with what timing, on what markets, and in exchange for what. The “either sell it and make some money back, or don’t sell it and eat the loss” is only true if you are paying for your electricity in Bitcoin to begin with, or if you know that the asset you have will only depreciate in value. If I spent $10,000 on a car that I don’t need, selling it for $8,000 might be a good deal because if I wait I will only get less. For Bitcoin, the exchange rate fluctuates, and you can divide it and sell parts at different times.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#67

Post by adiusmus »

beaner wrote: post #56
jonny_eh wrote: post #2

When can we call Bitcoin a failed experiment? And don't tell me it was "always about storing value", that's not in the original paper.

We're a pretty long way off, I'm sorry. Bitcoin is more popular than ever. The payments network (Lightning) being built on top of the financial sovereignty base layer is just getting started.

Another fork of bitcoin. So not actually bitcoin but still bitcoin at the same time. This appears to be an issue with cryptos. Nothing stops another fork later. It’s like people find a problem with a currency and start printing money in another one.

I can see blockchain currency being useful when it is backed by something solid. But right now it’s still just wasted electricity. Eg MasterCard and friends could easily create a currency and use it for exchange.

If I can’t actually use a currency to buy/sell or store value then what is it for? Or am I wrong?

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#68

Post by dmoy »

keymone wrote: post #42
ashelmire wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin is orders of magnitude better money than anything else in every aspect except convenience, but it’s getting there. Firstly, if you think money exists for any reason other than convenience, you fundamentally misunderstand why money exists. Its whole purpose is convenience, to make trade easier. Secondly, the points above are more than just convenience. You have no recourse in cases of fraud or crime when it c…

Convenience is a matter of development effort. Things like control over ownership, transparency, censorship and oppression resistance are not, they must be the fundamentals the system is built on. That Bitcoin is used for shady stuff and is harder to track is a red herring for all 10 years of its existence. Come back when Bitcoin’s usage for said stuff is within order of magnitude of USD’s market share.

GP was not talking about using Bitcoin for crime, but rather the (extremely common) crime of having your money stolen via fraud or whatever. In USD you have recourse there to be made whole. In btc, you do not.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#69

Post by tomrod »

TACIXAT wrote: post #21

A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted. Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their keys. For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price. So yo…

Fantastic assessment. I hadn't thought about it in these terms before, but agree strongly.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#70

Post by socrates1998 »

It sounds weird, but I think a big part of Bitcoin's, and other crypto's value, isn't in the day to day ability to use it to buy and sell things, it's the inability of the government to devalue it.

This isn't as big a problem in many richer countries with relatively stable currencies, but I sure as hell would prefer Bitcoin to anything the Venezuelan government or the Argentinian government would issue.

The kinks are still getting worked out for Bitcoin, but I still think it is a big game changer.

Post reply on HN