121–130 of 227 posts
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Yes. I'm excited for the next steps of stable coins. People always ask "What if Tether isn't 100% backed by Dollar?!" The more interesting question is "What if the Dollar is shit?!"
"But Tether's not backed by anything and they can arbitrarily print more of it!!!!" "...do...do you not know how the actual dollar works..."
https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/audited-annual-fi...
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Not saying crypto has failed in all aspects, just in the use case talked about in the blog post. I don't see crypto competing with e.g. Nequi any time soon. The project you mentioned is interesting, but I see it as something much more for the middle and upper classes. I know plenty of crypto enthusiast in those circles. I tried Buda, which is mentioned in the article as partner. It has been the most tedious experienc…
Utterly means “completely and without qualification; absolutely.”
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Give it up. Bcash is worthless. The value is absolutely in the real Bitcoin, BTC. Bcash is and always a scam that only fools fell for.
That wasn't the argument. Self governance of the project was the argument. If it happened once, it can surely happen again.
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Isn't the cost generally substantially higher than 1% if directly using the blockchain [depends on transaction size and urgency/timeliness I suppose]? But yes, you are right there is a competitive pressure/force at work here.
I just made a 400 USDC transfer. I payed 1 USDC in fees.
But that's with fiat, so…
They're also instant (seconds, maybe single digit minutes between banks), but that's because I'm in Europe.
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I've tested the lightning in El Salvador to lightning payments and they work in 4/5 seconds in the merchants that accept them. There's also the local wallet QR codes which I haven't had the opportunity to try yet The volatility is what I like the least. Like one day realizing that the Wendy's hamburger I had for dinner was well timed, because a few hours later Bitcoin's value dropped. In El Salvador we've had an stab…
All true, however, by using the dollar as your primary currency, you are effectively a vassal state of the United States, your currency getting regularly devalued without getting any direct benefit of that devaluation like American citizens get, and also no representation in the government that controls that implicit tax that is currency debasement. I'm not Salvadorian, so it's obviously not my place to say what you…
The nations of Central America have the same options as were available to the nations of Europe. All of Central America and the northern parts of South America were unified under a single government back in 1820. They decided to break apart into many small, weak nations, due to the selfish interests of the different types of agricultural interests being pursued in each area. But they could borrow ideas from the EU. They could reunify. If the whole region was under a single government, they would have much more room to push back against the dominance of the USA. But by itself, El Salvador is always going to have its life shaped by the USA. There is no monetary policy that will change that.
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"Why is this important?" Because without multi-region or multi-AZ durability, Wave could lose balances. For example, in the event of a DC fire. "Why can't they get by with a traditional main server plus some backups with a sync" Because without distributed strict serializability, Wave would also be risking the loss of data back to the last backup. However, I'm assuming here that Wave are running consensus around Post…
Not losing transactions with a database is not exactly terra incognita. > Because without distributed strict serializability Depends what you mean by "distributed". A simple 2-phase commit would do it. Or hell, just a write-ahead log on the application layer. > Postgres just doesn't seem like the best way to get distributed failover safely That may be so. But are you arguing in favour of blockchain? When was the last…
https://www.wcjb.com/2020/08/05/bank-of-america-glitch-accou...
Would you also class going to pay for something and not being able to because the payment network is down as "forgetting your bank balance"? Because those happen even more frequently; the cause being the POS terminal not being able to check your balance, so naievely defaulting it to $0 and giving an error about the network not being available.
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You seem to be vastly overthinking this. People have been building applications (including banking applications) using boring old relational databases for decades without losing data. Single master, replicated to another region. If relational databases were as faulty as you describe, every web app you use would be losing data all the time. Not everything has to be an overthought system design interview question.
Single DB corruption and disk failures are more common than you think. "Single master, replicated to another region." Why do you recommend against using a modern distributed database? Is it that hard to spin up something like CockroachDB? In fact, it wouldn't surprise me that Wave are running CockroachDB as their Postgres foundation under the hood.
Call me maybe. This is a newer technology and the growing pains have been dramatic. I assume you've followed Jespen?
I use MongoDB all the time, for a lot of projects. But I'm also keenly aware of how many years they have struggled to pass the Jespen tests. I can also recall several times engineers from MongoDB have said "We have finally resolved all of the issues raised by Jespen" and then another bug was discovered.
Again, I use MongoDB all the time. But I'm aware it is simpler and safer to use Postgres, for many, many use cases.
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> What happens if I pay for something with a credit card and the vendor fails to deliver? You are paying 2% - 5% premium on the price for this insurance that a credit card company providers. This is what the merchant gets charged in transaction fees and flat fees to get access to Visa/Mastercard network. There are many cases when you do not want to have insurance benefits of credit cardand you would simply take 2% ch…
With crypto you pay the additional overhead of gas fees, which are often unpredictable and may cost more than the item itself.
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Right, value has been removed from BTC and sent to the energy companies mostly.
Exactly, miners are paid in bitcoin but they need to pay the electricity bills with real money. This creates a constant selling pressure that has to be countered with aggressive marketing.
Circular economy.
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"Why is this important?" Because without multi-region or multi-AZ durability, Wave could lose balances. For example, in the event of a DC fire. "Why can't they get by with a traditional main server plus some backups with a sync" Because without distributed strict serializability, Wave would also be risking the loss of data back to the last backup. However, I'm assuming here that Wave are running consensus around Post…
> Because without multi-region or multi-AZ durability, Wave could lose balances. For example, in the event of a DC fire. I think you are making a bunch of assumptions that you haven't written down, so it is hard for me to guess what your assumptions are. In the boring, normal, standard setup that people have been using Postgres for in the last 20 years, data does not get lost so long as you have a main server and a s…
I think the assumption here is that I'm advocating blockchain, which I'm definitely not. Please see my original comment.