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Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

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Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#81

Post by teraflop »

sassypants wrote: post #48
lxmorj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, go look up tulips on wikipedia.

Bitcoin has shown predictable, steady growth sustained over a many year period. https://i.imgur.com/kV2IRT5.png Tulips experienced exponential an order of magnitude shift in price during the course of one year in 1637. Unlike tulips, Bitcoin is widely appreciated for its utility. I don't think the comparison is as meaningful as critics would make it out to be. Steady logarithmic growth in valuations is a normal pheno…

> Tulips experienced exponential an order of magnitude shift in price during the course of one year in 1637.

Did you fail to notice that your Bitcoin graph shows several occurrences of order-of-magnitude change over less than one year?

Anything can be made to look "steady" if you plot it on a log scale.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#82

Post by sanswork »

Cyther606 wrote: post #73
sanswork wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's possible to store Bitcoin on sheets of paper The process for making a secure paper wallet is far from convenient and brain wallets are about the worst possible way to store bitcoin and are far from safe and secure. If you're going to get some please do not use a brain wallet.

Numerous wallets make it dead simple to create a paper wallet. With Electrum, you just open the program and it automatically generates 12 words which you can write down on paper or learn by heart. It doesn't get much easier than that, and it's perfectly safe and secure to do.

Dead simple but no more secure than just storing the file encrypted on your computer.

Electrum is great and if you write down the words thats fine. If you try to memorize them without a backup there are a lot of events that can happen in your life that will lead to the total loss of your coins.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#83

Post by sanswork »

dwaltrip wrote: post #79
sanswork wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's possible to store Bitcoin on sheets of paper The process for making a secure paper wallet is far from convenient and brain wallets are about the worst possible way to store bitcoin and are far from safe and secure. If you're going to get some please do not use a brain wallet.

If you know what you are doing, brain wallets are very safe. However, if you don't, you might easily make a disastrous mistake. The casual user should not store coins in a brainwallet, but they can be quite useful.

If you know what you are doing you can get enough entropy that is true but there is still a lot of things that can happy in your life that will affect your memory but not be life ending. In those cases without a backup you'll lose your coins.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#84

Post by pnathan »

napoleond wrote: post #9

This is my favourite article about Bitcoin to date, and properly describes one of the main ideas I wish Bitcoin detractors would come around to. Bitcoin has a lot of problems as a unit of account and as a store of value, but that is not primarily what Satoshi was building ( https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf ). Bitcoin is, and has always been, a medium of exchange first and foremost. It still has some shortcomings in th…

Agreed.

I've generally come around to this idea. I'm not even sure "bitcoin" as the blockchain of today needs to exist. But the distributed blockchain of transactions for financial transfers seems to be a really great idea.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#85

Post by brg444 »

nlh wrote: post #63
brg444 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Bitcoin the Network may ultimately be more valuable than BTC the currency This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Bitcoin. Because each and every Bitcoin function as a sort of "token" that provides access to this payment network, their value is closely tied to the value of the network. For Bitcoin to become an international payment gateway system, liquidity requires every Bitcoin to be worth a lot.

I guess I mean "valuable" in the intrinsic sense, not the financial sense. If, for example, in the model that Stripe outlines, the Bitcoin network ends up powering the Bank-to-Bank side of things (away from the consumer), only a handful of counterparties are going to be involved on the BTC side of things. Millions of consumers may use Stripe/whoever to send $$ to millions of other consumers, but that might all be han…

I understand but I'm afraid you are being misled by the article.

While I believe it is an interesting scenario. I do not envision something like that will happen. The only reason it might is for its "consumer protection" value.

I appreciate that Greg realises some of the promises of Bitcoin but the true value for "billions of people" is not an optimized "clearing house". I expect Bitcoin to scale to a point where the store of value and liquidity concerns are non-existent.

At this point, high-inflation economies will turn to Bitcoin, and not gateways that will convert their already worthless currencies to USD or whatever. This provided value will ultimately catch on over here at which point some will find it largely preferable to hold BTC and not their "normal currency. Hell, some already do.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#86

Post by bduerst »

marincounty wrote: post #74
maaku wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is the typical store of value asset, and the story there is very similar.

Gold has experienced rapid growth since 2008, but historically the growth curve has been flat. I have never heard a competent Financial Advisor recommend gold. But this boom is weird? I wonder if HFT's will be to blame, when we have the crash?

Gold is a good asset to hedge with, because it is typically inversely correlated with the markets. Hence the boom around 2009.

