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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

#231

Post by tehjoker »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #177
tehjoker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you described is a speculative asset (and something with inherent value). I hate to trot out the tired tulip analogy, but there's a difference between an item that people need and use practically and something that they just think is great b/c they think other people believe in it.

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

#232

Post by matheusmoreira »

qeternity wrote: post #229
matheusmoreira wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, I get that it looks fine to you. That’s because you don’t understand the difference. That was the whole point of my comment. You spend 5 seconds googling and say “yep, good enough for me”. This is the crypto world.

I started trading about 2 weeks ago. I researched enough to know I should avoid USDT. I see no reason to doubt BUSD at this time.

Are you going to explain what's wrong with the attestation?

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

#233

Post by seibelj »

tw600040 wrote: post #175

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..

“Don’t buy into this stupid thing, or you’re an idiot! This is going to zero!”

5 years later...

“It’s not fair that not enough people bought in. Now we have to ban it because the wrong people bought in!”

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

#234

Post by tekproxy »

throw0101a wrote: post #228
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.

> Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization […] "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.…

What is a bitcoin account?

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

#235

Post by CyberDildonics »

centimeter wrote: post #80
CyberDildonics wrote: post #65

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…

It doesn't sound like you're familiar with how lightning works. It doesn't have to be "synced with the chain" except during channel opening and closing, which occur infrequently (like on the scale of weeks or months). > ethereum and bitcoin cash already have more transactions than bitcoin The eth blockchain is untenably huge (good luck running an ethereum full node), and ethereum fees are often higher than Bitcoin fe…

> The eth blockchain is untenably huge (good luck running an ethereum full node)

No blockchains are anywhere close to "untenably huge".

The ethereum chain is 639.43 GB.

https://bitinfocharts.com/

A $10 USD VPS could sync with that in under two hours. That is about $12 USD of hard drive space after 5 years.

This is about the same as downloading the five to eight largest games on steam.

> and ethereum fees are often higher than Bitcoin fees.

No they aren't. They are about the same, making them both unusable for normal transactions, but it should be obvious there are no technical limitations to making larger and/or more frequent blocks since ethereum does it already.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...

> It doesn't have to be "synced with the chain" except during channel opening and closing, which occur infrequently (like on the scale of weeks or months).

Which means that no one can use that balance for weeks or months and some third party has to spot people the money in the mean time. That sounds like a credit card. Know what doesn't work like that? On chain transactions.

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

#236

Post by api »

throw0101a wrote: post #228
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.

> Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization […] "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.…

Many of those Bitcoin "accounts" (addresses) are probably exchange wallets that actually hold the Bitcoin of many users.

Since Bitcoin is somewhat anonymous it's hard to actually estimate its GINI coefficient. I agree that it's probably not great, but I'm not convinced it's this bad.

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

#237

Post by graeme »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #218
graeme wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 70% of transactions are in USDT, and bitcoin’s price rise has followed increases in Tether tokens. It would appear the price surge has been backed by USDT because currently the bitcoin market accepts USDT as equal to USD, despite evidence USDT is not backed. Bitcoin itself is powered by the miners, but the fiat value of bitcoin is backed by USDT. If there was doubt about the peg you’d see a run.

> bitcoin’s price rise has followed increases in Tether tokens I understand this as price manipulation by Tether, not as evidence that BTC is backed by it. > currently the bitcoin market accepts USDT as equal to USD, despite evidence USDT is not backed Yeah, it's unfortunate. I don't understand why people won't use BUSD instead. > If there was doubt about the peg you’d see a run. Probably. In my opinion, people shoul…

> Probably. In my opinion, people should exchange USDT for BUSD while it still has value. That way everyone will continue trading normally when all the controversy catches up to Tether.

This is sound advice for the individual but it doesn’t work for the market as a whole.

I’m arguing Tether is a sham. When too many people try to get out of a sham, it collapses.

Currently, 2/3rd of people who try to sell their BTC find USDT buyers. If Tether is revealed as a fraud suddenly the sell side will outweigh the buy side.

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

#238

Post by neckardt »

throw0101a wrote: post #228
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.

> Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization […] "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.…

> About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts

This seems obvious to me. Many people have bitcoin wallets with only a little invested. In my case, I have a few wallets just to play around with. I assume all of those wallets count as "accounts" in the above, which would really drive down the amount of money the average account controls. However few people actually have wallets with large amounts of money. I could easily move far more money into my wallets, but I choose not to.

On the other hand, when we're talking about non-bitcoin wealth the numerator is much larger (everything you and me have as assets could count as wealth, not just what we've invested in a specific thing) and the denominator would be much smaller (every one of us only counts as one person, while bitcoin wallets could be created on the fly)

In other words, the above is quite the apples to oranges comparison.

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

#239

Post by foepys »

rawtxapp wrote: post #210
foepys wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nove…

You are just recentralising everything Bitcoin allegedly decentralized. It's ridiculous. Just pay cash, you are decentralized, are your own bank and can buy everything.

Problem solved without Bitcoin. You won't get rich from just holding it, though, and we all know that this is really the only goal of cryptocurrency proponents.

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

#240

Post by qeternity »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #232
qeternity wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I get that it looks fine to you. That’s because you don’t understand the difference. That was the whole point of my comment. You spend 5 seconds googling and say “yep, good enough for me”. This is the crypto world.

I started trading about 2 weeks ago. I researched enough to know I should avoid USDT. I see no reason to doubt BUSD at this time. Are you going to explain what's wrong with the attestation?

An attestation basically says that we’ve verified that your bank says you have $X in your account.

Deltec, Tether’s bank, is owned by Tether. So it’s worthless.

But attestations tell you nothing about solvency. Let’s say I need to show $1k in my bank account. So I go to a loan shark. I can now get an attestation that I have $1k. It’s true, I do...but I also owe $1k.

Attestations are not audits.

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