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The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

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Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#301

Post by kybernetikos »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #183
givemeethekeys wrote: post #9

If I were a bank, I'd stay far away from any non-bitcoin cryptos that I'm not an issuer of. Why would I want to own a coin that someone else is able to freely devalue, in addition to conventional currencies? On the other hand, if I were a bank, bitcoin presents a compelling argument. The supply is finite. Disclaimer: I don't own any crypto or bitcoin.

You're a bank. Three of your regulators (a) Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (b) Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (c) Office of the Comptroller of the Currency release a "Joint Statement on Crypto-Asset Risks to Banking Organizations". It contains the following text: "Based on the agencies current understanding and experience to date, the agencies believe that issuing or holding as principal cryp…

I was about to thank you for an interesting hypothetical, but then I did a quick search.

Here's the link for anyone else who was wondering. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/file...

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#302

Post by brianmcc »

brianmcc wrote: post #239
jamiegreen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never mattered if you live in a country with a stable currency and access to modern financial services. If that is you, you are in a very small minority of the world population. For the rest of the world, there seems to be some value... https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop...

>> you are in a very small minority of the world population Really? So EU, UK, USA, China, Australia, with stable currencies, are a small minority..? Sorry but countries with wild instability are the minority and frankly gold would seem to be a better store of value if that's anyone's concern. Crypto remains speculation i.e. a gamble not a store of value.

Replying to myself to point out: "fluctuations" and "stability" are not mutually exclusive. Largely stable ecosystems do see occasional volatility but remain mostly stable.

UK for example did indeed see a few weeks of high volatility, which mostly stabilised and indeed recovered in large part once the right wing nutjobs were duly defenestrated.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#303

Post by kybernetikos »

tnel77 wrote: post #23
dijit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if I were a bank, bitcoin presents a compelling argument. The supply is finite. Do you think that the most important thing about the value of something is the finite supply of it? Fiat currency is theoretically infinite since we abolished the gold standard, but seems to be compelling. Why would bitcoin be more compelling than gold (a finite store of wealth) or fiat currency (a fluctuating/volatile/infinite store of…

I personally find Bitcoin much easier to send to family than a chunk of gold, and Bitcoin’s block reward results in a far more favorable inflation rate than many currencies. There’s more to money than these two aspects, but they are IMO solid positives for Bitcoin.

You're obviously talking about supply inflation there, because price inflation (the more usual definition of inflation) measured in bitcoin has been about 250% over the last year.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#304

Post by pif »

joyfylbanana wrote: post #227
ozim wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to add perspective that for these cabbies and normal people it was gambling. It was not “get free from the government” it was not about convenience of digital payments or whatever crypto promise was there. For normal people it was get rich quick scheme and that is why advertising was so annoying. I agree with parent comment - in the end it never really mattered for normal people.

Though for many normal people it was also about buying drugs online which could be seen as "get free from the government" kind of thing

If you buy drugs for which you need to hide from your democratic government, then you are not normal people: you are a criminal.

Good riddance!

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#305

Post by monero-xmr »

top_sigrid wrote: post #209
monero-xmr wrote: post #31

3 years ago ETH was $100, today it's $1300, maybe we should all just wait and see before writing the obituary

It baffles me, that the people that are the most cryptocurreny-enthusiast are the ones most likely to confuse the proof for a _usecase_ of a technology with the sheer _price_ development a digital token on a completely volatile market. What your comment says is that more people decided to pump money into a cryptocurrency over (completely biased chosen) x amount of time than people cashing out (if put differently one…

I mean I could list a ton of milestones and use cases and things but on HN few people care about that. The price is an easy way to quantify the value to the market holistically.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#306

Post by tenuousemphasis »

toinewx wrote: post #72
givemeethekeys wrote: post #9

If I were a bank, I'd stay far away from any non-bitcoin cryptos that I'm not an issuer of. Why would I want to own a coin that someone else is able to freely devalue, in addition to conventional currencies? On the other hand, if I were a bank, bitcoin presents a compelling argument. The supply is finite. Disclaimer: I don't own any crypto or bitcoin.

> The supply is finite Until It isn't. Miners will one day decide to hardfork bitcoin to increases the mining rewards, hence increasing the supply. They will of course need to prepare the narrative, and say "it is for the good of bitcoin". It might be in 10 years, or in 50 years. But on a long enough time-scale, you can be sure of one thing: Bitcoin will change, because it's man-made and because it's mutable/forkable…

>Miners will one day decide to hardfork bitcoin to increases the mining rewards, hence increasing the supply.