A competent Financial Advisor would calculate correlations between Gold price performance and your portfolio, and use the coefficient to recommend the right amount of gold to buy. Or they just spare you the jargon and do it for you.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#87

Post by rooneel »

Cyther606 wrote: post #72
doctorpangloss wrote: post #64

> First, the resulting ecosystem is technologically open. Open ecosystems have a way of getting better much faster than their closed counterpart. Unless you are specifically in the business of making financial institutions, it would seem that Stripe (and for that matter, nearly every payment provider that a computer can interact with) is open in all the ways that matter to a normal person. > There are a number of cry…

First, Bitcoin resembles MLM / network marketing more than any one traditional financial instrument. Second, that the State would want to allow a free market currency of fixed supply to compete with their own digital currency that can be whimsically inflated and used to fund endless warfare and welfare just doesn't fit the historical record. Never, in the past hundred some odd years, has any competing currency been a…

>Society can't make progress if progress hinges upon the diktates of a corruptible few.

Not being sarcastic here, but come again? Isn't that also the argument _against_ bitcoin? The extension of that argument being: would people rather they get to _elect_ the corruptible few, or that the select few be just that because they are rich (family, etc) (eg. VC's dumping their money into bitcoin).

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#88

Post by natrius »

ceallen wrote: post #78
natrius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transactions are instant unless the sender double spends. Wait ten minutes for anonymous senders. Trust known senders, then blacklist their identity for instant transactions if bad behavior is detected. This is effectively what any merchant who accepts credit cards does today. Credit card transactions look instant, but can be rejected weeks later. If the blockchain is too heavy, why are miners willing to process tran…

Individual transaction fees are being heavily, heavily subsidized by block rewards currently. Just eyeballing the current numbers: ~400 transactions per block, 25 btc reward, ~500 usd / btc gives a transaction cost of 31 dollars each. What happens to fees when mining rewards taper off? Just authoritatively stating "it'll be fixed" blindly pushes these problems into the future.

It'll be fixed. Or something will outcompete Bitcoin. That's what markets do. Blockchain technology has eliminated the barrier to entry to compete on transaction fees.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#89

Post by brg444 »

joelhaus wrote: post #62
jarin wrote: post #30

Taking this a step further, when using it as a pure transport medium, the cryptocurrency itself doesn't matter. It could be Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, 2304293f20983uf2089j2f3coin, or whatever, as long as it's liquid enough to convert back and forth. What we really need is a gateway system that will intelligently convert between your local currency -> the cryptocurrency with the best liquidity/exchange rate -> the d…

Correct. You could also solve the "unit of account" and "store of value" problem by pegging your crypto-currency to the USD, 1:1 exchange. Then you get the advantage of the decentralized transport network and the stability of the dollar (or any other preferred real world currency). It's tends to not be a popular opinion around here (there are probably a few with vested interests), but Bitcoin as a currency is fatally…

Doing what you suggested would very much destroy any value existing in BTC. The USD is not actually a reference in terms of store of value.

It's deflationary property is a feature, not a flaw.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#90

Post by berdario »

> There are a few walled gardens with great payment experiences (the App Store, Amazon)

I'm of a different opinion: Amazon is much stricter than other online merchants, and they don't give you meaningful errors when something goes wrong with your billing. When I was back in europe, I had to rely on a relative's credit card to make a payment, since my debit card was being refused.

Now that I'm travelling in the US, the situation is even worse: they locked my account 2 times already, and they request information that (due to the privacy laws in my home country) can't be easily accessed and returned by my bank.

Apparently there're differences with credit cards, debit cards and atm cards... but as long as you have enough money/credit on your account, I cannot see how the payment process should be different, and no one has been able to explain it to me yet (an interesting blog post about how things can go wrong when paying in person with a card is this one btw: https://blog.flameeyes.eu/2014/04/my-time-abroad-chip-n-pin it deals with "Cardholder Verification Method" which I never even heard of before reading it)

Trying to pay for an order on Lenovo is even worse: they don't accept non-US issued cards (unless it's an american express) and my bank doesn't let me do a wire transfer to the US online (you have to phisically go to their desks and ask for the wire transfer to be sent)

It's mind boggling the amount of manual work and custom e-mails sent back & forth needed for payments. It's almost like being stuck in the early 20th century.

OTOH, the few times that I used bitcoin to pay for something online, the process has been flawless, and due to its utter simplicity I can vaguely understand the whole process of sending money on bitcoin... unlike with systems like banks, paypal and amazon, which are mostly huge black boxes of which I cannot even audit their source code.

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