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Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

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

#171

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

HN isn’t wrong about everything. It was extremely bearing on Groupon in 2011. It was another thing where true believers would say that skeptics “just don’t get it”, but the HN critics had extremely cogent critiques that went without response. Google “Groupon Stock”, HN was very correct.

VERY different from the anti-Dropbox sentiment of the famous Dropbox comment.

You also have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Roubini, all claiming Bitcoin is worthless. Some of the brightest minds in finance with impeccable and long track records.

Bitcoin has had 12 years and still has no real world use cases. By contrast the internet was instantly useful. Bitcoin has a monstrous cost in energy and money to maintain the network. The token backing BTC, Tether, is founded by con artists and was just revealed to not have had the backing they claim. BTC has been subjected to the same money money printing its advocates defy in fiat.

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Check the results for Groupon: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=7H1SYMDVJKiYwbkPvqiEg...

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

It's NOT trustless money. Instead of trusting the US gov, you are trusting that this decentralized ledger will gain acceptance by the whole world. Which one is more of a leap of faith?

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

#173
post #6

Why is everybody betting on bitcoin for payments when there are faster and more stable alternatives in the crypto space? I’m thinking that this is more about a proof of concept to get into the space.

Satoshi said in 2009: "The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size." "By Moore's Law, we can expect hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years…

Well, this is one thing that he obviously got wrong. Computer hardware speed didn't become faster by a factor of 100 in the 12 years since Bitcoin started. Just by a factor of 2, maybe.

But solutions to that problem exist. I pay small amounts regularly with my bitcoin wallet (the Wallet of Satoshi), it costs mere cents and transactions confirm in seconds. It's far superior to anything visa has to offer, because it's fraud and counterfeit proof, privacy friendly, globally universal and cheap.

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

#174

The most sophisticated pyramid scheme ever, hidden in plain sight; so obvious that everyone second guesses themselves. “They all seem to be going along, I guess I must be wrong.” Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely: https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html .

inb4 you get called a "no-coiner" which always makes me think people who are "coiners" are immature children.

I'm glad you used an adjective because the majority of children I teach would beat most cryptocurrency eschatologists in one fell swoop at a maturity contest.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

It's NOT trustless money. Instead of trusting the US gov, you are trusting that this decentralized ledger will gain acceptance by the whole world. Which one is more of a leap of faith?

> you are trusting that this decentralized ledger will gain acceptance by the whole world.

Bitcoin itself is inherently trustless, that's the whole point of it. You can trust that there will never be more than 21M Bitcoins, you can trust that there will never be a double-spend, you can trust that it will run 24/7, etc.

Whether it will gain worldwide acceptance is another matter (btw, adoption is increasing at very fast pace now), as long as there's a subset of the world that accepts it, that's good enough for me.

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

#177
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…

How the heck would bitcoin volatility go down when there's no fixed reason to use it? USD has value despite fiat status because it's required to pay US taxes and oil markets are priced in USD (by force and trade agreement). Bitcoin is totally unteathered from reality (and deflationary which is another story entirely). This means Bitcoin's value is based on completely ephemeral feelings, and the size of its network --…

> This means Bitcoin's value is based on completely ephemeral feelings

How is this different from any other asset? Value always disappears when people stop believing in it. People invest in company stock because they believe the company is valuable and will grow over time. Nobody wants to hold coins that lose value constantly. Governments have to literally force people to use their currencies by force of law.

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

#178

Bitcoin is an asset that tends to appreciate. Why would I use it as payment? Lastly, is it considered legal tender? What is the meaning of legal tender if one can use Bitcoin everywhere usd is accepted?

Because you will die if you don't spend it on some food. There is more to life than to grow your wealth.

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

#179
The number of people commenting who completely misunderstand Bitcoin and crypto is astounding.

Bitcoin will never be used directly for payments, it's a value store. Immutable deflationary digital gold.

I wrote it off for years too because it was too slow and the fees were too expensive. That was the dream they had, but they couldn't realize it at the base layer. I was still walking around last year believing that's the scam they were still peddling, but once you take time to investigate you'll see it will become a major part of the world economy.

COVID helped push this over as bailouts and printing money in the US and the ECB is going to drive a massive movement of money out of the markets and fiat.

Normally you'd see momentum go to bonds when the stocks burst but the bonds situation is unsalvagable.

Also expect a ton of movement to crypto when wealth taxes get implemented to fix economies. They'll use it to hide assets, guaranteed. Form an LLC, siphon the money out that way and into crypto.

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

#180

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

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -Sagan
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