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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

#301

Post by gruez »

graeme wrote: post #266
dbancajas wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

>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.

I'm not convinced. Were these products around a few years ago when people were sounding the alarm bells about tether?

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

tiborsaas wrote: post #257
purple_ferret wrote: post #57

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.

> converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card That's an accounting detail most people won't care about. Perception matters more than technicalities.

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by mlcrypto »

kajumix wrote: post #119
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.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

The amount of economics, philosophy, history, & engineering one must understand to grasp Bitcoin is rare. That's why they say we are lucky to make our wealth in it

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

#305

Post by graeme »

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…

Note: this should have said *bearish on Groupon

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

#306

Post by gruez »

3np wrote: post #275
rawtxapp wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who is 'people' here? 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…

Nitpick, Cash was the “original chain” as the split happened because what became the BCH portion of the network declined to adopt a proposed update Just goes to show it’s not necessarily clear cut what’s considered “original” at every point in time. Canonically, Bitcoin considers the longest chain in terms of accumulative difficulty (roughly translatable to hash power) the “real one

>Nitpick, Cash was the “original chain” as the split happened because what became the BCH portion of the network declined to adopt a proposed update

AFAIK adopting segwit is a soft-fork (existing clients will continue to work, only miners need to update), but raising the block limit is a hard-fork (all clients need to update).

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

#307

Post by rawtxapp »

lambda_obrien wrote: post #271
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…

Yes, it seems like flash loans are super legit... https://www.coindesk.com/the-defi-flash-loan-attack-that-cha...

These attacks also showcase the power that it gives and it will force the ecosystem to become stronger over time which arguably a good thing even though it suffers in the short term.

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

#308

Post by ArchD »

kajumix wrote: post #119
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.

The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.

When people run out of good arguments, they give you tons of weak arguments. What you see and describe is a bullish sign for the thing they are trying to argue against.

It's somewhat pointless to argue with random strangers on the Internet who may or may not appreciate your effort at reasonable discussion. If you believe in your own arguments, put your money where your mouth is and be proven right economically and be the one who quietly owns the last laugh.

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

#309

Post by screye »

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.

What sold me on Bitcoin wasn't the strength of bitcoin itself, but the weakness of gold.

Bitcoin is an incredible store of value (albeit volatile). Being able to store a huge amount of assets in an inflation resilient trust-free resource that can't be faked is incredibly useful.

The other thing that sells me on it is the institutional buy in. At this point, nough rich people are going to lose big if bitcoin doesn't succeed. So, I find it unlikely that politicians and bureaucracy will purposely limit it.

That being said, I wouldn't invest more than 20% of my portfolio into crypto. It is far too volatile to put in anymore than that.

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

#310

Post by Kranar »

chrisseaton wrote: post #262
tekproxy wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a bitcoin account?

An address that owns Bitcoins.

Most BTC is held by an exchange, like Coinbase, Binance, etc... so this statistic is about as meaningful as pointing out that 95% of US dollars are stored at a bank.
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