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PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

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Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#111

Post by tomlagier »

rawtxapp wrote: post #107
tomlagier wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's mine: it doesn't seem socially useful if everyone holds a small amount of bitcoin and does nothing with it, particularly if all of those holdings are centralized on a small number of exchanges. I have no idea whether that is the true use for most BTC, but (mod exchanges vs private wallets) it's been the case for every single person I've talked to that owns some. I just don't get it - we're all holding pieces o…

> but it feels like the majority of the stuff is just... sitting there... It gives you the ability to actually save your money for a future use. If you need liquidity, you can borrow against it to spend money in other endavors. Nobody wants to bring their coins to their grave, but whatever you spend it on needs to bring more value than this just sitting there , which means you would expect a lot of unprofitable or ve…

Isn't that true of any asset? Why is BTC better than, say, a bunch of emeralds?

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#112

Post by bustin »

xur17 wrote: post #94
lawn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personal opinion: I think the part you are missing here is that lots of transactions shouldn't be occurring on the base layer. What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee). > Why is it "laughable" for the lightning network to use BTC as a settlement layer? It's laughable because peop…

> What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee). That is not at all what I am saying. I'm saying that technically only a very small subset of transactions should be settling on the base BTC layer, and hence that is how incentives should be (and are) setup.

Why would people prefer to use a paypal that settles on the bitcoin network vs a paypal that is based around USD?

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#113

Post by rawtxapp »

tomlagier wrote: post #111
rawtxapp wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it feels like the majority of the stuff is just... sitting there... It gives you the ability to actually save your money for a future use. If you need liquidity, you can borrow against it to spend money in other endavors. Nobody wants to bring their coins to their grave, but whatever you spend it on needs to bring more value than this just sitting there , which means you would expect a lot of unprofitable or ve…

Isn't that true of any asset? Why is BTC better than, say, a bunch of emeralds?

Many people believe it to be the future global reserve currency. Whether you agree with that or not, there's a non-zero probability of that becoming true. And the scarcity means that a central entity can't dilute your holdings as they please, so you can actually save it.

Emeralds are not digital, they are not that fungible, you can't easily divide them, no guarantees on supply, etc, etc.

Also if you look at it historically, it has been the best performing asset in 10 years out of it's 12 year existence which kind of reinforces people's beliefs.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#114

Post by mikkel »

ahelwer wrote: post #41
ceilingcorner wrote: post #25

I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

I think it's an interesting example of people being too close to something, technically, to really see its totality. I'm a distributed systems person so I basically blew off Bitcoin two bubble-cycles ago because of the 3 tx/sec issue and the obvious deficiencies of the proposed lightning network workaround. I also took an in-depth look at a cryptocurrency with a supposed better protocol (Nano) and was very unimpresse…

Can you elaborate on the network partition issue that you found with nano? As far as I know nano has been live for years without a doublespend or downtime and thats pretty impressive.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#115

Post by mindcandy »

CPLX wrote: post #42
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything cryptocurrency related is very hot in the fintech investing space right now. Companies don’t necessarily think that crypto is going to supplant traditional currencies, but they do salivate over the unbelievably high fees that cryptocurrency business can charge their customers. If you’re a stock brokerage, $0 trades are the cost of doing business these days. Meanwhile, companies like Coinbase are more than 60…

> Bitcoin remains popular despite the fact that it costs $10 or more per transaction. Indeed. In precisely the same way that the $10 service charge ATM’s in the lobby of a casino remain popular.

More like a $20 wire transfer fee.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#116

Post by xur17 »

bustin wrote: post #112
xur17 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee). That is not at all what I am saying. I'm saying that technically only a very small subset of transactions should be settling on the base BTC layer, and hence that is how incentives should be (and are) setup.

Why would people prefer to use a paypal that settles on the bitcoin network vs a paypal that is based around USD?

I have no idea, but second layer networks have much different properties than a custodial paypal service has.

In terms of USD vs BTC spending - I imagine a lot of people will want to spend USD, and BTC will serve as a store of value and backing asset. USD is possible via stablecoins though.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#117

Post by [deleted] »

rawtxapp wrote: post #113
tomlagier wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that true of any asset? Why is BTC better than, say, a bunch of emeralds?

