Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#131

Post by matheusmoreira » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

foepys wrote: post #106

itake wrote: post #18

I used https://electrum.org/ for accepting btc payments and it worked fine. The bigger issues I had that I am skeptical any self-hosted options have is protecting your wallets from being poisoned by 'black' bitcoin. Coinbase (and maybe others?) keeps a blacklist of banned wallets (stolen or associated with crime or gambling[0]). If a customer pays you from a black address, you may end up poisoning your entire crypto…

Is this for real? Do merchants really rely on some opaque third-party service to determine which accounts are able to pay? Is this third-party able to essentially blacklist aka unbank accounts at their will, without a legal appeal process? How can a system that supports this be considered better than USD or EUR?

> Is this for real?

Yes. Bitcoins are not fungible. If they've been tainted by criminal transactions, they might as well be worthless.

There are better coins out there that do not have this problem. Monero, for example.

> Do merchants really rely on some opaque third-party service to determine which accounts are able to pay?

Not if they use Monero where transaction details are simply not made public. Even if they managed to blacklist some Monero addresses, it wouldn't matter since you can just make more addresses.

> Is this third-party able to essentially blacklist aka unbank accounts at their will, without a legal appeal process?

Yeah. The US treasury will place some address into a database and everyone holding bitcoins that passed through that address will instantly be made poorer.

https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt

Monero is apparently able to subvert these sanctions. The link above also shows the US treasury failing to sanction a Monero address.

> Digital Currency Address - XMR 5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320;

Note the lack of a 0x prefix. That's not a wallet. It's a transaction identifier. Here's the transaction on a block explorer:

https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207...

Pretty awesome.

> How can a system that supports this be considered better than USD or EUR?

It can't. Bitcoin is a failure. The fact it's still number one in the market is proof of how irrational it is.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#132

Post by defaultprimate » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

Geee wrote: post #125

q1w2 wrote: post #93

I don't have a recommendation - I just want to make you aware of a major issue other stores have... > We do not intend to convert to traditional currency unless needed. This is a big risk due to cash flows. Most stores operate on a margin on merchandise that is under 10%, with a turnover on goods averaging months. If a currency fluctuates in value more than ~10% over several months, this can easily drive an otherwise…

This is also a problem when you're operating with inflationary currencies, and that's why bitcoin might be better, despite its high volatility. Bitcoin is volatile in short-term, but long-term deflationary. Fiat currencies are stable in short-term, but long-term inflationary. It's a trade-off, and it depends on your circumstances which allocation works for you.

>but long-term deflationary

Past performance is not indicative of future performance.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#133

Post by matheusmoreira » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #118

itake wrote: post #18

I used https://electrum.org/ for accepting btc payments and it worked fine. The bigger issues I had that I am skeptical any self-hosted options have is protecting your wallets from being poisoned by 'black' bitcoin. Coinbase (and maybe others?) keeps a blacklist of banned wallets (stolen or associated with crime or gambling[0]). If a customer pays you from a black address, you may end up poisoning your entire crypto…

> poisoning Did something apocalyptic happen to the many coin mixing services around?

Yes. They don't work. The fact you used them at all is used as evidence against you. If your coins ever touch a mixing service, exchanges will assume you're a money launderer and refuse your coins. You can't cash out.

Privacy cannot ever be optional. If it is, most people will not take that option simply because it's not the default. Then everyone who does will stand out.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#134

Post by Geee » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

hda2 wrote: post #55

itake wrote: post #18

I used https://electrum.org/ for accepting btc payments and it worked fine. The bigger issues I had that I am skeptical any self-hosted options have is protecting your wallets from being poisoned by 'black' bitcoin. Coinbase (and maybe others?) keeps a blacklist of banned wallets (stolen or associated with crime or gambling[0]). If a customer pays you from a black address, you may end up poisoning your entire crypto…

> poisoned by 'black' bitcoin. Can you expand further on this? Is there a public list of blacklisted addresses we can download/query? How far does the association extend for an address to be blacklisted by other entities?

Some exchanges have been known to blacklist addresses, because they might have to follow certain AML/ATF orders. That's also why they don't accept completely anonymous cryptocurrencies like Monero at all.

