Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by graeme » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

hnrodey wrote: post #190

graeme wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mung…

I'm not here to defend Bitcoin nor respond to critiques. Just not what I'm in to. Full disclosure, I have a financial stake in Bitcoin. My observation on all of this is that the most common themes to bear Bitcoin - can all be fixed! People are quite happy to look at the current landscape and proclaim immediate and indefinite failure. Detractors allow no room for growth. Volatility - you could argue that Bitcoin is st…

I didn’t mention volatility. I said Bitcoin’s current run up is backed by massive fraud.

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

#202

Post by matheusmoreira » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #171

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.

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 Mung…

> The token backing BTC, Tether, is founded by con artists and was just revealed to not have had the backing they claim.

USDT doesn't back BTC. It's just a stable coin people use. There are other coins tracking the dollar. Binance created their own BUSD and it seems to be as legit as it gets with frequent audits of reserves and everything. There's also USDC.

BTC is actually backed by the eletricity used to power the computers that mine it. The expensive computations guarantee its scarcity.

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

#203

Post by hnrodey » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:52 PM UTC

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.

Replying to my own comment because an edit felt like cheating...

The entire crypto market goes to infinity or zero. I don't readily know which is more likely; only that I'm betting on infinity.

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

#204

Post by waheoo » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

notyourwork wrote: post #160

fny wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... what do you expect with a currency with an annualized volatility of 100%. The risk is way too damn high.

I don't expect anything other than businesses will do what businesses do. Its just sad that mainstream media consumers will interpret this very differently from reality.

I think you're the one messing with reality here.

Bitcoin needs to be stable before it can be used widespread for transactions.

Visa doing this increases its adoption, increased adoption, even if used in this way will stabilise the currency.

That is huge. It's just a required stepping stone.

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

#205

Post by xiphias2 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:54 PM UTC

There are so many people commenting here about Bitcoin holders who don't even have Bitcoin.

As a person living primary on Bitcoin, I would love what VISA is doing, the volatility is not a problem for me, lightning wallets would be perfect, but I don't want to do taxation for thousands of small payments with different Bitcoin prices (especially as I'm not from US, where there is specialized software for it), so I lend USD against my Bitcoin tax-free and use that money to buy stuff. My behaviour would change if Bitcoin could be used for buying things directly tax-free (just like with any other currency).

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

#206

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:57 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #142

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's a deflationary currency. It's not a currency, that's a misnomer to a great degree. Which nations are supporting it as a currency? Essentially none. If something doesn't have the currency status backing of a single major economy, it plainly can't be considered a currency. It's a store of value. Sure, we could be pretend about it (any medium of exchange), be idealistic, and say that you don't need nations to bac…

> It's not a currency, that's a misnomer to a great degree

I agree with you. The comment was made within the context of (a) Visa treating it like a currency and (b) OP referencing the original dream of Bitcoin supporting a decentralized financial system.

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

#207

Post by ALittleLight » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #159

rowland66 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is pretty basic economic fallacy. Whether you hold coins today or not should not impact an investment decision. If the BTC you bought 10 years ago for $100 is worth $100,000 today, and a couple of weeks from now the price collapses and is worth $100 again, you have still lost $100,000. Just the same as if you paid $100,000 for your BTC today. Only difference would be tax liability.

It sounds like you believe the marginal utility of currency or wealth is constant and anything else is contrary to "basic economics". Can you explain further, because it sounds weird to me?

I think the idea is you have some amount of "worth" today, denominated in whatever you like. Maybe you have 100k USD in BTC or in cash. If you let your bitcoin ride, that's equivalent, modulo taxes, to buying bitcoin. Or, selling your bitcoin today is equivalent to choosing not to buy.

The idea is that you shouldn't think "I already have some bitcoins, may as well let them ride" but instead think "Would it be better to have bitcoins or dollars?" And then, whatever your answer and current assets are, reposition yourself so you're consistent with your beliefs.

If you have a bitcoin that you bought for 10 dollars and you hold on to it even though you believe the price will likely fall because you think you'll still be able to sell above 10 dollars, that's a fallacy in the sense that you'd probably make the most money basing your decisions only on what you think is likely to happen and not what the original cost of your assets was.

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

#208

Post by rawtxapp » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #200

rawtxapp wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't implement those changes uni-laterally, it would cause a hard-fork. In addition to devs and miners, you need users, network nodes and exchanges to agree to it as well. And even if that change were to go through, there will still be people running the old chain (Ethereum Classic is still alive). So those parameters would only change if they improve the network for most stakeholders, otherwise, most people wo…

> They can't implement those changes uni-laterally, it would cause a hard-fork. In addition to devs and miners, you need users, network nodes and exchanges to agree to it as well. Sure, but the devs do have the "Bitcoin" name, which would leave them well-positioned to market their changes. Bitcoin Classic may stick around, but like Etherium Classic, it may not be very healthy: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classi…

Nobody owns the "Bitcoin" name, people collectively decide which chaintip to call Bitcoin and that's it. The devs own "Bitcoin Core" which is just one implementation of the network.

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

#209

Post by qeternity » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #169

qeternity wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GBTC was trading at 15% discount to spot today... The institutional thesis is massively overblown. And retail isn’t piling in like in 2017.

There was an article I read on how arbitrage vs BTC was possible, despite it not being an ETF. I forget the details, it may have taken like 6 months to do the exchange for regulatory reasons. So professionals were making money while it was >BTC, until they overdid it and the premium went away. It seems reasonable to be patient because there's just a lot of lag in the system as it's currently set up. If you've ever pa…

There’s no arbitrage in the strict sense but basically it’s just a straight convergence trade without a delivery mechanism. Just need funding, which is abundant today.

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

#210

Post by rawtxapp » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 11:02 PM UTC

foepys wrote: post #191

rawtxapp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Channel factories solve this issue by being able to create and close many channels at once. > LN also requires a constant observation of the LN network or malicious actors can just take more from a channel than allowed. These are called watchtowers, they never have c…

Channel factories do not work globally as far as I understand them. They only work within a group of addresses that know they won't close the channels every other hour or everybody would have to create yet another channel. It sounds very similar to a credit union. Watchtowers are what I meant with payment processors. You need to pay them to watch the chain in case the other party tries to literally steal from you. Yo…

Exchanges could act as channel factories, for example, today they batch a bunch of withdrawals into a single transaction, there's really no reason why they couldn't simply open a channel for each person in that.

It can be a third-party or you could also run one yourself, there's nothing stopping you.

I wouldn't be surprised to see counterparts, just like email is "mail on the internet", but there are also fairly novel concepts like flash loans which are just not possible in current financial system.