131–140 of 176 posts
I didn't want blockchain. I didn't want anonymity. I just wanted a way to instantly move money (the same money anyone might use to buy bread with) between myself and another person, without banking fees or delays or even legislative limitations. And instead I got cryptocurrency.
p.s. thanks for your work on Ardour
I wonder if this is one of these dot-com bubble-esque articles that we'll look back on and think, "What an interesting time."
Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc... Unless, of course, you use places like Coinbase that pool transactions or bypass the network altogether, but then... what's the point of cryptocurrency?
> Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc... Nobody forces merchants to stick to requiring block confirmations for e.g. Bitcoin transactions. They just do it because that's the way it always has been. Instead of that, for low price purchases, they could also monitor the network for how well-sprea…
At the very least there's no guarantee of that. If you send a conflicting transaction with a higher fee, a miner should (rationally) discard the older one. And last I checked (Ethereum, a few years ago), that was indeed what they were doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was having this discussion with a friend recently, arguing over what the actual use cases are for crypto, and I came to a similar conclusion. In terms of facilitating payments , cryptocurrencies are worse in almost every way I can think of compared to existing systems. They are (currently) slow, have high transaction fees, but most importantly the non-refundability of crypto transactions is a bug, not the feature c…
What if a bunch of countries peg their currency to crypto like Bitcoin and it becomes so valuable that one day jobs return to America due labor being cheaper in the US because we were to stubborn to chain our policy? Lol is that a thing that could happen?
Are there any crypto projects that allow chargebacks? I religiously avoid using my debit card except at bank ATMs to avoid that once every few years when someone skims my credit card. That and rewards are the main value-add of a traditional payment flow at the moment.
It's possible to provide customer protection as a third-party service. Chargebacks shouldn't exist on the base layer of money.
From what I can find around current crypto "credit cards", it seems they are in reality just debit cards.
[0] Not money, but Visa - though this was ambiguous as written
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc... Nobody forces merchants to stick to requiring block confirmations for e.g. Bitcoin transactions. They just do it because that's the way it always has been. Instead of that, for low price purchases, they could also monitor the network for how well-sprea…
> Miners will refuse to accept a transaction which conflicts with the one they saw much earlier. At the very least there's no guarantee of that. If you send a conflicting transaction with a higher fee, a miner should (rationally) discard the older one. And last I checked (Ethereum, a few years ago), that was indeed what they were doing.
If miners did change their Bitcoin nodes to facilitate double spending even with RBF disabled, that would erode trust in Bitcoin and thereby de-valuate it, which is probably not in the interest of miners. They'd damage the thing they're heavily invested in.
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> they will eventually realize, those rewards are not worth the cost. Debit cards in the US have been available and basically free to use for all merchants and purchasers for many decades. Yet, merchants willingly do not give people that buy with a debit card a discount. That seems like proof to me that merchants are betting that they earn more money from the use of credit cards, even after the fees associated with t…
Cash discounts are predominantly at gas stations in the US.
And you can get a minimum 2% cash back on no fee cards, so unless the discount is at least that much, I don’t see a reason to not use a credit card.
Have you used cryptocurrency for payments lately? Unless you want to pay $25 to wait 6 hours while your transaction is confirming, stick to venmo/zelle/paypal/etc... Unless, of course, you use places like Coinbase that pool transactions or bypass the network altogether, but then... what's the point of cryptocurrency?
That's the trick, Visa won't do cryptocurrency payment, they will do "fiat currency" payment indexed on cryptocurrencies. For example, you buy 0.1 BTC using euros, you then pay a merchant asking for 0.1 BTC, which he will withdraw as dollars. Noticed that neither the buyer nor the seller manipulate bitcoin. No address, no transaction on the blockchain. It shows bitcoin on your account but in reality, it was a euro to…
There’s every reason to think in the longer term there will be some cryptocurrencies with higher costs that behave more like a custodial store of value like gold, some that behave like a cheap medium of exchange, and some that have other purposes like hedging against fiat currency or operating some smart contract based app / game / service.
The valuation model would be different for each.
You don’t pay for things from your brokerage fund by cashing out your QQQ shares. You don’t pay for things with the gold in your home safe. You don’t keep funds in a foreign currency in your home country for everyday purchases. There is no use of bitcoin for which this seems well-suited.
> There is no use of bitcoin for which this seems well-suited. All the things you listed are not identical to the new, very different asset class that is Bitcoin, so how can you deduce facts about Bitcoin from them? E.g. they can't be transferred as easily as scanning a QR code with your smartphone, you can't store them in your brain, they can be de-valuated by governments, and so on.
The first thing is a speculative asset.
The second is a store of value.
The third is a currency.
I did not mention that bitcoin is taxed as a commodity in the US.
Bitcoin is easy to transfer - but you still need to wait for a transaction to get stored in a block and processed by miners, and wait for the odds of a double spend reducing to near zero. Venmo is just as easy, with different risks.
Note that I am not entirely bearish about bitcoin. It’s cool tech! But it has some real limitations and there seems to be no upside to paying with it through Visa of all things.
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Not necessarily. Dogecoin has no fixed cap on the amount of Đ in existence. Rather, it expands at a rate of Đ5billion/yr, much to the chagrin of several currency pumpers. https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/issues/1674
I did not know this. Thanks for the information. So do this make a currency like Doge more attractive as a long term solution? Will BitCoin be a one hit wonder per se?
I'd like the coin to take off as an actual currency, and of the coins I've looked at, I think it has the most potential for adoption in that respect.
But I don't think it's got the ecosystem to support that right now. A metamask-style doge wallet would do wonders for this.
Also, knowing little to nothing about the backend (or other crypto backends, tbh), other than that it's derived from Bitcoin - I have concerns about scalability wrt transaction settlement times, power consumption, and ease-of-entry with self-hosted wallets.