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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

#261

Post by IncRnd »

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

> Bitcoin disrupts central bank, not payment networks.

What central bank has been disrupted by Bitcoin?

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

#262

Post by chrisseaton »

tekproxy wrote: post #234
throw0101a wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

An address that owns Bitcoins.

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

#263

Post by dodobirdlord »

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…

> Certainly it's also possible that the protocol is updated to be more energy efficient, or another coin reigns supreme.

It’s essentially impossible that the protocol gets updated in any way at all. Even the most trivial of changes like trying to increase the block size went nowhere. Bitcoin has thoroughly fossilized, so I’m immediately skeptical of the intentions of Bitcoin evangelists.

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

#264

Post by samstave »

A big regret; I was offered $2,000 of btc at $9/share... I didnt know what BTC was so I turned it down...

I was offered unlimited shares of APPL at $9 / share I bought some but sold as soon as it hit $100.

I thought "let me borrow $10,000 from the family to borrow $20,000" to buy APPL once the Ipod came out... but I didnt want to bother them...

~regrets

My grandmother was offered 10% of this company - and she threw the letter away and said "nobody is ever going to drink that much coffee....."

The letter was starbucks...

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

#265

Post by pshc »

zionic wrote: post #116
kajumix wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lightning, technically speaking, is garbage. 10k transactions per second ETH2 layer 1 + zk roll-ups providing throughout multiplication threatens VISA.

Sorry, 10k tx/sec on sharded ETH2 sounds really high to me, is that really the goal or a typo?

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

#266

Post by graeme »

dbancajas wrote: post #258
graeme wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fin…

> ndependently 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. Where are all the people holding all the USDT? It seems nobody is complaining. I'm bearish on BTC price right now but can't help thinking someone should have already cracked the USDT wide open. Eventually someone (few brokers) will be left…

Excellent question, why haven’t tether holders lost confidence?

Part of the answer I think is that you can lock up Tether at 12+% interest. So the system encourages withdrawing tethers from the system, at unsustainable savings rates.

https://bitcompare.net/coins/tether/savings-interest-rates

The other part is that it is not easy to directly trade USDT for USD. Kraken is the only place you can do so directly, it is the only place the peg is directly tested. Apart from that to get USD you need to trade to something else, like BTC or ETH, and then sell that for dollars.

The only people likely to have held USDT are also likely to be long crypto, so not surprising they wouldn’t cash out.

The better question is who are selling their BTC/ETH for Tether, and what do they do with the money after? Surely the locked in savings are part of the answer: interest rates on stablecoins are much higher than on BTC/ETH. But I don’t think it is the whole answer.

Presumably enough people don’t question the peg that it can stay afloat for now.

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

#267

Post by jayd16 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #211
Spivak wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they have which is why they keep coming up again. BTC genuinely uses a stupid amount of energy and there isn’t a terribly good reason for it since we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal. It would be necessary if establishing trust was impossible but it isn’t. BTC transaction fees and throughput are still an issue. Off-chain transactions that use the main…

> we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal Who's "we" ? I certainly do need it.

Most people. Almost no one has it so how can we all need it?

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

#268

Post by 3np »

graeme wrote: post #215
matheusmoreira wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

> About 70% of transactions are in USDT

Source? Because this is very far from any data I have.

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

#269

Post by kart23 »

67868018 wrote: post #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 t…

I agree that Bitcoin is never going to be used for payments again. But I still don't know about value store. Its hard to convert back to fiat (without paying taxes) unless you're going completely P2P with cash, which likely isn't feasible for large scale transactions. Is bitcoin's value negatively affected by difficulty cashing out, or am I overthinking it?

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

#270

Post by concreteblock »

qeternity wrote: post #130
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.

Yeah this is trading 101 for anyone who has cut their teeth somewhere decent. I had that drilled into my head. There is no such thing as house money.

Curious, who drilled it into your head? Were you/are you a quant?

I see the 'house money' fallacy all the time (most commonly in the context of 'take out your initial investment').

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