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Stripe Crypto

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Re: Stripe Crypto

#191

It is important to recognize that Stripe is largely selling well-made shovels for the gold rush here. They have a history of diving more deeply into this market [1] and withdrawing from it before [2], so this is just Take 2. This time around, they are not themselves buying Cube Thingies or similar and don't have any exposure to the volatile world of ETH or other coins. I think there will be decent transfer of money f…

> Updated March 10, 2022 Did they just update this after you pointed this out?

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Crypto

#192
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, isn't that exactly a pyramid scheme?

If you're asking in good faith, it's market manipulation. In your own words, can you explain the difference between, say, a Ponzi and a pyramid scheme? Pyramid and a matrix? Or do you use "pyramid scheme" to just mean "scheme?"

Okay, it may not be a pyramid scheme in the exact technical sense, but combined with the other items on the list, "get-rich-quick", etc., I think pump-and-dumping shitcoins counts, right?

Re: Stripe Crypto

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also bury your ingots/drives deep in the wilderness and only memorize where they are at

Obviously that is not as easy/useful/realistic as a wallet you can generate from memorized seed words to instantly recover your wealth anywhere.

How does that protect you from someone who can seize your device? If they can seize your device they can also seize any physical assets that you possess. So your wealth exists only nominally, you can't really spend it.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#195
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will a bank that has restrictive policies around crypto know that a Stripe payout made into a customer's account was not related to an NFT sale? Essentially, how are existing Stripe users protected from Stripe's reputational self-harm here?

How would this bank even know stripe is accepting a new currency? Why would it matter. Money will flow into your account from stripe. Stripe is not a cryto service provider defined by banking regulations. That's like saying a bank won't accept a transfer from another bank because that bank allows you to pay them in cryto.

> Stripe is not a cryto service provider defined by banking regulations.

But it's now a payment provider that allows businesses in the UK to engage in what surely must be considered high-risk crypto business by the bank (NFT marketplaces).

This is the sort of thing that gets businesses denied banking service.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#196

It's very strange seeing the option near the bottom of the page to donate a fraction of your revenue from Stripe Crypto to carbon recapture efforts. I agree with Stripe that, at this point, the solution to our climate problems must include carbon recapture, but it's not an ideal situation to be in. Businesses entering the crypto space always seem to tout carbon offsets and sidechains that use less energy, but offsets…

The “ecological damage” is a rounding error and being mitigated in several ways. This is not a serious concern for cryptocurrency, despite how often and blindly its repeated.

This is not a convincing argument, but even if it were, carbon recapture is currently even more of a "rounding error" in the grand scheme of carbon emissions. Current carbon emissions are somewhere around 50 billion metric tons a year. I've seen varying estimates of crypto emissions, so I'm going to cite one [1] on the low end here, since it's more favorable to your argument, but the highest I've seen is less than double this number, so they're all in the same ballpark.

ETH currently emits 7.4 million metric tons of CO2 a year. Bitcoin is much higher. I've seen estimates as low as 16 million and as high as 55. There are other chains as well. To keep the math simple, let's round it to 50 million, so crypto is contributing 0.1% of total carbon emissions. Like you said, a rounding error.

I think we're just going to have to disagree on mitigations. I don't think they're working very well.

Crucially, at the beginning of 2019, according to the source I linked, ETH was only at 2 million tons a year. It's more than tripled since then. In 2021, Carbon recapture removed an estimated 9 thousand tons of CO2. [2] The CO2 from the growth of ETH eclipses anything that carbon recapture is currently capable of. The technology will get better. The most optimistic estimate I've seen is that carbon recapture will hit 30 million tons a year in 2070. But this year, Stripe Crypto only has to increase crypto transactions, across all blockchains it supports, by 9,000 tons to completely offset all of the money it's putting into recapture efforts. Even if you remove all the other chains, Stripe only has to increase ETH transactions by 1.3% to achieve this own-goal.

Long term, Stripe alone could end up causing more CO2 emissions on the blockchains to grow faster than all of carbon recapture.

1: https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/ 2: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-...

Re: Stripe Crypto

#197

It's very strange seeing the option near the bottom of the page to donate a fraction of your revenue from Stripe Crypto to carbon recapture efforts. I agree with Stripe that, at this point, the solution to our climate problems must include carbon recapture, but it's not an ideal situation to be in. Businesses entering the crypto space always seem to tout carbon offsets and sidechains that use less energy, but offsets…

The “ecological damage” is a rounding error and being mitigated in several ways. This is not a serious concern for cryptocurrency, despite how often and blindly its repeated.

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Crypto

#198

It is important to recognize that Stripe is largely selling well-made shovels for the gold rush here. They have a history of diving more deeply into this market [1] and withdrawing from it before [2], so this is just Take 2. This time around, they are not themselves buying Cube Thingies or similar and don't have any exposure to the volatile world of ETH or other coins. I think there will be decent transfer of money f…

> Updated March 10, 2022 Did they just update this after you pointed this out?

For me, Google's cache of the page[1] does not contain that and says a timestamp of 10 Mar 2022 01:35:20 GMT.

[1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cKDBTS...

Re: Stripe Crypto

#199
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I searched for who said this but came up empty. Where is this quote from?

Pretty sure it was Peter Thiel. https://sports.yahoo.com/tech-billionaire-peter-thiel-says-1...

Thanks for the link. I didn't find that quote in the article, but maybe it was in there. If it's not in there then it's crazy that you linked that article saying "Peter Thiel" - another commenter said the same thing. If it's in there then it's weird that my quoted Google Search didn't yield at least that article.
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