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US Digital Currency

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: US Digital Currency

#131

Post by atarola »

kenpomeroy wrote: post #124
fra wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which cash savings? The median savings for a US family is ~$5000. What you're really saying is "it inconveniences the rich".

Inflation hurts the poor far more than the rich. Rich people invest their money rather than simply holding cash and losing value through inflation. Poor people have no choice but to keep their money in cash. Also, wage increases are often much slower than the rate of inflation.

Poor people don't keep cash, they spend it on living expenses almost immediately.

Re: US Digital Currency

#132

Post by otakucode »

nostrademons wrote: post #89
otakucode wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What differentiates it from Visa is that there is literally nothing behind Visas numbers. They could be pure fiction right now and no one but Visa would know. Also, Visa takes a cut. As more and more of the whole economy flows through payment processors, they have become de facto taxing bodies. Their fees drain the economy, and can be used to manipulate the economy to Visas whim. A government-backed cryptocurrency wo…

Up-thread, the proposal is to fix the scalability & energy usage issues by having a trusted authority such as the U.S. government run a database with a payment API on top. Under such a system - how do you know that there is anything behind the government's numbers? They could be pure fiction right now and no one but the government would know. Also, the government takes a cut. As the whole economy flows through their…

You are correct that it wouldn't bring any sort of additional guarantee of the money being backed beyond what fiat currency already has. But, the advantage is that it could be proven, mathematically, that each bit of the currency was actually issued by the federal reserve and is actually backed by the government. As it is now, it could just be a bug, or malware, or pure fiction invented by a company to make their numbers look better. And you can't prove that either way.

I am no economist, but I have never thought the idea of "trust" had much to do with the value of US currency. Certainly it's not backed by gold any longer. But I think it's backed by something real. Bombs. The US has more than enough to force others to accept their currency as having value.

Re: US Digital Currency

#133

Post by mrb »

bastawhiz wrote: post #109
mrb wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« Cryptocurrency is slower than card networks » Not inherently. If you compare apples to apples, accepting a credit card transaction is equivalent to accepting a zero-confirmation cryptocurrency transaction, which is just as fast as a CC charge (instantaneous.) And it is technically safer for a merchant to accept a 0-conf crypto tx because a CC charge is trivial to reverse (via a fraudulent chargeback) while a tx in…

> accepting a credit card transaction is equivalent to accepting a zero-confirmation cryptocurrency transaction, which is just as fast as a CC charge (instantaneous.) Except my charge is guaranteed to happen (or be rejected) within a reasonable amount of time. If you scale up anything to the size of, say, Visa, the transaction times are going to grow to be unbounded. I know my credit card charges are going to settle…

«If you're a small business, this matters a LOT.»

With a CC it takes 1-3 business day for the merchant to receive spendable funds. With a crypto tx it takes minutes (the time for 1 confirmation). This is a huge advantage for cryptocurrencies.

«What service, exactly, is more expensive than a 7% fee?»

It's the worldwide average of all remittance companies. See http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en which claim 7.13%.

«Major cryptocurrencies currently don't do it, so we shouldn't talk about them as if they do.»

You spoke as if the problem was unfixable. I am clarifying it can be fixed. The reason most cryptocurrencies do not implement UTXO commitment sets is simply that having to store all txs is not (yet) an intolerable pain point.

Re: US Digital Currency

#134

Post by snissn »

ac29 wrote: post #116
snissn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cryptocurrency is slower than card networks. How long does it take you to set up a merchant account? With cryptocurrency, it's practically instant.

24 hours or so. Its a non-issue for business operations.

How long does it take to set up a business?

Re: US Digital Currency

#135

Post by rbreve »

skybrian wrote: post #40
rbreve wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in a bubble, your argument is not valid for millions of people that don’t have bank accounts, have you seen western union fees? Africa and Latin America will embrace cryptocurrencies because it will be faster and cheaper and will not require people to open a bank account, only a cell phone with data which most people already have

If you know more, could you share? I haven't read anything about cryptocurrency being successful in Africa or Latin America. (Versus, say, M-Pesa in Kenya.)

look it up, there are a lot of articles about it

Re: US Digital Currency

#136

Post by rbreve »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
rbreve wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in a bubble, your argument is not valid for millions of people that don’t have bank accounts, have you seen western union fees? Africa and Latin America will embrace cryptocurrencies because it will be faster and cheaper and will not require people to open a bank account, only a cell phone with data which most people already have

Payments in developing countries is already fast through the use of mobile phones, no cryptocurrency overhead required.

Fast but with very expensive fees, and the problem is also corruption, privacy, and abuse by banks and financial institution. With the blockchain beeing decentralized you wont get ripped off and you won't get tracked either (in a way) Also, imagine if Trump decides to ban or tax transfers from USA to LatinAmerica/Africa, then crypto will be the solution.

Re: US Digital Currency

#137

Post by rbreve »

dang wrote: post #78
rbreve wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in a bubble, your argument is not valid for millions of people that don’t have bank accounts, have you seen western union fees? Africa and Latin America will embrace cryptocurrencies because it will be faster and cheaper and will not require people to open a bank account, only a cell phone with data which most people already have

Probably this got downvoted because of the "you live in a bubble" part, which crosses into personal attack. Could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit those bits out of what you post here? This comment would be just fine without it.

Oh sorry, I wasn't attacking.

Re: US Digital Currency

#138

Post by freeone3000 »

devinhelton wrote: post #105
freeone3000 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already hold US dollars in digital form. You're describing exactly how banks work. The reasons that transfers cost money or people outside the US can't hold accounts are not technical.

No, that is not how banks work. You are not holding actual legal tender, your bank account is a credit with that specific bank that the bank promises to pay back to you with legal tender on demand. But the bank has lent out that money and might not be able to actually pay you back (or might need to be bailed out by the FDIC to pay you back if your account is under $250k). I agree though that existing banks could tech…

So instead of a distributed transaction ledger held by one party, it's a transaction ledger held by one party, with the shared fiction that there's backing paper somewhere? I don't see a difference.

Re: US Digital Currency

#139

Post by nivertech »

stale2002 wrote: post #123
Zarath wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a thought experiment. Satoshi (who we'll pretend is Hal Finney) owns 10% of Bitcoin, we assume he's lost the keys. Bitcoin becomes a global, and universal currency as we slowly colonize the entire galaxy. Satoshi has been unfrozen from his cryogenic sleep, and remembers his keys. Satoshi now owns 10% of the entire economy of the galaxy. Seems ridiculous right? Satoshi contributed nothing for hundreds or thousa…

This is no different than of someone just happens to own a whole bunch of silver, and the price of silver goes up in the future. Deflationary currencies are not a new thing. Lots of things that have all the same properties as a currency already exist right now, and have existed for thousands of years. There are already lots of limited supply things in the real world, and someone can already just buy a whole bunch of…

> This is no different than of someone just happens to own a whole bunch of silver, and the price of silver goes up in the future.

Silver is a natural scarcity. Bitcoin is an artificial scarcity. To get 10% of Earth's silver supply one will need to invest a lot of equivalent real-life resources. Satoshi just very cheaply early-mined 1M bitcoins.

> Deflationary currencies are not a new thing.

Commodity-based (i.e. based on natural scarcity) deflationary currencies are not a new thing, but "cryptocurrencies" are based on an artificial made-up scarcity, not even on a math-based scarcity (PoW math puzzles used for leader election only).

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