Live data from Hacker News

Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

wave.com

171–180 of 227 posts

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#171
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all changes when miners pay for their electricity in bitcoin and electricity companies pay their employees in bitcoin, and their employees pay for their rent and groceries in bitcoin, etc. Circular economy.

And pigs might fly.

I'm sure you would have said something similar if I was arguing 2 years ago that publicly traded companies would put bitcoin on their balance sheets and nation states would declare it legal tender and add it to their treasuries.

Year after year for the 13 years of bitcoin's existence, people have been saying ABC will never happen, and then it happens. You're worshiping a god of the gaps that gets smaller and smaller with each passing year, while bitcoin only grows stronger.

You could still be right, and finally after years of defying the haters, bitcoin is on the verge of collapse and its growth and integration into civilization will halt. Historical performance is no guarantee of future results and all that.

But maybe it's just getting started.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#172
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This all changes when miners pay for their electricity in bitcoin and electricity companies pay their employees in bitcoin, and their employees pay for their rent and groceries in bitcoin, etc. Circular economy.

Value is still removed as BTC is added to the ledger without going through an exchange. It only shows up in price when the mined BTC is sold -- regardless whether or not it's converted to fiat or not.

IOW, "BTC printer goes brrr"

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#173
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all changes when miners pay for their electricity in bitcoin and electricity companies pay their employees in bitcoin, and their employees pay for their rent and groceries in bitcoin, etc. Circular economy.

Value is still removed as BTC is added to the ledger without going through an exchange. It only shows up in price when the mined BTC is sold -- regardless whether or not it's converted to fiat or not. IOW, "BTC printer goes brrr"

You do understand that bitcoin's inflation rate is algorithmically defined to halve every 4 years and trend toward 0, right? It's already 1.74% per year an will half to 0.84% in 2024.

https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/7c08d81e119570792648...

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just made a 400 USDC transfer. I payed 1 USDC in fees.

I regularly make 5 digit USD transfers with no fees at all. 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.

and I can't wire USD anywhere because my government confiscates any foreign currency deposits and only authorizes outbound transfer for specific operations of specific companies.

what you have is a financial privilege that you are not aware of.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#175
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And pigs might fly.

I'm sure you would have said something similar if I was arguing 2 years ago that publicly traded companies would put bitcoin on their balance sheets and nation states would declare it legal tender and add it to their treasuries. Year after year for the 13 years of bitcoin's existence, people have been saying ABC will never happen, and then it happens. You're worshiping a god of the gaps that gets smaller and smaller…

Well, you're right about that... human stupidity never ceases to surprise me, so weird things could happen.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#176
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value is still removed as BTC is added to the ledger without going through an exchange. It only shows up in price when the mined BTC is sold -- regardless whether or not it's converted to fiat or not. IOW, "BTC printer goes brrr"

You do understand that bitcoin's inflation rate is algorithmically defined to halve every 4 years and trend toward 0, right? It's already 1.74% per year an will half to 0.84% in 2024. https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/ https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/7c08d81e119570792648...

That's not bitcoin's inflation rate. That's the rate at which bitcoins are printed. Additionally, bitcoins can also be created and destroyed via fractional reserves.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Just like the energy used to pump my heart and charge my brain is expended. Everything worth doing costs energy.

It takes energy to do things, not all of those things are worth doing

True, and I and millions of others have decided that bitcoin mining is worth doing.

Who are you to tell us it's not? Are you going to kill us to stop us from using energy in this way?

When you start talking about policing how people use energy, you start down a very dark path.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite any source for this?

>> With crypto you pay the additional overhead of gas fees, which are often unpredictable and may cost more than the item itself. > Can you cite any source for this? It's common knowledge. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f... https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_...

I think your information is somewhat outdated. For example, paying on USDC using Solana or Avalanche networks

- Fee is less than 10c, less then a debit card

- USDC is backed by US Treasury notes, making it more solid than deposit in a bank

- There is no volatility risk of the cryptocurrency

- USDC follows US court orders for crime and money laundering cases

https://solberginvest.com/blog/how-much-are-solana-fees/

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you recommend against using a modern distributed database? Call me maybe. This is a newer technology and the growing pains have been dramatic. I assume you've followed Jespen? https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen 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…

I'm not sure "struggled to pass" is the right characterisation. The Jepsen tests are part of the MongoDB test suite. They have found some bugs in the past and we have fixed them and incorporated into our test suite. Am I about to say Jepsen will never find another bug in MongoDB? No. But if they do we will fix those as well.

I followed MongoDB and Jespen in detail for years and I think "struggle to pass" is a correct characterization, which I believe even Kyle Kingsbury used it at one point. There was a long stretch where MongoDB treated Kingsbury as an enemy, and simply ignored him, or said he was wrong, then there were some years where they were saying "we dealt with all of the issues that Kingsbury raised" and then Kingsbury would write another blog post saying "Well, I still find these issues." Finally, MongoDB changed gears and decided to work with Kingsbury in a productive way, and then Jespen began to become part of the MongoDB test suite.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#180
post #31

Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them…

> There it is. This is just an article blindly bashing cryptocurrencies. I implore you to ask yourself, what has previously been used to do all the above? That's right. Fiat currencies such as the GBP, USD, and other currencies. Did you read the part after that? It sounds like they might use crypto for other purposes, and that they hope the useful things about it come to overshadow the way it's largely used today.

Which part? The part that I quoted was the last paragraph of the article with only a paragraph of hiring opportunities afterwards, unrelated to the article..
Post reply on HN