Serious question: what happens when nobody wants their HW assets to verify the blockchain? What happens when the infrastructure falls apart or the demands on the blockchain verification outpaces the number of machines available to verify? Can you buy/sell btc off of the internet? Why would we want a future with digital assets that are inherently relying upon things that can fall apart with an EMP (not trying to be a doomsayer/fearmonger)?
MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
561–570 of 910 posts
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Strong currencies are not the solution to poor governance. Good governance and democracy makes a country and its currency strong. Not vice versa. That's a good point. Too many people propose individualist solutions to social problems, and all their "solution" would do is make the social problem worse. I think that stems often stems from an overzealous faith in free markets, which leads to a distorted idea that indi…
Markets only exist within the context of a political system. They are just a tool to reach a certain policy outcome. The idea of using the free market to replace poor governance is laughable. It's the opposite. You have to set the right policies and incentives and only then will the free market show its true beauty. Markets fail or succeed because of improper or proper governance. It's like a genetic/ML algorithm tha…
> Markets fail or succeed because of improper or proper governance.
I have yet to see proper governance last long enough to be of any note and worse governance tends to quickly flip to favor the powerful.
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People are buying TSLA because they want to do something about climate change. I hope given Tesla's new affinity with Bitcoin that what they want to do is "make it worse" lol. Tesla is literally selling its green energy credits to dirty car companies, then throwing it at Chinese coal miners. The market goes through particularly bubblicious periods of pricing mania from time to time. It's happening now, it's happene…
It will only revert if people sell. What if nobody sells because they equate selling with giving up on their dreams of fighting climate change?
Retail might never sell, I doubt commercial institutions Vanguard for example would not sell for idealistic reasons.
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pegged tokens like USDC and USDC can still be used to speculate in DeFi platform like AAVE with pretty lucrative returns.
Where do the returns come from? Does the interest return come from actual investments? Or is it paid forward by newcomers? The latter is the literal definition of a ponzi scheme. There's no free lunch when it comes to generating interest.
Borrowers pay more than lenders. You get a cut of those fees as interest. There's risk there of course, but it isn't magic money or a ponzi.
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why buy something today when it'll be cheaper in a week or a month? Because you need it today? We already see this all the time in subsets of the market which experience deflating prices. If you wait a year to buy that fancy device you're wanting there will most likely be a better model available at a lower cost. People still buy the current model, though, because there is a cost to waiting which offsets the expect…
It's a different situation when the currency itself is deflationary, not the goods being purchased. Instead of thinking in terms of buying a phone, think of this in terms of capital allocation and investment. Deflationary currencies are designed to accrue value to those who don't use them. An economy built on the idea of incentivizing people to not spend any money is not good at all. Everyone knows about the downside…
> An economy built on the idea of incentivizing people to not spend any money is not good at all.
It's better not to induce anyone to over-spend or under-spend. I would not advocate a deliberately deflationary monetary policy any more than I would advocate a deliberately inflationary one. The supply should remain as constant as possible so as to avoid injecting noise into a very important economic signaling mechanism regarding the dividing line between socially beneficial investment (above-average returns) and malinvestment (below-average returns). Between the two, though, IMHO it's better to err on the side of deflation. It's easier to correct for underconsumption or underinvestment (just start spending or investing more) vs. getting back resources which have already been wasted on unproductive excess consumption or malinvestment. When you inflate the money supply in an attempt to drive people to consume more than they need or else invest in ventures that may or may not actually make a positive contribution to the average rate of return just to avoid being penalized for holding cash you're actively contributing to the destruction of wealth and making everyone collectively worse off. (Though of course not everyone is worse off; those individuals closest to the supply of new money benefit disproportionately from receiving it at pre-inflated rates before it becomes diluted throughout the economy.)
"Deflationary spirals" are a well-known economic myth. There is no general correlation between monetary deflation and a shrinking economy, much less a self-destructive feedback loop. Gradual, unforced deflation does not significantly affect the demand for goods—people still need things now, they can't just wait forever for prices to improve—and while nominal wages do obviously decrease over time, nominal prices of consumer goods tend to decrease even faster, resulting in an increase in purchasing power. As opposed to the situation with money supply inflation, where prices tend to rise faster than wages.