Legitimate merchants and users in bitcoin ecosystem should push back against overreaching censorship, and treat bitcoins as fungible commodity. Merchants and users shouldn't start censoring transactions themselves. If there's a problem at an exchange, it should be boycotted and forced out of business.

Also, if you're using Bitcoin with Lightning Network only, it's not possible to become associated with blacklisted addresses.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#135

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #131

foepys wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this for real? Do merchants really rely on some opaque third-party service to determine which accounts are able to pay? Is this third-party able to essentially blacklist aka unbank accounts at their will, without a legal appeal process? How can a system that supports this be considered better than USD or EUR?

> Is this for real? Yes. Bitcoins are not fungible. If they've been tainted by criminal transactions, they might as well be worthless. There are better coins out there that do not have this problem. Monero, for example. > Do merchants really rely on some opaque third-party service to determine which accounts are able to pay? Not if they use Monero where transaction details are simply not made public. Even if they man…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#136

Post by lottin » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

KoftaBob wrote: post #71

wmf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a currency. Gold has existed forever but you won't find point of sale systems with good support for gold coins either.

Bitcoin may be largely used as a store of value like gold, but that's not what it was designed for. It's designed to be a currency.

Gold is not used a store of value, and neither is bitcoin. Both are investments. The question is whether they are good investments or not.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#137

Post by lottin » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

tiku wrote: post #78

Geee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't easier to accept any other currency online.

Exactly, you always got to have a middle man party. Bitcoin/Crypto is the only way that you can cut out that middleman, because you can directly view the blockchain for confirmations etc.

Who do you think appends your transaction to the blockchain? A middleman.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#138

Post by tcgv » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

robcohen wrote: post #33

tcgv wrote: post #29

Most comments suggest using BTC in various ways, as usual. I'm curious as to why hasn't a stablecoin been adoptet/gained mainstream traction for this use case yet? They seem like a perfect fit for making digital payments while preventing exposure to crypto volatility.

They are the perfect application, the problem is that they are generally expensive to use (see ethereum fees). There are efforts to get smart contracts working in Bitcoin, but we’re waiting for full implementation of taproot for most of that to be feasible. Stellar USDC is cheap to use, but Stellar seems pretty centralized to me, so there’s that issue. Another problem is that you need to convert USDC to USD, which is…

Good point, ethereum fees are a deal breaker.

At least with regards to the fees problem we now have side chains that make really cheap to send/receive stablecoins (USDC, USDT, DAI, etc).

You can currently transact stablecoins on Polygon paying one tenth of a penny in fees [1], and there's more than US$ 1bi in stablecoin supply already being transacted there (US$ 700mi for USDC alone).

[1] https://polygonscan.com/tx/0xc260342a31648108f88e3cb5afe740a...

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#139

Post by Geee » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

KoftaBob wrote: post #71

wmf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a currency. Gold has existed forever but you won't find point of sale systems with good support for gold coins either.

Bitcoin may be largely used as a store of value like gold, but that's not what it was designed for. It's designed to be a currency.

It's designed to be money. Store of value is the most important property of money. In this, bitcoin is very similar to gold. Another one is to be medium of exchange, which bitcoin does better than gold, and thus can avoid the centralization failure that happened to gold.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#140

Post by lottin » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 7:09 PM UTC

smabie wrote: post #36

__d wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "perfect fit for making digital payments while preventing exposure to crypto volatility" is ummm ... fiat with Visa/Mastercard? Which is exactly why no cryptocurrency has gained mainstream traction: it's solving a "problem" that doesn't exist for most people, and doing so in a way that introduces new problems.

traditional payment processors wield undo influence and control over businesses: just look at the past onlyfans drama. Moving away from a duopoly that censors legal businesses it doesn't like is definitely valuable, and also something a stable coin could facilitate. Moving money around onchain is orders of magnitudes easier than using the tradfi systems. Most crypto firms (trading firms, VCs, protocols, etc) are excl…

Using bitcoin as currency makes no economic sense. In the same way that using a foreign currency in your own country makes no economic sense. That's because using any other currency other that the local currency incurs transaction costs (not to be confused with transaction fees) that could be avoided by using the local currency. So people who use bitcoin as currency tend to do it for ideological reasons or to prove that it can be done. There's nothing practical or economically advantageous about it.