331–340 of 359 posts
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In the U.S. it is quite common for grocery stores to have a small bank branch inside them for exactly the reason you cite.
Grocery stores or Walmart?
Wal-marts cash checks, do money transfers, and provide debit cards which act as a pseudo-bank account since they can be used with direct deposit etc.
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One potentially huge market is online payments and small transactions. If libra is embedded into the browser, millions of blogs could start charging for frictionless access to their content, and thousands of games would improve their experience and revenue. That s a huge and largely unserved area, unless you think that entering card numbers and private data with every spent penny is a good situation. I think Libra is…
Micropayments of this sort are one of those use cases that people have been trying to put into place forever, and they always founder on the fact that users hate them.
I put on virtual pyrotechnics shows in various grids and and get paid or tipped in either the grid's own digital currency or in Gloebits. Gloebits are better since they can be spent on various different grids and by all my accounts. I also take paypal.
I hope this doesn't cause Facebook to give up on Libra. I personally have no desire to own Libra. But traditional bank accounts kind of suck as a product and I would like to see more tech companies competing with them. The problems with bank accounts: 1. They charge you fees for things 2. They try to upsell me stupid financial products 3. They are not easy to use in other countries 4. Typing in my credit card number…
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yeah, those are the ones you can't sent 2 or 3 units of abroad in a minute by chat, where the receiver is not taxed 2-5%
There are newer services like Revolut proving that it can be done. All you need is somebody's phone number and the transfer is instant and with no taxes. You can also exchange currency at the interbank exchange rate during the week. And transferring that money to your local bank account is also free of taxes. Not sure if Revolut will last, but I've been very happy with it.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/aussie-banks-warn-customers-a...
In this story they refer to a “spike” in queries to the database. What actually happened is that someone tried querying every mobile phone number in Australia.
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Libra is not a bank, it’s a currency that’s pegged to other currencies. The asset backing is only because the initial value has to come from somewhere. It can’t default. It could decrease in value, but there’s no debt or counter party risk.
A run on a currency is still pretty disastrous for everybody involved, hence the need for a bank of last resort to shore up the currency when that happens. All these alternative currencies look like they're solving a political science problem, not any actual problems that people have.
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I am a happy customer of both a bank and a grocery store. If one day the grocery store decides to also open a bank, I won't suddenly move my accounts there just because I go to the grocery store every week. That's why the grocery stores trying to offer credit cards usually have some loyalty programs (e.g. points/discounts for in-store purchases). And BTW, they typically just partner with existing banks and not try to…
Interestingly the grocery store bank thing more or less happened in Ontario and it’s quite good/popular: https://www.pcfinancial.ca/en
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You cannot compare the speed of the different services without bringing up settlement time, how long it takes for money to become irreversible. Yes you can send money very quickly with SEPA, but that's not the settlement time. The money can still be reversed (although with more difficulty than credit card payments). With Bitcoin you also get a notification in seconds, but the payment becomes extremely more difficult…
> Yes you can send money very quickly with SEPA, but that's not the settlement time. The money can still be reversed From a banking perspective, the money is settled in 10 seconds, at least with TIPS (the ECB’s platform; the ACH clear it, but the end-user behavior is the same). Reversal (known as a recall in the standards) requires consent of the beneficiary.
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You cannot compare the speed of the different services without bringing up settlement time, how long it takes for money to become irreversible. Yes you can send money very quickly with SEPA, but that's not the settlement time. The money can still be reversed (although with more difficulty than credit card payments). With Bitcoin you also get a notification in seconds, but the payment becomes extremely more difficult…
> Yes you can send money very quickly with SEPA, but that's not the settlement time. The money can still be reversed From a banking perspective, the money is settled in 10 seconds, at least with TIPS (the ECB’s platform; the ACH clear it, but the end-user behavior is the same). Reversal (known as a recall in the standards) requires consent of the beneficiary.
I'm actually kind of bummed out about this. I may not like FB, but I like the idea of a digital currency backed by a floating basket of currencies.
> a digital currency backed by a floating basket of currencies This will be live by the end of 2019 in a similar form. The MakerDAO stablecoin system on the Ethereum blockchain produces the DAI stablecoin, with 1 DAI pegged at 1 USD. There's currently $85M of DAI in circulation. Each $1 of DAI is backed with $1.50 of Ether, the currency of the Ethereum blockchain. Later this year a major upgrade will go live named "M…
That said I have high respect for the Maker team and the overall idea. They are some of the best people working in crypto right now.
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No, but let's not conflate the internet and currency/
Wait, aren't you the first one to do that in your first comment in this thread?
Personally, I don’t trust any of these systems or organisations, neither tech, nor fintech, nor traditional banks. They’re all flawed for different reasons.
Technology is an attack surface the traditional banks don’t comprehend (from the horror stories I’ve heard from tech people who worked for them), and successful attacks on banking have rewards that tech… I don’t think fully appreciates.