281–290 of 561 posts
I think anyone who has dealt with SWIFT transfers into higher-risk jurisdictions is thankful for stablecoins.(Also you save a ton in fees)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes — there’s fees converting from/to fiat and when sending the crypto. You’ll generally have the conversion slippage and transaction fee regardless - so the difference is the second conversion. In practice, that isn’t too expensive and worth it for the speed; though that may change if you’re sending larger or smaller amounts than I am (in $1k-10k range). Edit: Replying by edit due to rate limits — but subcontracting…
I’m curious - under what circumstances are you exchanging $1k-$10k with friends internationally?
Two things can be true at the same time: - Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out. - Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he ca…
yay?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a service like Wise which is cheap and takes a few minutes most of the time. Never had much of a need for other services when transferring across the globe.
I suspect parent is using "a service like Wise" even though they believe they're using Crypto. That's because for an end to end transaction to complete in under 10 minutes it has to be performed by an exchange (not actually settled on chain). There are many cases like this where the "crypto" part is just theater. Money is being moved the tradition way by altering records in a non-distributed database.
But it could also be theater, yeah. A friend of mine buys USDT on a P2P exchange and immediately sells it (so, sends money to a stranger’s bank account and then gets paid by another stranger). It could just as well be some e-wallet thing like WebMoney or whatever, but the fact that you can move USDT to your own wallet instead of immediately selling it makes it a bit more reassuring I guess.
I do agree that there's a huge amount of fraud and scams, and obviously that's only got worse since the President of the US started being part of that ecosystem. But at the same time there is also finally real finance happening on-chain too. Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage. I think Coinbase announced their on-chain equity offering will have the same capabi…
> Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage What is the actual societal value of this? Do you seriously believe that such a token helps price discovery?
Two things can be true at the same time: - Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out. - Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he ca…
You are forgetting Ethereum which is the defacto main standard and driver in the "crypto industry". Most of those chains are in fact EVM based (so outside of Bitcoin, XRP or Solana). The people in and around the Ethereum Foundation are solving very interesting problems but nobody talk about it on HN. For example I believe they are at the forefront of the use zero-knowledge proofs. Just dig into [0]. Is the Ethereum F…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say. Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believe…
"but as long as we all believe it has value, it does". Would one argue that an airplane is a _story_ ? If no one believed in the technology and lost faith in all pilots no one would fly. But that doesn't change the reality of the technology and competence of the pilots. I get the sentiment, but I am not sure _story_ is the right word.
Currency OTOH is basically a (forgery-proof) piece of paper with a number written on it, or even just a number in a database on some (hopefully well-protected) server. So it can only be used to buy stuff as long as we all agree that it's worth something. Of course, it helps if a government and/or a central bank is behind it, but even without a functioning government, a currency can limp on for decades, such as in Somalia, where the last banknotes were printed in 1991, but people still used them as the lowest "rung" of a three-tier system consisting of the Somali shilling, the US dollar and mobile phone payments, until recently when businesses sort of agreed to not accept them anymore (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/11/poorest-somali...).
> A defender will say that gold is no different, a price that refers only to itself, and that we do not call gold a fraud; but gold carries a floor of industrial demand and a monetary role thousands of years old, and Bitcoin has neither. I'm always interested to see how anti-crypto people try to differentiate gold from crypto, and so far I've never seen anything convincing. Gold's industrial utility as a good electri…