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Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

stripe.com

61–70 of 146 posts

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#61
post #51

As companies continually erode employee benefits and aggressively seek out ever cheaper labor, we have to continually be reminded how innovative and great this "massive shift enabled in large part by new technology" is going to be. Now you're going to get paid in unregulated tokens, isn't that amazing! And guess what? Not using actual money also let's them access "millions of talented freelancers live in countries wh…

Is your solution to keep the walled garden systems we currently have that benefit proportionally very few people on earth? Why not give the rest of the world access to the tools for economical freedom too?

And please let's not even debate if they work or not yet, I am more interested in the reasoning behind preserving the current status quo where billions of people literally cannot access these tools.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#62
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Issued by Coinbase. It is owned by whoever has it. They are also easily and instantly (and perhaps most importantly permissionlessly) exchangeable to hundreds of other tokens thanks to DeFi swap smart contracts.

USDC is not permissionless. Coinbase froze all USDC in Tornado on the Ethereum blockchain, for examaple.

That's after the fact. Anyone can use and trade in USDC without being whitelisted.

You can receive payments in USDC and immediately exchange them for other safer tokens if you wish, and if you use a fresh address each time, nobody can stop you.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#63
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Issued by Coinbase. It is owned by whoever has it. They are also easily and instantly (and perhaps most importantly permissionlessly) exchangeable to hundreds of other tokens thanks to DeFi swap smart contracts.

Issued by Circle

[deleted]

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#64
post #55
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Binance P2P. You can transfer crypto directly into local currency. It uses local residents as liquidity providers.

Yep that's it. I just didn't want it to look like I was shilling something in the comments :) Locally, Binance P2P is used a lot for remittances, and plenty of establishments use it as a way to receive payments as well. I've seen the Binance QR code in a bunch of restaurants and autoparts stores, for example I used it earlier this year to send money to my sister in Argentina. Super fast, no fuss.

Just to balance this, Bisq is a decentralized alternative P2P marketplace (based on Bitcoin mainly) which will keep working even in adverse conditions, where a centralized company like Binance will generally restrict/stop their activity if a government shows their teeth.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#66
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USDC is not permissionless. Coinbase froze all USDC in Tornado on the Ethereum blockchain, for examaple.

That's after the fact. Anyone can use and trade in USDC without being whitelisted. You can receive payments in USDC and immediately exchange them for other safer tokens if you wish, and if you use a fresh address each time, nobody can stop you.

That doesn't make it permissionless. The parent is right. USDC is closer to an IOU than a permissionless ERC20 token because the contract it uses has been modified for the centralized blacklist functionality and can lock you out any time.

It's the same as a centralized bank. If you get your salary deposited you can also go and take out cash immediately, but until you do, you don't truly own the par value.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USDC is a completely centralised 'stablecoin' and has a blacklist function which means they can seize funds of people who they don't like. USDC again is not even regulated as I said with no proof backing this other than 'attestations' which is not a full audit of reserves. How is this decentralised money that was promised by crypto and blockchain? You may very well use Wise, Moneygram and other regulated alternatives…

This is partly incorrect -- USDC is regulated and audited. You're confusing it with Tether https://www.circle.com/blog/how-to-build-trust-usdc-audits-a...

No. I am talking about all stabletokens including USDC.

I don't see any fully independent verifiable real audit of their entire reserves anywhere with USDC, and a lousy blogpost by Circle isn't strong enough evidence and no substitute of this.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Stripe and USDC you don't have control of your money at all and smart contracts don't work and are broken causing people to lose money in the millions. It is a fragile, brittle system that is highly likely to fail, you only need to look here to see why. [0] [0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

> smart contracts don't work and are broken This absolute statement is asserting that ALL smart contracts don't work. There is overwhelming evidence of some smart contracts working just fine, and of course a lot of smart contracts also have problems. It is wild to just drop all of the nuance of such a complicated issue. What new technology has been flawless without any failures along the way?

This 'flawless argument' is an irrelevant statement, we have given blockchain technologies over 15 years to improve, but the scams have been getting bigger in an unregulated environment.

I also don't recall any regulated bank accounts getting automatically drained or losing everybody's money due to a single scammer or a bad actor.

One single error or exploit in these smart contracts results in millions being drained. This happens on a weekly basis with a giant lack of consumer protection, unaccountability or any chance of getting your money back (which that is a huge unsolved problem). So yes, these smart contracts do not work.

It's a system designed to fail with thousands of disasters, rug pulls and scams just waiting to happen.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#69
post #51

As companies continually erode employee benefits and aggressively seek out ever cheaper labor, we have to continually be reminded how innovative and great this "massive shift enabled in large part by new technology" is going to be. Now you're going to get paid in unregulated tokens, isn't that amazing! And guess what? Not using actual money also let's them access "millions of talented freelancers live in countries wh…

A lot of the world does get paid in unregulated "tokens" though. That's literally what the eurodollar system is. A US dollar abroad is not equivalent to a US dollar in the US. US banking regulations do not apply to those dollars. Hence, they even have different interest rates!

But you're absolutely right that this is a mechanism by which they can expand the labor pool for digital work.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#70

It is a massive mistake that Stripe is offering anything in the crypto space as everyone and Stripe knows it is full of fraud, money laundering, scams and it is completely unregulated. I look forward to the day that Stripe will get investigated for all of the above with this and end up like Paypal, eventually freezing or banning these accounts. Crypto does not offer anything new at all. EDIT: It seems Stripe and Cryp…

> EDIT: It seems Stripe and Crypto apologists have downvoted & flagged my comment since Stripe is somehow a HN / YC darling that is immune from valid criticism even if they venture into crypto scamming, with no usecase that is better than the current financial system. > It is a massive mistake that Stripe is offering anything in the crypto space as everyone and Stripe knows it is full of fraud, money laundering, scam…

At least cash is accepted everywhere in domestic countries, and even it's online it's card. Crypto isn't widely accepted or even used as a form of payment in the real world and has no useful legitimate usecase. We don't need more unregulated tokens that have no intrinsic value other than speculation, gambling and fraud.

Sure we have issues in the current financial system, but augmenting (and dare I say) replacing it with an entirely worse unregulated system which loses people money through scams, increases and emboldens ransomware and exposes people to huge volatility is not the way to go.

> The argument is engaging in "everything is X" talk by blanketing an entire space as only engaging in negative impacts.

The negative impacts are FAR greater than the positive impacts of crypto.

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