221–230 of 530 posts
If BTC does catch up, the current inequality of the world will look like an anthill in comparison to the inequality that BTC will create. I can't imagine the world letting that happen..
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 t…
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> 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…
For a crowd that constantly parrot “DYOR”...you should really DYOR. No stablecoin has even been audited. Zero. None. Most perform attestations, which doesn’t even come close to an audit. Tether does neither.
> Paxos Trust Company has engaged Withum, a nationally top-ranking auditing firm, to independently verify at specific points in time that the entire supply of Paxos Standard tokens is consistent with USD in reserve accounts at U.S. banks held and managed by Paxos.
> Withum performs month-end attestations of these accounts using standards established by the AICPA.
An independent third party verifies and attests to the fact reserves match supply every month. Looks fine to me.
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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.
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.
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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.
This is where the difference between theory and practice comes in. Who is 'people' here? Billions of people today have no idea what bitcoin is and will have no say in 'collectively' deciding which chain tip to call 'Bitcoin'. BTC is decentralized in theory, but with literally .0001% of the population owning like 99% of BTC it can't get more centralized..
People in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
For example, when the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash split happened, you had people dumping one for the other to manipulate the price in their favor, you had miners that decided which one they wanted to mine, exchanges that decided which one they wanted to put under BTC ticker and some people that just stayed on the sidelines waiting to see which chain would prevail.
For a brief moment, Bitcoin Cash was actually close (in price, adoption, etc), but then eventually people chose the original chain as Bitcoin and we know the rest.
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This is the poison pill for BTC in my opinion. I have a very small amount of BTC and this is the primary reason I don't have a larger investment, don't make more of an attempt to use it as currency, etc. The central banks/governments aren't going to give up their power so easily. They may have low-key destroyed crypto by considering them commodities. The only way crypto can win* is if a plurality of people just choos…
You can just borrow against it to spend it. No tax whatsoever and you hold on to your asset.
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.
"Decentralization"? Bank of America Global Research just released a report today that said:
> 1. Concentrated Ownership: About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts. By comparison, the latest Fed data suggests that the top 1% of Americans control about 30.4% of all household wealth in the US.
* Francisco Blanch, with Savita Subramanian, Philip Middleton, et. al. "Bitcoin’s dirty little secrets". BofA Global Research, 17 March 2021.
Probably not even Russian oligarchs have that much control.
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For a crowd that constantly parrot “DYOR”...you should really DYOR. No stablecoin has even been audited. Zero. None. Most perform attestations, which doesn’t even come close to an audit. Tether does neither.
https://www.paxos.com/attestations/ > Paxos Trust Company has engaged Withum, a nationally top-ranking auditing firm, to independently verify at specific points in time that the entire supply of Paxos Standard tokens is consistent with USD in reserve accounts at U.S. banks held and managed by Paxos. > Withum performs month-end attestations of these accounts using standards established by the AICPA. An independent thi…
This is the crypto world.
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 t…
The usefulness of gold itself is questionable:
* https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2078535