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Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

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Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#181

Post by baddox »

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…

> Does bitcoin only offer a "reset" button for regulation?

Even if that was the case, that would already be pretty awesome.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#182

Post by lifeisstillgood »

lambda wrote: post #166
megablast wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer to basically all of your questions is that to transfer money, you need to move money. Is that true? I everyone around the world is moving money around, then most trades can be covered by not moving any money around, just between people in the same country. If I want to move $1000 to France, and someone else wants $1000 from France, we just swap money, and two people in France do the same. What is left is…

> What is left is keeping track what everyone has put in, and what they have taken out. And that's exactly what Bitcoin is; a secure digital ledger. It's a way to securely and globally record "person A has 10 BTC, gave person B 5BTC, then person B gave persone C 3 BTC" in a way that doesn't allow person A to simultanously have given those same 5 BTC to person D (who, given the anonymity of the internet, may also be p…

So is that not an impressive solution - if Alice wants to move 100 USD to France and Bob wants to move 100 USD out of France (let's say both want to buy a new textbook) then one could envisage a peer to peer money transfer system.

A site allows bob and Alice to find each other, agree a shared amount to transfer, agree to which end point they will onwards transfers (hmmm this might be the breakdown point) and then record that in the block chain

I think oddly there is still an enormous amount of trust involved - trust that Alice will complete the final important step of giving the money to Bobs silver haired grandmother or whatever

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#183

Post by XorNot »

elithrar wrote: post #172
XorNot wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absurd. I spend money by wire transfer all the time. A good 80% or so of my ebay shopping would be wore transfers to merchants in Hong Kong via Paypal. This is a big enough issue in Australia that we've had retailer associations complain about it on occasion. Overseas money transfer is not at all difficult on a consumer level.

> This is absurd. I spend money by wire transfer all the time. A good 80% or so of my ebay shopping would be wore transfers to merchants in Hong Kong via Paypal. It's worth noting that EFTs (Electronic Funds Transfers) between domestic banks in Australia is nearly always free, and that in your case you're not transferring money overseas at all. You are transferring money to PayPal Australia, who is then communicating…

This is the exact same thing involved in Bitcoin funds transfer.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#184

Post by sassypants »

bottled_poe wrote: post #175
sassypants wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been meaning to build a chart to evaluate this. The question would be: What are the longest periods of time one could have held Bitcoin and lost money? And secondarily, how frequent were the opportunities to have lost money? My ballpark guess would be that the longest you might have held Bitcoin at a loss were if you purchased during a few day span during the peak of 2011. You would have had to have held for alm…

If I understand you correctly, your estimate is way off. Have a look at the bitstamp exchange rate for the last 8 months. Looks like around 40% of days closed at a price above the current price.

In my example I was using a 1 year horizon. So none of those closing prices would be charted until they had a year to mature.

I think I would need to make a slider so that you could explore the concept at various time horizons -- 8 months might bring a 50% occurrence of profit.

But my expectation is that at 1 year 95% of investments are sound, while at 2 years it would be 100%.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#185

Post by ncallaway »

XorNot wrote: post #183
elithrar wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is absurd. I spend money by wire transfer all the time. A good 80% or so of my ebay shopping would be wore transfers to merchants in Hong Kong via Paypal. It's worth noting that EFTs (Electronic Funds Transfers) between domestic banks in Australia is nearly always free, and that in your case you're not transferring money overseas at all. You are transferring money to PayPal Australia, who is then communicating…

This is the exact same thing involved in Bitcoin funds transfer.

The article explicitly notes that PayPal is offering a very similar service. They argue that the open nature of Bitcoin is a competitive advantage to the network in the long run.

From the article: "This would not, of course, be the first global payments network. One obvious comparison is with PayPal. The fundamental advantage a Bitcoin gateway ecosystem has over PayPal is that it’s open".

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#186

Post by sassypants »

boucher wrote: post #169
sassypants wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would it stop sooner than a $200 billion market capitalization? Or $700 billion for that matter? When Facebook was raising money at $10 billion valuations would it be wise to predict that it had to "stop very soon"? I don't disagree that Bitcoin will at some point stop revaluing upwards by orders of magnitude, and I don't pretend to know what the market cap will be in a few years time. But I don't think it wo…

When Webvan was raising money valued at $1 billion would it have been wise to predict that it would "stop very soon"? Anecdotes are not market principles.

But that's my point. Arbritrarily declarations that exponential growth must stop soon are not meaningful in the positive or negative.

There are reasonable methods, however, to estimate likely outcomes of successful growth. I think its reasonable to predict that Bitcoin is likely to reach valuations of large publicly traded corporations. There are those that estimate it reaching valuations similar to gold, or the GDPs of industrialized nations.

But saying that the growth must stop because growth must stop isn't really saying much at all.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#187

Post by sanswork »

baddox wrote: post #179
mbillie1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I had to physically go to a bank and talk to people to set up my bank account. I don't see how that can be considered more convenient than spending 5 minutes on a website.

How does spending 5 minutes on a website get you bitcoin without having already gone to a bank and talked to people?

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#188

Post by Natanael_L »

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…

Not impossible, actually! Heard of Secure Multiparty Computation?

http://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/r003r/are_others_int...

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#189

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Classical wire transfers have two things that people object to: high fees and anti-money-laundering legal requirements.

The problem with making it "easy" to move money is that fraud becomes easy as well. There was an article on HN the other day about someone who wired $4k to a fraudulent AirBNB host. The credit card system skews towards assuming that the merchants are fraudulent and the customers mostly honest. Bitcoin goes in the other direction: it's entirely caveat emptor, there's no fraud protection or recovery at all. If your key is used to send bitcoins, by you or someone else, they're gone to that address. This allows for the low transaction fees but creates a trail of people who've lost money, whether on mntgox or localbitcoins or random internet purchases.

(I've been playing with the description "uber for banknotes" for a while; the disruptive evading of existing regulated systems is important to both Uber and Bitcoin)

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#190

Post by pjc50 »

Cyther606 wrote: post #176
sanderjd wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have bought and sold a few hundreds of USD worth of BTC and even used a few tens of USD of it for transactions, and while you're definitely right about the intent and philosophy of BTC, I agree with your parent comment that what is actually exciting about BTC (or something inspired by it) is its potential as the lowest-friction way to buy things digitally. The sooner BTC shakes its crypto-libertarian culture the be…

> the vast majority of people in the world (at least those who've heard of it) know it as this weird, unsavory, and probably criminal thing Yes, and it's the truth. What can bitcoin do that no other currency can? It can operate entirely outside of the existing banking system. That's the X factor of bitcoin, and NY regulators hate it for this reason. The black market actually has _very_ wide appeal. It's worth north o…

Ask an Italian whether a black market dominated economy is a good thing.
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