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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

#401

Post by Priem19 »

seibelj wrote: post #369
FridgeSeal wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, crypto communities _appear_ (I’d be pleased to be wrong here if anyone has examples) to be filled with people who are absolutely opposed to any kind of economic governance, if it’s not “let the magic hand of the market decide” they’re seemingly not interested.

You have an entire world full of governments and fiat currencies. If they are so superior then there should be no problem with competition from Bitcoin.

“Simply because cancer occurs naturally doesn't mean we shouldn't treat it. In the same vain, sometimes the “free market” just screws up, requiring intervention.” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general are pyramid schemes. They deserve no place in the economy.

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

#402

Post by dehrmann »

gruez wrote: post #296
peteretep wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Ethereum has shown the immutable part is up to developer whim. The “hard limit” is literally a config value.

...assuming you can get consensus. That's harder than you think. On ethereum it might be easy because the creator is still around, but on bitcoin it's very hard. See the whole segwit2x controversy.

At least for Bitcoin, don't miners effectively control consensus? And they're less concerned with you using Bitcoin to store wealth and more concerned with recovering the cost of their single-purpose hardware. Your interests are actually less aligned with the people running than Bitcoin show than with central banks.

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

#403

Post by yigitcakar »

This might be a scheme to increase taxation on bitcoin revenue.

Besides being a revenue source based on volatility and scarcity, bitcoin's real value is being a tax free wealth exchange between people and generations.

Bitcoin has been following internet's, especially start-up scene's trajectory. Like internet, Bitcoin started as a technological adventure and garnered the attention of first movers. Those first movers gained a lot of wealth through bitcoin and general population got interested. The surge in interest created a bubble. We are riding that bubble.

Bank of America's research shows that we passed the monopolization stage. Report mentions "About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts." There might be a burst, and bitcoin might not survive that.

I believe, the NFT and DeFi are projects to keep the bubble going, or create some value after the burst so like internet companies, the bitcoin sector can recover.

In its current situation, I don't believe the bitcoin can recover from a burst, but I would love to hear differing opinions especially from people who understand finance.

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

#404

Post by delaaxe »

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.…

Those are exchange accounts that hold BTC for many people

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

#405

Post by qeternity »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #338
qeternity wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, I understand now. Hopefully Binance and Paxos will start auditing BUSD reserves one day.

Avoiding USDT won’t help you. A tremendous piece of the current BTC price is fueled by USDT because its currently trades at 1:1 with the USD. This then provides the leg to every other stablecoin and fiat currency.

But if you take that away, the whole party stops. Exchanges can’t afford BTC sub $10k anymore. There is no hiding from Tether. They have co-opted the system.

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

#406

Post by twelve40 »

vmh1928 wrote: post #319
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean for exchanges like coinbase? Will they lose out new customers to visa?

Exchanges like Coinbase could function like your bank and checking account you use to pay the Visa bill today. Your bill for last month is $2500 or 2500 euros, you'd like to pay with a bitcoin from your account at Coinbase. Visa calculates the exchange rate at that moment and sends a debit request to Coinbase for xxx fractions of a Bitcoin to be transferred from your wallet/account to Visa's wallet. It's a way for Vi…

so i used to go to a bank, show my ID, open an account, wait for a bunch of random restrictions on Zelle limits to pass, ACH payments to go through for many days, and other crap to settle.

Now it's the same exact routine through Coinbase. Upload my ID, wait for them to allow me to actually move amounts more than a kid's lunch money, wait for days on end to withdraw, etc etc.

And in the end some of these payments in both flows are handled by Visa. I'm missing the "wow" part of this deal.

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

#407

Post by DJBunnies »

dencodev wrote: post #69

Not sure if this was the first year for tax returns to have it, but I was asked to document every single time I spent bitcoin to purchase something. Because you have to pay capital gains on the value above when you bought it. I wonder if this is true here but either way it's a massive pain in the ass.

Cryptotrader.tax automates it, fwiw.

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

#408

Post by DJBunnies »

gervwyk wrote: post #58
k1rcher wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is super interesting, thanks for sharing. Cryptocurrencies and alt coins are a dime a dozen these days and it is incredibly difficult to filter through the noise.

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve tracked these guys from the start. Really solid concept behind it and the founder make a really strong commitment from the start to say that if its a currency the only thing that matters is the number of daily transactions. Which is really true if you consider the value of a currency related to the value of the network. unfortunately they really hit a speedbump with the long ongoing SEC case…

No erc20 token will gain any significant traction.

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

#409

Post by Aunche »

strgcmc wrote: post #379
Aunche wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from its industrial applications, it's dense, rare, chemically stable, and very easy to recognize. These are all qualities that make for a good store of value. You can't replace gold with any other element.

By this argument, you'd think we'd still be using CDs and Walkmans, instead of moving to mp3s and iPods/iPhones. Gold will have its place as an analog store of value. But you are simply missing the point about how to evaluate a digital store of value. Think about which digital properties a digital store of value would need to have, since concepts like density and chemical stability are literally useless to evaluate a…

Gold has obvious aesthetic and industrial uses, but as a store of value, its utility is very low to begin with. The only use for storing gold is that it could be used as an emergency medium of exchange in the event of a global economic collapse. Meanwhile, even if you had stable internet access, by some miracle, very few people would have enough spare energy to mine for blocks for Bitcoin transactions.

Outside of this extreme case, a currency is much better store of value because it comes with the bonus of liquidity. Sure fiat currency may lose its value to inflation, and Bitcoin may rise 50x, but that's actually a benefit of fiat.

Money is really just a credit for your contributions to society that society now owes back to you. The value of your contribution to society decays over time, so it makes sense that the value of your money should do so as well. You're now incentivized to "rent out" the credit society owes back to you to someone who needs it more than you, for example, a young family buying their first house. This is in essence what a loan is.

Had your money/store of value been sitting idly, it wouldn't be able to help anyone. This is the problem with Bitcoin. Loans and investment become extremely risky. It's impossible for everyone to pay back interest successfully when there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, so instead people are incentivized to hoard them. In a broader sense, by "holding value," you're holding back societal contributions for the future when these contributions could reap benefits right now. That's not something anyone should be rewarded for.

Given that storing value is a net negative for society, there's the question of where the additional value of Bitcoin is coming from. Part of it was due to the devaluation of the dollar, but that can't explain all of it. Maybe it has some unrealized potential to become a currency outside of government control, but that's something that was rejected in the original comment I replied to. This means that the value of Bitcoin is being leeched from outside. I think that people will collectively realize this, which will cause Bitcoin to crash.

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

#410

Post by gervwyk »

DJBunnies wrote: post #408
gervwyk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve tracked these guys from the start. Really solid concept behind it and the founder make a really strong commitment from the start to say that if its a currency the only thing that matters is the number of daily transactions. Which is really true if you consider the value of a currency related to the value of the network. unfortunately they really hit a speedbump with the long ongoing SEC case…

No erc20 token will gain any significant traction.

But it is not a erc20 token. They began with on erc20, then switched to Stellar, now on Solana.

2 switches has caused considerable issues for users. But seems like thing are stabilising now.

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