Crypto is very popular among people working in rich countries who send remittances back to their families in other countries. That's a legitimate use, a very popular use, and is obviously what Stripe is going for here.
Coinbase closed their remittance project due to absolutely minuscule usage. Like a couple thousand of dollars a month or value being transferred. If the biggest player in the crypto space can’t get enough users, I’m doubting any real adoption.
This is good but I wish it wasn’t specific to Braintrust. Have been in crypto for a while and have never heard of Braintrust or their token. Freelancers should just be paid directly in a ERC20, Stripe could take a small fee on transfers for their UX and API services, no need for a DAO or separate BTRST token.
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…
If people prefer unregulated tokens over government managed tokens I don't see the problem.
I am more worried about excessive tax complexity that getting paid in a foreign currency brings.
This is good but I wish it wasn’t specific to Braintrust. Have been in crypto for a while and have never heard of Braintrust or their token. Freelancers should just be paid directly in a ERC20, Stripe could take a small fee on transfers for their UX and API services, no need for a DAO or separate BTRST token.
We were evaluating ETH payouts for Finclout and at the time transaction fees was a huge barrier. We are currently working with the Cardano chain because it allows for a min payout of 1 ADA which makes users happy when they get payouts more frequently and us happy because fees are low.
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…
Crypto is very popular among people working in rich countries who send remittances back to their families in other countries. That's a legitimate use, a very popular use, and is obviously what Stripe is going for here.
Isn't that what Western Union is doing, rather well and gobally?
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?
Those things are neither smart nor contracts.
They are just pieces of code in esoteric programming languages running on world's slowest VMs. They encode primitive trivial rulesets and are still so complex that their own authors fail to see trivial errors even after multiple audits.
An actual real world contract such as buying or selling property (which I've done several times now) would be a beast of such byzantine proportions that it would take until the heat death of the universe to write and audit it. And it would still be unenforceable after that.
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…
From what I understand from past discussions on HN, it is legitimately hard and convoluted to pay remote workers in Africa for example.
Your bank might just not want to do it, or make it complicated.
I recall Nigerians and Ethiopians mentioning how cryptocurrencies have allowed them to more easily work with western clients or employers.
Kainda sad how all else is either hard to use or skimms too much off the top.
This is good but I wish it wasn’t specific to Braintrust. Have been in crypto for a while and have never heard of Braintrust or their token. Freelancers should just be paid directly in a ERC20, Stripe could take a small fee on transfers for their UX and API services, no need for a DAO or separate BTRST token.
We were evaluating ETH payouts for Finclout and at the time transaction fees was a huge barrier. We are currently working with the Cardano chain because it allows for a min payout of 1 ADA which makes users happy when they get payouts more frequently and us happy because fees are low.
Personally feel that a better solution long term is Ethereum L2 payouts.
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.
Just don't forget that capital works in the interests of capitalists above all. It's not because they suddenly started caring about all the countries they previously ignored. Today Braintrust is a democratizing force enabling talent to earn from anywhere, yay! Tomorrow everyone is going to be competing with the absolute cheapest labor globally and NA will be earning avg(NA, Africa) salary while paying NA rents. Uber'…
Right but in this case, Braintrust's governance is based on token holders, the talent who actually put their work up on the platform. Braintrust is paid for via a 10% fee on client success. This is a relationship where labor ownership is baked into the platform.
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.
First, a Eurodollar is a USD that is deposited outside of the US. As such it's interchangeable and indistinguishable from a USD. US banking regulations don't apply to these dollars? Well, of course, because US banking regulation only apply in the banks in the US. Banks that are located outside of the US are subject to whatever regulation is in place in the location that they're at. Does that mean that Eurodollars are…
Because eurodollars have fewer regulations (for good and for bad, such as FDIC reserve requirements) around them, eurodollar deposits can generate higher interest rates than equivalent USD-denominated deposits. Saying a eurodollar is identical to a USD is a stretch as regulatory regimes, and as such risk, are different between them.