751–760 of 839 posts
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Most people I've spoken with about crypto prefer the way banks work. The idea that losing your keys means losing your money, with no recourse, terrifies them.
> no recourse Recourses: - Backed up dat file - Backed up wallet password - Recovery phrase There, now you have 3 separate ways to not lose your btc!
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Cryptocurrencies are definitely an “Innovator’s Dilema” situation when it comes to general use. It’s much worse than the established solutions. It’s confusing, error-prone, unreliable, cheap and janky. It’s also not a great business case for the establishment who are currently making billions and billions serving very rich customers. But... it also brings financial service options to people who have no opinions or on…
> if you are one of the unbanked billions around the world. I think I can buy that. The unbanked could become centrally-banked like all of us as their countries develop, but there is a competition between that and the cryptocurrency which could wedge itself in at this point and outcompete the local government simply because the government is small and lacks in experience (maybe corrupt too). Another contender here is…
In the long run I think banks will win amongst the unbanked.
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How do you think bitcoin started ? You'd had to be crazy to believe in it 9 years ago, and spend time and energy in the community, nlt to lention monney, to foster the project. My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things. Btc was banana money at first, and only people believing it would be a great thing as a concept made it work. We didn't expect to make banks,…
Bitcoin doesn't work in any meaningful sense. It can't be used for purchases in most contexts and you can't use it as a stable store of value. It is also controlled by dubious actors and mining is a horribly destructive practice, both in terms of environmental waste and the constant nuisance of people stealing CPU time. But you were saying?
This gets asked often, but in case something changed recently - what are the use cases of cryptocurrencies that are not: - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserver or VISA) - Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players I am not looking for answers of the form "well whenever you want to avoid a t…
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For me it's like asking, would you want Amazon to succeed if you did not profit from it?* Obviously, if I am not personally invested in Amazon, I don't really care that much. But it still could have value for society for other reasons than getting rich off of speculating. For example: https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-gaza-west-bank-bitcoin-pales... * To those people who say, "You can't compare crypto to a company beca…
Don't compare a company to a tech. As an example of a tech, if someone asked me would you want self driving cars to succeed if you could not profit off of them, I would say that's a resounding success. A lot of people are excited about this tech because of the improvement in their daily lives, not because of a profit motive. Compare that to crypto
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Transferwise does £ to pesos. Fees for £1000, £11.88. Rate 50.06 vs google saying the market rate is 50.07. By the way if you are buying BTC, Kraken is much cheaper than 2% (more like 0.2%) and I think they take GBP. It does sound like the banks are iffy.
Transferwise does £ to pesos, to where. As stated, bank accounts in the country do not have a SWIFT code assigned. You have to triangulate the money (Please check my other comments below). Re: Kraken, the 2% I'm talking about is in the local broker I'm using to convert BTC to pesos. I doubt Kraken can help me there. Not to mention that that Kraken is an exchange. A completelly different bussiness model to Localbitcoi…
I'm not sure you need a swift code, probably just a bank account number/sort code.
>The recipient gets money in their currency directly from TransferWise''s local bank account.
I have not tried Argentina as I have no business there but have sent money to Indonesia which is another tricky place and it worked fine. Fair enough re Kraken - they do GBP to BTC, not BTC to pesos.
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The market has settled on gold? For money? What? The market moved on to other forms of money centuries ago.
This is categorically false. The gold standard (albeit a reduced version of it established under the Bretton-Woods monetary regime) was abolished in the United States as recently as 1971. In Switzerland this link was abolished in the early 2000's AFAIK.
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For me it's like asking, would you want Amazon to succeed if you did not profit from it?* Obviously, if I am not personally invested in Amazon, I don't really care that much. But it still could have value for society for other reasons than getting rich off of speculating. For example: https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-gaza-west-bank-bitcoin-pales... * To those people who say, "You can't compare crypto to a company beca…
Don't compare a company to a tech. As an example of a tech, if someone asked me would you want self driving cars to succeed if you could not profit off of them, I would say that's a resounding success. A lot of people are excited about this tech because of the improvement in their daily lives, not because of a profit motive. Compare that to crypto
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But I would still as a depositor have the promise from the bank that the bank will give me back my cryptocurrency when I want? If I do, there is practically zero difference how banks would work with crypto and fiat. And that promise can be used as money just like it can now with fiat. Thus banks would be able to monetarily multiply crypto at will as well. If not, well, how exactly are you planning to stop me and my b…
In practice, there would be 1 big difference: payments are made in cryptocurrency, not in bank credits. And this difference has an impact on all the rest. We use bank money now because it's more convenient than paying with gold. But imagine that paying with gold was more convenient and preferred. In that case, we would see money in the bank as an investment, not as a wallet. Your employer does not wire transfers mone…
The reason nobody does this is because there is no good reason to -- banks in the US are extremely reliable and trustworthy.
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> per Transaction calculations are completely flawed They seem fairly important to me, but OK, what metric are you comparing on to claim that the current banking system is using far more raw energy? Bitcoin has a market cap of $70B and daily volume of transactions of $10B. NYSE covers about $20T alone for just 4000 companies. Scaled up, bitcoin would be over 10% of world energy use. SWIFT seems to deal with about $5T…
> By what measure do you want to back up the claim that the current system is far more energy intensive? I'm trying to find one and honestly struggling. how much damage financial and environmental have politicians and military have caused over the last 5 thousand years? yep, take that into account in your calculations.