Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants

btctimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 530 posts

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

#381

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

notyourwork wrote: post #61
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.

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 for every day purchases is dead, it's averaging over 20 a tx these days and you need to open a LN channel which means maintaining that channel.

Bitcoin has been extremely resistant to any L1 scaling, so that's just the state of things.

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

#382

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

stephen_g wrote: post #373
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.

Well, I mean, bitcoin isn't really decentralised... Not just because most of the circulation is held by a small number of accounts, and not just because most mining is heavily concentrated too. The real centralisation is the development of the client software. As long as that team can keep at least 51% of the network on their software, they can change the rules and control things as much as they want. Past experience…

That's quite a stretch. There are plenty of things beyond their control, like issuing new bitcoins

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

#383

Post by sellyme »

Kranar wrote: post #310
chrisseaton wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of BTC was held by an exchange like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex, too.

With banks I can trust that I can actually get my money bank. BTC isn't decentralised, and the central actors controlling the system are far less reputable (which is saying a lot, when they're being compared to bankers).

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

#384

Post by riffraff »

throwawaysea wrote: post #378
alisonkisk wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is not anonymous. it's pseudonymous at best. It's a public ledger.

Is there an alternative that is fully anonymous?

Monero[0] seems to be aimed at that, but I have no idea if it maintains the promise.

[0] https://www.getmonero.org/

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

#385

Post by lambda_obrien »

rawtxapp wrote: post #307
lambda_obrien wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's one way to look at it, sure. Another is that it's the wild west and normal people will get bankrupt.

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

#386

Post by peteretep »

gruez wrote: post #350
bostonsre wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounded like they required support from the developer community but they didn't have it. Not sure if that support would be needed for a 51% attack, would it?

Depends on the attack you're pulling off. A 51% attack won't allow you to change the coin generation rate (what peteretep was talking about).

Uncle Sam wakes up tomorrow and says:

"Compliance measures on crypto-currency are expensive. We'll be charging a 3% compliance tax on all crypto-currency holdings, and we'll do this via any US-registered crypto-brokers charging a withholding tax unless you can prove it's double-taxation; also any failure to pay this is tax evasion and will be prosecuted as such"

you'll see some hard forks. Also this is a _great_ idea as it increases tax revenue, increases investment in US bonds and stocks, _and_ it suddenly swells the value of US Govt gold reserves.

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

#387

Post by perl4ever »

ALittleLight wrote: post #207
perl4ever wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you believe the marginal utility of currency or wealth is constant and anything else is contrary to "basic economics". Can you explain further, because it sounds weird to me?

I think the idea is you have some amount of "worth" today, denominated in whatever you like. Maybe you have 100k USD in BTC or in cash. If you let your bitcoin ride, that's equivalent, modulo taxes, to buying bitcoin. Or, selling your bitcoin today is equivalent to choosing not to buy. The idea is that you shouldn't think "I already have some bitcoins, may as well let them ride" but instead think "Would it be better…

All else being equal, given that you turned $100 into $100K, you're much more likely to have $100K that you can afford to lose.

Saying that the history of your investing shouldn't impact your choices is saying that your total wealth shouldn't affect your choices.

But if I borrowed $100K against my home and it gets foreclosed and I'm homeless, that's very different from if I gambled $100 and got $100K whose loss will be no worse for me than losing the original $100.

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

#388

Post by perl4ever »

qeternity wrote: post #209
perl4ever wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article I read on how arbitrage vs BTC was possible, despite it not being an ETF. I forget the details, it may have taken like 6 months to do the exchange for regulatory reasons. So professionals were making money while it was >BTC, until they overdid it and the premium went away. It seems reasonable to be patient because there's just a lot of lag in the system as it's currently set up. If you've ever pa…

There’s no arbitrage in the strict sense but basically it’s just a straight convergence trade without a delivery mechanism. Just need funding, which is abundant today.

There's no arbitrage in what sense?

The article I read that called it arbitrage described it like this:

"[Hedge funds] borrow Bitcoin, deposit the coins with GBTC in exchange for shares that are more valuable than the coins they bought, and they pocket that profit by selling the marked-up shares after a six-month lockup period expires."

Unlike an ETF though, the shares can't be destroyed. And suddenly the premium went away, so probably some of the people who were counting on it to remain have quit now.

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

#389

Post by riffraff »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #299
pjc50 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've reached the doubly-cynical conclusion: the critics are right, but it will probably keep climbing in value in the medium term. Actual on-chain transaction volume will remain dwarfed by on-exchange volume. Tether will get clobbered in the next few years. This ought to affect the bitcoin price, but won't.

I think it will continue to increase in value for while, as it continues to plumb the depths of “people who haven’t bought in yet”, but that’s eventually going to cap out, and eventually they’re going to run out of coins to mine, and people will catch on and the value (and interest in it) will fall through the floor.

I partially agree with both of you, but I think the depths of "people who haven’t bought in yet" are larger than generally estimated: we're at an inflection point where corporate financials will start to think "well, we should own some bitcoins too" and there will be a bit of domino effect there as people try to emulate their "betters".

But I think things will crash way before we run out of coins to mine.

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

#390

Post by young_unixer »

Priem19 wrote: post #199
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…

>Also expect a ton of movement to crypto when wealth taxes get implemented to fix economies. They'll use it to hide assets, guaranteed. Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. Disregarding all of bitcoin's shortcomings, a financial instrument that brings out the worst in people—greed—won't change the world for the better. https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html . I used time-travel to uncover thre…

I'll take greed over institutionalized theft any day of the week.
Post reply on HN