Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

Post by dillondoyle » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

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.…

Post by JohnHaugeland » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 12:56 AM UTC

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

Post by rawtxapp » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 12:59 AM UTC

foepys wrote: post #239

rawtxapp wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by Black101 » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

moralsupply wrote: post #244

Does that mean more energy will be used to mine Bitcoin and more carbon will be emitted in the atmosphere, killing turtles in the oceans and burning the remains of the Amazon forest?

Post by fomine3 » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 1:03 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #242

neckardt wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To expand on this, quite a few wallet apps nowadays default to using a fresh wallet per transaction as a privacy measure, further inflating the number of wallets relative to the monetary supply.