This line of thinking is a fundamental misunderstanding of who holds the power to change the rules of a system like Bitcoin. It's not the miners, they just enforce the rules. Economic actors are the ones who agree on which rules miners enforce.

That hard fork the miners created? It's worthless, just like every other time miners have tried to change the rules.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#307

Post by ilammy »

aaronwalker wrote: post #178
root_axis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It appears that Bitcoin's main use case is as a long-term store of value If we grant this for the sake of discussion, bitcoin has been capable of this for more than a decade, the masses aren't interested in this, the only thing they like about bitcoin is the fun of gambling which is the mainstream success I referred to in my previous comment. > It will be very helpful to have a currency that anyone can use without…

> the masses aren't interested in this Having a store of value is in fact appealing to the masses, especially those with weak national currencies. We know this because the rates of crypto adoption are highest in developing nations, where national currencies are not as strong. Yes, the possibility of making a lucrative investment is also appealing, and is what's driving most of its current growth, but as BTC settles i…

> they have to store some of it somewhere. This is one of the uses of currencies

Currency is for current things. You don’t store wealth in currency. Even in poor countries wealthy people store wealth in assets, be it real estate, businesses, cars, or cattle. Only poor people store their “wealth” in currencies, because they can’t afford any assets.

> there is no incentive for people to keep pouring money into it, so its value relative to Gold, USD should not increase too much

If there is no incentive to keep pouring money into it — not feeding the miners who maintain security and turning gears of the network — then indeed the value will not increase, but rather rapidly decrease.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#308

Post by paulgb »

kybernetikos wrote: post #300
paulgb wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but the other path I've heard proposed is for miners to force a hard fork to lift supply cap and keep subsidizing the network with inflation. I think that's even less true to bitcoin's original ethos. (I also think it overestimates the power that miners have to unilaterally hard fork and have the community accept it, but so goes)

You're probably right on both counts. Having said that, if the analysis is correct, then it means that users will eventually drive the chain to a place where it's experiencing regular attack. At that point they'll probably not stay around and will look for other options.

Yes, that's essentially the conclusion I've come to as well.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#309

Post by lordfrito »

aaronwalker wrote: post #178
root_axis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It appears that Bitcoin's main use case is as a long-term store of value If we grant this for the sake of discussion, bitcoin has been capable of this for more than a decade, the masses aren't interested in this, the only thing they like about bitcoin is the fun of gambling which is the mainstream success I referred to in my previous comment. > It will be very helpful to have a currency that anyone can use without…

> the masses aren't interested in this Having a store of value is in fact appealing to the masses, especially those with weak national currencies. We know this because the rates of crypto adoption are highest in developing nations, where national currencies are not as strong. Yes, the possibility of making a lucrative investment is also appealing, and is what's driving most of its current growth, but as BTC settles i…

> Having a store of value is in fact appealing to the masses, especially those with weak national currencies.

I think you're being overly generous in your estimation of the thought processes of the masses. All the normies I know that are into bitcoin (or talk about it) aren't into it because of "weak national currencies". The normies are into crypto because of hype and FOMO. "Hey did you hear, you can make a ton of money in bitcoin! What's bitcoin. It's internet computer money". "It's the future!" "Gotta get in early." That kind of nonsense. At best you get a few of the "fuck the government" crowd in the mix.

Normies don't spend one second thinking about the dollar beyond "how can I easily get more of them." When talking about economics they parrot "the Fed sucks" or "Biden destroyed the economy" narratives etc.

They want dollars because dollars lets them purchase everything they need and pay taxes. They're not interested in monetary policy beyond paying lip service.

I have to assume this is pretty universal the world over. People are just trying to survive, and [local_currency] lets them do that. Bankers and fiscal policy setters worry about the stuff you're talking about.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#310

Post by eli »

93po wrote: post #129
eli wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol a compelling argument for what? Like as an investment?

Compelling against the US dollar which is "printed" by the trillions and is constantly losing value based on arbitrary decisions of people with effectively no accountability

I don't even understand what you're arguing for. Accounts at the bank would still be denominated in dollars, right?
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