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Visa and MasterCard will warm up to bitcoin they will have ideal product for all the bitcoin millionaires. When you are long on bitcoin you almost don't care about volatility. Because you can't predict the future the only good time to buy bitcoin is when you have too much dollars and the only good time when to sell bitcoins is when you have not enough dollars. Sure, now you have 10 mln dollars in BTC at all tine…
> Sure, now you have 10 mln dollars in BTC at all tine high, and 2 mln after price drops but in day to day purchases it doesn't matter. This doesn't track at all, unless it is a safe assumption that the general trend of Bitcoin will always be up, and you are able to time the market to do any major withdrawals at higher prices. Or, you don't have any major withdrawals, and you luck out in that your many small withdraw…
Compare this to wealth of Elon Musk. This month he's the richest person on planet, two months ago he wasn't even in top 10 (I think). Did anything changed for him? No. Can he not be the richest man on the planet in two months? Sure. Will it change anything for him? Still no.
I pretty much think about people who got into bitcoin early and they have more than 1000% gain and just hodl because they don't have much use for that kind of money.
Their daily purchases would be minuscule percentage of their bitcoin wealth.
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that paying for things directly with bitcoin doesn't make sense. However, that doesn't mean bitcoin doesn't have a use case as a global settlement network and volatility isn't what's important, it's liquidity, which bitcoin has far more of then any other cryptocurrency. For an example of this take a look at something like Strike Global using bitcoin's lightning network. https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-…
>it's liquidity, which bitcoin has far more of then any other cryptocurrency. "Far more of than any other cryptocurrency" is kind of a moot point. Does "bitcoin" (the people converting it to cash) have enough reserves in any real currency to cover even 10% of its value? There's no federal government backing it, and as best I can tell nothing to prevent the proverbial "run on the bank". I still struggle to see how bit…
It doesn't sound like you bothered reading the link I posted. Price volatility caused by a "run on the bank" doesn't really matter if you are sending payments between two people using different currencies. The link I posted describes an app that as an example allows a payment to be sent from someone in the US to someone in Europe and have it settled instantly. Bitcoin is only used on the end of each transaction and converted in and out of dollars and euro's instantaneously making it's price irrelevant.
The intrinsic value argument is old and tired at this point so I'm not even going to bother with it.
Yes, Bitcoin at this stage is extremely volatile and anyone buying it to hold as an investment should understand it can lose or gain a lot of value quickly. However, it does have multiple use cases at this point that clearly the market has determined have some type of value. We're still figuring that out.
As a side note, if you do some digging you can find some pretty good on-chain analytics that can theoretically put a sort of floor on the price based on how coins have moved over time. There are now quite a few sites like glassnode.com, cryptoquant.com, coinmentrics.io etc that provide this data or if you are technical enough set up your own node and verify it for yourself.
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#568Everyone on this thread seems to be missing the point that they’ll be working with stablecoins on Ethereum and other smart contracts chains, and not Bitcoin.
Not even that. they will likely implement their own private-ledger-per-country system. The press release mention only one market that is currently trading via informal SMS and WAP bank apps with little access to actual money, so why not remove the money entirely?
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, sure settlement in Bitcoin happens within a few minutes. Getting that converted into usable money is a whole other story, no? I can basically think of two scenario types when you are in need of international, spontaneous money transfer: a) "I just got carjacked in Sierra Leone and need some money for an hotel and a flight home" b) "I have some weird novel business and I would like to pay my contractors in East…
I had contractor on Litecoin in Russia for 6 months. Worked pretty well.
Out of curiosity, can I know why you did use Litecoin rather than others crypto???
Re: MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the point of an unstable, volatile, frantically manipulated currency that is susceptible to social media pump and dump schemes (Elon + Doge)? Currency and its exchange rate needs to be relatively stable for the world to put trust into it. Saying that BTC is stable, but the rest of the world's fiat currency is fluctuating makes no sense. US dollar provides stability and security, I feel confident that a cappucc…
Your view must be skewed by privilege of having stable currency. Currency of my country lost 250% of its value over last 7 years. It's not bitcoin-level volatile, but close to it. Thankfully I have an option to use USD to hoard money, but that option is not something that's given, in many countries you just can't exchange for fair price. I agree that for someone living in US or EU there's no much point using BTC.
Am I dumb? How does something lose over 100% of it's value?