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Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

btctimes.com

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Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#131

Post by kajumix »

_7fvc wrote: post #124

The problem with using Bitcoin for payments is volatility. Bitcoin's price is volatile. Bitcoin supporters say volatility will go down "at some point". The logic is pretty silly. Bitcoin is money for the people. But when the super rich people adopt it, volatility will go down. They have more money. The Bitcoin money "tank" will be bigger. Its volatile flow will go down. Bitcoin is digital gold, God's money. When it c…

High volatility is due not to supply, but to the trading volume. Like Taleb said, there is no long-term stability without short-term volatility.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#132

Post by hggh »

kajumix wrote: post #110
notyourwork wrote: post #61

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.

Bitcoin disrupts central bank, not payment networks. Lightning [1] as layer 2 on top of Bitcoin adheres to trustless and p2p ideals, and is actually the competition for Visa. [1]: https://lightning.network/ Edit: added link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM4gNVme5a0

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#133

Post by JumpCrisscross »

notyourwork wrote: post #61
purple_ferret wrote: post #57

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.

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.

> the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved

It's a deflationary currency. If it has a future as a store of value, and I think it very well may, it would have a net effect of concentrating wealth. And with wealth comes power. Whether that power is exercised through how the blockchain processes transactions or via some other vector seems something of a side show to me.

The wealthy never wanted to abandon the gold standard. It was the populists and the bankers. The poor and the middlemen.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#134

Post by ceejayoz »

beforeolives wrote: post #107
lottin wrote: post #21

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.

> Don't be surprised if they also gladly pay a ridiculous fee to buy a coffee. I would be very surprised if people started deliberately picking the much more expensive option for no benefit whatsoever.

Sure they will.

Saks Fifth Avenue sells a $1500 plastic tic-tac-toe board. Plenty of upscale market for absurdly expensive things that do the same thing the cheap version does. https://www.saksfifthavenue.com/product/edie-parker-tic-tac-...

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#135

Post by foepys »

kajumix wrote: post #119
hnrodey wrote: post #108

One of the reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin over the next decade is precisely because of the anti-BTC sentiment on this board.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

Please explain to me how scaling is solved in bitcoin. The lighting network requires an on-chain transaction to create and close a channel both times. Even if the world population were static it would take months to open a channel for everybody. Companies also need multiple channels each.

LN also requires a constant observation of the LN network or malicious actors can just take more from a channel than allowed. This eventually leads to entities specialized in monitoring the chain for the average Joe. You could call those payment providers.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#136

Post by rawtxapp »

iijj wrote: post #122

Maybe I don't understand it correctly, but after having recently done my taxes, it seems to me you'd generate a capital gain or loss that has to be captured on IRS Form 8949 every time such a thing triggered bitcoin to be converted to USD, goods or services. Or is it some nudge-nudge-wink-wink situation where everyone, including the IRS, ignores such a thing unless the sums involved are large.

Because of the open nature of the blockchain, the IRS knows all your exact movements, so there's no nudge-nudge-wink-wink especially if you have tied your real identity to a Bitcoin address using a centralized exchange.

Presumably, tools like cointracker (maybe even Visa themselves), etc, will take care of reporting these taxes for you, still a pita, but doable.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#137

Post by _7fvc »

kajumix wrote: post #131
_7fvc wrote: post #124

The problem with using Bitcoin for payments is volatility. Bitcoin's price is volatile. Bitcoin supporters say volatility will go down "at some point". The logic is pretty silly. Bitcoin is money for the people. But when the super rich people adopt it, volatility will go down. They have more money. The Bitcoin money "tank" will be bigger. Its volatile flow will go down. Bitcoin is digital gold, God's money. When it c…

High volatility is due not to supply, but to the trading volume. Like Taleb said, there is no long-term stability without short-term volatility.

Taleb changed his mind on this subject. :) I can see Bitcoin as a "stable" long-term Store of Value. Short-term, it's always volatile. It's not suitable as a Medium of Exchange.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#138

Post by Spivak »

kajumix wrote: post #119
hnrodey wrote: post #108

One of the reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin over the next decade is precisely because of the anti-BTC sentiment on this board.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

I don’t think they have which is why they keep coming up again.

BTC genuinely uses a stupid amount of energy and there isn’t a terribly good reason for it since we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal. It would be necessary if establishing trust was impossible but it isn’t.

BTC transaction fees and throughput are still an issue. Off-chain transactions that use the main network as a settlement layer is a non-solution that undermines the whole point of BTC. Might as well just use banks as a settlement later for the lighting network for all it matters at that point.

Volatility and the fact that BTC is more of an investment vehicle than anything else matters if you want to actually use it to buy stuff.

The fact that there is no form of monetary policy means that the available currency doesn’t expand and contract with growth in economic output which makes prices unstable and naturally deflationary.

BTC is fine as a nerdy digital cash and commodity market based on its value as such but a general purpose currency it isn’t.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#139

Post by lottin »

dizzant wrote: post #77
lottin wrote: post #21

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…

I wasn't talking about bitcoin not being backed by anything (which is true, incidentally), I was talking about NFTs.

Re: Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

#140

Post by rawtxapp »

karpierz wrote: post #129
kajumix wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

The core issue I've seen that goes unanswered is what problem does BTC solve? The answers I've seen so far are: 1. Avoiding Venezuelan hyper-inflation - it is a use-case, but doesn't really apply to the United States for example. 2. Store of value - volatility is way too high and there are much better alternatives (Treasury bonds) 3. Evading capital controls - it is a use-case, but not really applicable to most citiz…

> The core issue I've seen that goes unanswered is what problem does BTC solve?

To me, it's trustless money. I don't need to trust the US gov, I don't care about who they will elect or which wars they are gonna start or which banks they are gonna bailout.

You can verify everything through code and math. If that's not valuable to you, maybe there's some other use case you're interested. If you've done your research and there's really no use case that excites you, then you can just ignore it.

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