91–100 of 530 posts
Misleading Title. Visa says it will allow for Bitcoin to be converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card in the same way debit cards already work. This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just on-chain layer 1 transactions that are somewhat expensive. The lightning network solves this and works great, can do thousands of transactions per second and has close to 0 fees. Feels like magic to use it :)
That doesn't solve anything, it still has to be synced with the chain so that the balance can be useful to anyone else. The average transaction is around $20 USD and has been around this much for a while. Opening and closing second layer channels is even more expensive than an average transaction. There is no universe where 1.5KB/s in transactions makes sense. Any other cryptocurrency works better, ethereum and bitco…
I'd never want to send large BTC amounts through visa, but I would trust them enough to facilitate Or heck, maybe consumers don't need an actual channel, just let me send Bitcoin out on credit and pay my monthly balance with BTC. Maybe only channels to vendors that receive payments are necessary.
Not sure how much demand exists for this, but "We are the #1 facilitator of Bitcoin transactions" would probably be great for Visa's stock price if they could achieve it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's such an anti-pattern for the world to adopt this approach. Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved. Sadly, I'm less and less hopeful that crypto will be what the movement conveyed over last 10 years.
Just as with social media, convenience was more important than sovereignty via decentralization. Can’t change the wind, have to adjust your sails.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None are as stable as Bitcoin. There are some that are faster right now because no one uses them, but are likely to fail if they get any serious adoption. Ethereum is the only sensible alternative to Bitcoin but Ethereum has major scalability issues and much less infrastructure compared to Bitcoin to alleviate those issues.
Ethereum does face additional problems because of the EVM. Proof of Stake is coming which helps a lot with overall effort expended, if not directly tx/s. What does Bitcoin have that Ethereum doesn't for scaling transaction rate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may have been downvoted for a snarky tone, but this is the first time I've seen it mentioned here - bitcoin is taxed as a commodity in the US, each exchange is a capital gain or loss.
If you buy euros with dollars, keep them, then buy dollars back, is that lunged as capital gain/loss?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume this is a bad-faith question, given how much it begs the question, but: there is no known solution to the double-spend problem that achieves the same security properties as proof-of-work without consuming energy.
Dumb out-of-the-loop question: then what's this talk of Ethereum moving to proof of stake? Whenever someone brings up that PoW is bad, people say Ethereum; whenever someone says why PoW, someone says because PoS isn't safe.
It's not that the premises and protocols themselves are complicated — sure, they're technically sophisticated, but they can be explained simply. The problem lies in that it is very hard to predict the economic consequences and security guarantees of the various consensus mechanisms. Frankly, if Bitcoin hadn't been working flawlessly for the past 12 years very few people would guess that it would work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are paying good money for owning a serial number with no connection whatever to anything in the physical or in the virtual world. Don't be surprised if they also gladly pay a ridiculous fee to buy a coffee.
This take on Bitcoin -- not backed by anything in the physical or virtual world -- is misinformed. You're correct that coin isn't specifically backed by anything in the sense that you can't trade it in for a an equivalent asset like gold. But neither is the US dollar. BTC's value is backed at least by the billions that have been spent on mining architecture by companies like MARA and RIOT, large mining pools, produce…
While I wish I jumped on the bandwagon. I don’t see why any nation would adopt a solution they don’t control. They are happen to consider it a commodity and tax it though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't solve anything, it still has to be synced with the chain so that the balance can be useful to anyone else. The average transaction is around $20 USD and has been around this much for a while. Opening and closing second layer channels is even more expensive than an average transaction. There is no universe where 1.5KB/s in transactions makes sense. Any other cryptocurrency works better, ethereum and bitco…
I'm not an expert on lightning network, but couldn't Visa position themselves as a central hub for lightning network transactions, so that most people can open a channel to Visa and they act as the clearing house for keeping all of those channels balanced? I'd never want to send large BTC amounts through visa, but I would trust them enough to facilitate Or heck, maybe consumers don't need an actual channel, just let…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may have been downvoted for a snarky tone, but this is the first time I've seen it mentioned here - bitcoin is taxed as a commodity in the US, each exchange is a capital gain or loss.
If you buy euros with dollars, keep them, then buy dollars back, is that lunged as capital gain/loss?
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/09/forex-taxatio...