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Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

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Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#111

Post by foobarqux »

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…

> Maybe there's some rule out there that no one competes on the basis of transaction fees, and those who do are shut out of the cabal.

Because lowering your price does nothing if your competition can lower theirs just as easily. It's a race to the bottom.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#112

Post by Alex-Galapagos »

Natanael_L wrote: post #98
diegocg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the only thing about bitcoin that actually interests me, how easy is to make payments cutting and pasting some text. But everything else surrounding bitcoin, I don't find it useful at all. I just want/need something like bitcoin, but connected to my €-denominated bank account. I don't want or need an alternative "digital currency" and I find the mere idea of one stupid, I just want to make exchanges with curre…

So you want Ripple, essentially. You should be aware that anything dependent on a small set of entities can fail spectacularly. You never know if they get hacked, bankrupt, sued, raided, etc ...

Ripple is a rip-off. You buy a gift card and the money stays there..

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#113

Post by mbillie1 »

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.

> It doesn't get much easier than that

I think a lot of people would argue that sticking with their current system (banks, fiat currency, etc) is, in fact, much easier than that.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#114

Post by xiphias »

rsp1984 wrote: post #97
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…

Let me ask a dumb question: If money exchange is the main problem that Bitcoin solves, then why isn't the problem of money exchange attacked directly instead, i.e. through some other less volatile classical stores of value like gold or stock? Why is money exchange a problem anyway and why couldn't a classical wire transfer solve the problem? The article doesn't say anything about these things and the underlying princ…

You're not alone: all the people who bought Bitcoin and holding it use Bitcoin mainly as the best store of value in human history. All fiat currencies are being printed like crazy (CHF was an exception, but it changed a few years ago)

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#115

Post by Natanael_L »

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…

No it doesn't resemble MLM more than superficially, because there's no hierarchy or levels of anything of that kind. At worst it is like another bubble in that manner, like tech stock bubbles before it.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#116

Post by wpietri »

xiphias wrote: post #114
rsp1984 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask a dumb question: If money exchange is the main problem that Bitcoin solves, then why isn't the problem of money exchange attacked directly instead, i.e. through some other less volatile classical stores of value like gold or stock? Why is money exchange a problem anyway and why couldn't a classical wire transfer solve the problem? The article doesn't say anything about these things and the underlying princ…

You're not alone: all the people who bought Bitcoin and holding it use Bitcoin mainly as the best store of value in human history. All fiat currencies are being printed like crazy (CHF was an exception, but it changed a few years ago)

Could you explain that? Compared with traditional currencies, Bitcoin's high volatility and unknown long-term risk profile make it look like a terrible store of value to me. (And, for similar reasons, very attractive to speculators.)

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#117

Post by badbaguette »

aeturnum wrote: post #101

>However, Bitcoin has huge potential as a way to transport value. It’s surprisingly difficult to move money today, and the experience of paying for something online is just about the only part of the internet that hasn’t changed dramatically in the past twenty years. Based on my very limited understanding, the difficulty in moving money has nothing to do with technical limitations of money (it's not like we lack the…

The appeal of bitcoin in this respect is that it disrupts the idea of money "being" in a certain place and thus having to "move" across borders. As a worldwide distributed ledger, it's unclear that sending someone bitcoins amounts to a value transfer across borders.

I don't see this as a loophole so much as radical redefinition of what a store of value means. It's clear that whatever future regulations look like, they can't mirror the status quo.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#118

Post by mcs »

marcosdumay wrote: post #108
mcs wrote: post #66

What about a voting system? With little keychains given out with only the voting system having the public key for, and any third party can validate the votes. "Coins", or voting credits can be distributed back to voters without transaction fees.

It has the same problem of every cryptographic (and not cryptographic - see paper) voting system. It's impossible to create a system that assures both a correct result and voter anonymity. Paper assures none, but has quite strong guarantees on both. I'd settle on some system that assures the result, and has good guarantees of anonymity, what one can create with pseudonyms, but at that point it's a political debate, n…

People don't have to share their name to their public key in the blockchain. So the anonymity is about the same as a social security number, and but confirming the identity is much stronger and doesn't need to reveal private information or their private voter's token keychain. Transparency is giving out tokens to known voters, since there is already registration at least in united states elections. What it does give is a strict list of keys that should correlate with registered population.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#119

Post by Bakkot »

aeturnum wrote: post #101

>However, Bitcoin has huge potential as a way to transport value. It’s surprisingly difficult to move money today, and the experience of paying for something online is just about the only part of the internet that hasn’t changed dramatically in the past twenty years. Based on my very limited understanding, the difficulty in moving money has nothing to do with technical limitations of money (it's not like we lack the…

Regulations are only possible because the technology to "transfer dollars electronically", as you say, requires lots of infrastructure and trust - the entire banking system, basically. If I want to send you a dollar electronically, I can't do so without using the banks. And the banks are both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to impose regulations, which they can do by limiting access to their transfer-money services.

But access to the technology to transfer bitcoin does not require infrastructure and trust. I can send you a bitcoin without needing a bank or any other large authority. Moreover, I can do so relatively anonymously, and from anywhere in the world. It is therefore much, much harder to impose restrictions on moving bitcoin than moving USD or other non-digital currencies, because there are no large authorities capable of enforcing those restrictions.

(That is, the government can of course pass laws saying I can't send you bitcoin, or limiting the circumstances in which I could. But the most they can do is punish me if they can catch me - they can't actually stop it. Whereas banks do have the power to actually stop me from sending you USD. [Unless I want to do so physically, which is hard to do in quantity or over any distance.])

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#120

Post by joelhaus »

brg444 wrote: post #89
joelhaus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not proposing doing anything to Bitcoin, it's an idea for controlling the supply of a new crypto-currency.

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

I studied this while getting my economics degree. Methinks you are missing some important behavioral dynamics related to interest rate interactions with consumption and investment.

Here's a lesson from the fed: http://www.philadelphiafed.org/education/teachers/resources/...

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