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Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#21

Post by crooked-v »

billions wrote: post #14
buildbuildbuild wrote: post #5

Excited to see a reputable company like Coinbase launch this. Hopefully with their reputation we can avoid another Tether situation. The US government should launch their own stablecoin. A digital US dollar is a national need that shouldn’t be managed by a corporation in my opinion.

The government's "stable coin" lost 96% of its value since 1913. Time to try something different? https://comparegoldandsilverprices.com/news/economics-101/do...

That article is dramatically inaccurate in many ways, starting with its claim of gold's value not changing over time.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#22

Post by Avamander »

endijs wrote: post #7

I understand why stablecoin's are useful to the end user. I also understand how Bitfinex is cashing in on Tether. However how is Coinbase making money with USDC? They clearly will have considerable expenses (keeping reserve, legal team, development etc. etc.). But if I give them 1USD and get back 1USDC, which later can be exchanged back to 1 USD, where are they making money?

Depositing and withdrawing money from their system?

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#23

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Permit wrote: post #18
Pharmakon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You go from saying it achieves the goal of being decentralized, and in the next breath point out that it’s centralized. I don’t get it.

Decentralized transactions are distinct from decentralized issuance. Decentralized issuance doesn't matter to most people in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. They have been happy to participate in ICOs where coins are issued from a central authority. That said, I haven't yet heard anything on how transactions are actually verified (ie. Proof of work vs Proof of Stake) Edit: It appears to be an Ethereum-based token: http…

> Decentralized transactions are distinct from decentralized issuance

Dollars can be transacted, online and offline, through a variety of means ranging from at the Federal Reserve to totally de-centralised.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#24

Post by larrysalibra »

Something that's missing from this article: Since USDC is an ERC20 token based on Ethereum, you'll still need to hold ETH so that you can pay for gas to move the USDC stablecoin token around.

A fiat-world analogy to this would be to imagine if spending Euros required you to hold US Dollars to pay the transaction fees.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#25

Post by arcticbull »

soared wrote: post #9
buildbuildbuild wrote: post #5

Excited to see a reputable company like Coinbase launch this. Hopefully with their reputation we can avoid another Tether situation. The US government should launch their own stablecoin. A digital US dollar is a national need that shouldn’t be managed by a corporation in my opinion.

Why does there need to be a digital US dollar? Almost 20% of the US is underbanked, and 6.5% is unbanked. A digital dollar seemingly would be even worse and work to concentrate wealth among the educated/wealthy. https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/

Many low income people have smartphones actually, and use them in lieu of desktops. Not being connected isn’t the reason they’re unbanked or underbanked, you could argue moving more to digital would include more of them. Plus the US dollar is already digital.

In part they don’t have bank accounts because they’re poor, so they don’t have money to put in them. If they weren’t broke they’d have bank accounts. IMO this is more a function of wealth inequality in the US than of banking.

Think about it, you’ve got $0. Now I give you a fee free bank account. You’ve still got $0. You’re no more included in the financial system.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#27

Post by Pharmakon »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #17
Pharmakon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You go from saying it achieves the goal of being decentralized, and in the next breath point out that it’s centralized. I don’t get it.

The transactions can be decentralized while the mining is centralized.

Ok, I see. Still it seems like the dream of cryptocurrency was total decentralization. If the supply is centralized does it matter if the transactions aren’t? It’s still a single point of failure.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#28

Post by simias »

Permit wrote: post #11

Stablecoins seem like they would achieve most of the goals of the original cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: - Decentralized transactions - 24/7 access - Low fees - Store of value I suppose the only drawback here is that they're issued from a centralized authority. That said, for practical purposes the vast majority of Bitcoin holders didn't mine their own coins either. Despite this, no one on Twitter[1] seemed excit…

>I suppose the only drawback here is that they're issued from a centralized authority.

Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of cryptocurrencies though? After all this authority could selectively blacklist some coins from ever being converted back to their peg currency, effectively rendering them worthless, couldn't they? You couldn't easily launder it away because this authority could decide that if these coins are used in any transaction then the "bad" coins would contaminate the outputs proportionally to their amount in the inputs, so it would mean that people would double check their inputs not to get "bad" money. So it would be effectively like trying to spend fake dollar bills (except that the authenticity verification would be quick, automatic and completely impossible to fake).

That means that on top of trusting the authority to fairly issue the coin you also give it the power to effectively censor transactions.

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#29

Post by arcticbull »

billions wrote: post #14
buildbuildbuild wrote: post #5

Excited to see a reputable company like Coinbase launch this. Hopefully with their reputation we can avoid another Tether situation. The US government should launch their own stablecoin. A digital US dollar is a national need that shouldn’t be managed by a corporation in my opinion.

The government's "stable coin" lost 96% of its value since 1913. Time to try something different? https://comparegoldandsilverprices.com/news/economics-101/do...

I can’t overstate this enough, DONT HOLD DOLLARS. Currency is intentionally lossy so you invest it in productive assets. You’re pointing to a feature and yelling bug because you don’t seem to understand how it’s meant to work. Wages kept pace so earn rate remained constant or better and if you invested instead of throwing dollar bills under your mattress you’d have done incredibly well as the S&P has had a historical 7% geometric return.

Finally, all the popular stable coins are literally indexed to the US dollar, so you can’t say USDC/USDT is great then whine about the USD right?

Re: Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin

#30

Post by max76 »

Trading is all about trust.

This represents an odd level of trust. The user trusts Circle and Coinbase enough to purchase USDC at facevalue. The user doesn't trust Circle or Coinbase enough to keep private transaction histories.

I understand the position of fully trusting the third party (Visa, Paypal, Stripe) when combined with legal protections. I understand the position of fully distrusting third parties (bitcoin, etc). I do not understand why someone would prefer this mixed level of trust.

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