Many people believe it to be the future global reserve currency. Whether you agree with that or not, there's a non-zero probability of that becoming true. And the scarcity means that a central entity can't dilute your holdings as they please, so you can actually save it. Emeralds are not digital, they are not that fungible, you can't easily divide them, no guarantees on supply, etc, etc. Also if you look at it histor…

[deleted]

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#118

Post by tomlagier »

rawtxapp wrote: post #113
tomlagier wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that true of any asset? Why is BTC better than, say, a bunch of emeralds?

Many people believe it to be the future global reserve currency. Whether you agree with that or not, there's a non-zero probability of that becoming true. And the scarcity means that a central entity can't dilute your holdings as they please, so you can actually save it. Emeralds are not digital, they are not that fungible, you can't easily divide them, no guarantees on supply, etc, etc. Also if you look at it histor…

> Many people believe it to be the future global reserve currency. Whether you agree with that or not, there's a non-zero probability of that becoming true.

Mayyyybe. I don't think that's why most people are buying it, though. I think it's your last point.

> Also if you look at it historically, it has been the best performing asset in 10 years out of it's 12 year existence which kind of reinforces people's beliefs.

Yeah, this is what gets me. BTC is valuable because BTC is valuable. I don't understand why that loop doesn't unroll, and it breaks my brain a bit. I can't think of anything else that has value _only_ because it has made other people wealthy, and that has so consistently appreciated off of that fact.

The idea that an asset needs _no_ intrinsic value in order to be valuable, or that the intrinsic value may have been defined a long time ago and is now irrelevant to its current value just doesn't compute to me.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#119

Post by hanniabu »

tomlagier wrote: post #111
rawtxapp wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it feels like the majority of the stuff is just... sitting there... It gives you the ability to actually save your money for a future use. If you need liquidity, you can borrow against it to spend money in other endavors. Nobody wants to bring their coins to their grave, but whatever you spend it on needs to bring more value than this just sitting there , which means you would expect a lot of unprofitable or ve…

Isn't that true of any asset? Why is BTC better than, say, a bunch of emeralds?

Portability. You can't carry emeralds, golds, etc with you. You also can't encrypt them to prevent theft.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#120

Post by ahelwer »

mikkel wrote: post #114
ahelwer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's an interesting example of people being too close to something, technically, to really see its totality. I'm a distributed systems person so I basically blew off Bitcoin two bubble-cycles ago because of the 3 tx/sec issue and the obvious deficiencies of the proposed lightning network workaround. I also took an in-depth look at a cryptocurrency with a supposed better protocol (Nano) and was very unimpresse…

Can you elaborate on the network partition issue that you found with nano? As far as I know nano has been live for years without a doublespend or downtime and thats pretty impressive.

Yeah this is kind of where distributed systems theory comes up against practice, and I think is very interesting. On a theoretical level Nano is just fundamentally flawed, as are all coins which use this "everyone has their own blockchain" eventual consistency concept. The problem is this, as far as I can recall (I looked at this three years ago): imagine a network partition occurs, where two different exchanges are in different partitions. For whatever reason Eve still has network access to both partitions. She broadcasts a different transaction to each partition, each transaction sending all of her Nano to a different exchange. Since Nano uses proof of stake, these transactions have to get a certain number of votes. I don't recall the exact threshold (I think 1/3 of all extant Nano has to vote?) but it is possible for both transactions to be confirmed as long as the partition stays in place. Possibly long enough for Eve to convert her Nano to a different cryptocurrency and transfer it out. Once the partition collapses one of the transactions is rolled back and the exchange is left holding the bag. IOTA solves this problem by just saying "the partition containing the coordinator is the real partition" lol. Humorously the more centralized Nano voting power is the less likely this scenario is to occur, too - although then you get the existential threat of those big-vote accounts getting hacked! They have to stay online with their private keys accessible, after all.

As you say, this has never happened (to my knowledge). So it's possible that even though the problem is real, it will never actually occur in practice. In the end the real measure of success is how well these systems perform in the real world, so we could say this analysis of the theoretical problems doesn't hold much water. On the other hand if something like this were to happen, it would probably tremendously undermine confidence in the currency & destroy it overnight. So this could be more of a thanksgiving turkey situation where each day seems better than the last until thanksgiving arrives.

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