Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

stripe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 249 posts

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#121

Post by kaonashi »

badbaguette wrote: post #117
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, the…

Not really a ledger, bitcoin is only an asset, never a liability.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#122

Post by mcs »

mcs wrote: post #118
marcosdumay wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Accountability in the ballots themselves is just as important as accurately tracking the votes.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#123

Post by xiphias »

wpietri wrote: post #116
xiphias wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Volatility should never be important when selecting a store of value. Gold and silver has much volatility compared to USD and hamburger price, still if you sold a cow 5000 years ago in Egypt for silver, you could buy at least 0.1 cows from the same amount of silver today. Silver doesn't lose more than 0.01% of its value/year (still the volatility is much higher than that). It's actually more important to understand why USD and CHF are so bad store of value. The best explanation is by Mike Maloney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#124

Post by badbaguette »

kaonashi wrote: post #121
badbaguette wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

Not really a ledger, bitcoin is only an asset, never a liability.

Point taken, but I think that a long list of all accounts and their balances is essentially a ledger even if those balances are constrained to be positive.

A ledger is almost certainly a better model for thinking about the blockchain than, say, a bunch of people with cash under their mattress.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#125

Post by wpietri »

xiphias wrote: post #123
wpietri wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Volatility should never be important when selecting a store of value. Gold and silver has much volatility compared to USD and hamburger price, still if you sold a cow 5000 years ago in Egypt for silver, you could buy at least 0.1 cows from the same amount of silver today. Silver doesn't lose more than 0.01% of its value/year (still the volatility is much higher than that). It's actually more important to understand w…

Volatility matters a lot for a value store, because the point of storing value is being able to convert back to something you actually value later on. If you put it in something highly volatile relative to whatever you actually care about, you may end up losing a lot of the stored value.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#126

Post by xiphias »

xiphias wrote: post #123
wpietri wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Volatility should never be important when selecting a store of value. Gold and silver has much volatility compared to USD and hamburger price, still if you sold a cow 5000 years ago in Egypt for silver, you could buy at least 0.1 cows from the same amount of silver today. Silver doesn't lose more than 0.01% of its value/year (still the volatility is much higher than that). It's actually more important to understand w…

I can't reply to your comment for some reason, so I reply here.

I bought Bitcoins more than 1 year ago. If you look at Bitcoin in terms of years, and as a long-term store of value, Bitcoin is not volatile: the value is increasing until total adaptation. And I don't know anybody else who bought and held his bitcoins who's complaining :) (I'm not counting people who had Bitcoins held at MtGox, as they didn't have Bitcoins, just IOUs for Bitcoins)

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#127

Post by rockyleal »

mbillie1 wrote: post #113
Cyther606 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are more familiar with the current system, but after you have done it for the first time, you realise that electrum is actually way easier than banks. People just think its harder, but it is not really.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#128

Post by wpietri »

xiphias wrote: post #126
xiphias wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volatility should never be important when selecting a store of value. Gold and silver has much volatility compared to USD and hamburger price, still if you sold a cow 5000 years ago in Egypt for silver, you could buy at least 0.1 cows from the same amount of silver today. Silver doesn't lose more than 0.01% of its value/year (still the volatility is much higher than that). It's actually more important to understand w…

I can't reply to your comment for some reason, so I reply here. I bought Bitcoins more than 1 year ago. If you look at Bitcoin in terms of years, and as a long-term store of value, Bitcoin is not volatile: the value is increasing until total adaptation. And I don't know anybody else who bought and held his bitcoins who's complaining :) (I'm not counting people who had Bitcoins held at MtGox, as they didn't have Bitco…

Bitcoins are way more volatile than gold: http://btcvol.info/

That you bought something and had it go up is great for you, but it does not mean the volatility is low. Indeed, if it went up a lot, it means volatility is high. Volatility is the inverse of stability.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#129

Post by mseebach »

MichaelGG wrote: post #94
mseebach wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With hindsight, sure, but was that really obvious in 1995 when JavaScript shipped? 1995 saw Java's first public release. PHP was a CGI-thingie that powered Rasmus' personal homepage. Tcl and Perl was the state of the art of scripting languages. Ruby was released (it would be another four years before it started getting traction outside Japan). The first edition of O'Reilly's "Programming Python" was published in 1996…

ML and LISPs existed. Surely Scheme in the browser would be a better language and implementable in the 10-day window JS had.

Functional programming is barely mainstream today, it certainly wasn't in 1995. Netscape had enough on their plate convincing people that "the web" is a cool thing and they should be on it without driving a programming paradigm change at the same time.

Seriously, it's 20 years ago. You're operating with extreme hindsight.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#130

Post by nhaehnle »

foobarqux wrote: post #111
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.

It's an interesting thought, isn't it, especially once you realize that it doesn't just apply to transaction fees.
Post reply on HN