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Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

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Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#231

Post by BrendanEich »

MichaelGG wrote: post #20
jmhain wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just a consequence of Metcalfe's law; the first implementation of a good idea will never be perfect, but has the greatest chance of succeeding. Sure IPv4, JavaScript, Bitcoin, and countless others have defects, but the world is still better with than without them.

JavaScript could have had a better design without impacting adoption. Likewise if IE had fixed the language along with all the other improvements they added, it'd also be better by now. IPv4 is vastly better than JavaScript for what it does.

In point of fact, your first sentence is wrong.

I know this because I tried for a better design via JS1.2 in Netscape 4, enabled by opt-in versioning (). This was in 1997 while standardizing ECMA-262 Edition 1 (ES1).

And based on this JS1.2 experience (in beta, and it went to final in Netscape 4 when that dog finally released), I argued to the Ecma TC39 TG1 standards group that ES1 should incompatibly change == and != to work as === and !== do in JS today and since ES1.

Microsoft's JScript lead rejected this change as breaking, counterproposed the === and !== operators, and we all agreed. We also rightly decided not to impose opt-in versioning then, or ever after (1JS FTW).

(Irony: in 1996 summer, the same MS lead had mailed me privately to propose some incompatible changes to give JS "a better design", but I couldn't make them without breaking the Web even then.)

So almost 20 years later, asserting that something adopted widely and rapidly on the Web "could have had a better design without impacting [further] adoption" is easy to do but hard to prove. I did try, with == and !=, and that attempt bounced because of adoption-in-full (taking in versioning and backward compatibility).

Number-locked versioning and related protocols such as content-negotiation via the Accept: header have failed hard on the Web, over and over.

Sure, lots could have been better, but the time to get it right was 1995 May, not during standardization in late 1996 or 1997. At that point, "don't break the Web" prevailed, as it does still, among competing browser vendors.

/be

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#232

Post by tim333 »

kaonashi wrote: post #121
badbaguette wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The appeal of bitcoin in this respect is that it disrupts the idea of money "being" in a certain place and thus having to "move" across borders. As a worldwide distributed ledger, it's unclear that sending someone bitcoins amounts to a value transfer across borders. I don't see this as a loophole so much as radical redefinition of what a store of value means. It's clear that whatever future regulations look like, the…

Not really a ledger, bitcoin is only an asset, never a liability.

You could argue MtGox have a liability of quite a few bitcoins.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#233

Post by sanswork »

mrb wrote: post #230
sanswork wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed out on the word large. Remittances are generally very small. Also the cost of remittances isn't in moving the money it's in having lots of people in the destination country that your family can go to and get cash from. There is no indication that bitcoin would make that cheaper.

The most blatant way Bitcoin can make remittances cheaper is if the recipient can directly spend the bitcoins. So no more Western Union = no middle man pocketing remittance fees!

Yes, but people can't so it doesn't.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#234

Post by cpeterso »

BrendanEich wrote: post #231
MichaelGG wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript could have had a better design without impacting adoption. Likewise if IE had fixed the language along with all the other improvements they added, it'd also be better by now. IPv4 is vastly better than JavaScript for what it does.

In point of fact, your first sentence is wrong. I know this because I tried for a better design via JS1.2 in Netscape 4, enabled by opt-in versioning ( ). This was in 1997 while standardizing ECMA-262 Edition 1 (ES1). And based on this JS1.2 experience (in beta, and it went to final in Netscape 4 when that dog finally released), I argued to the Ecma TC39 TG1 standards group that ES1 should incompatibly change == and…

In Firefox bug 988386, we started collecting telemetry on how often users see web content with JS versions. The hope is that we can remove some of non-standard language extensions like `for each`, old-style generators, and destructuring `for (var [k,v] in x)`. XUL is ignored for now because it defaults to JS 1.8.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988386

So far, version telemetry shows that JS 1.7 and 1.8 content does exist on the web, but I'm not sure how or why people are using these language extensions. I hope to add telemetry for actual use of the extensions instead of just the tag version. Maybe these version strings were just cargo-cult copied code and the enclosed JS is actually not using the extensions. :)

http://telemetry.mozilla.org/#filter=nightly%2F33%2FJS_MINOR...

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#235

Post by patcon »

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…

I think it's a shame that Balanced Payments didn't wind up their PR machine when their CEO was talking about this same stuff last January: https://soundcloud.com/aroundthecoin/podcast_01_18_14

They're not doing the best job at demonstrating it, but I think they've been looking at Bitcoin in a clever way for much longer than Stripe :/

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#236

Post by mrb »

sanswork wrote: post #233
mrb wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most blatant way Bitcoin can make remittances cheaper is if the recipient can directly spend the bitcoins. So no more Western Union = no middle man pocketing remittance fees!

Yes, but people can't so it doesn't.

Yes they can, and here is one more example: according to the World Bank the lowest remittance costs to send 140.00 EUR from Italy to China are 12.00 EUR (this is 8.6%!) see http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en/corridor/Italy/Chin.... However thanks to Bitcoin exchanges existing in both Europe and China, and with their low fees of typically So do not say that Bitcoin "would not" make remittance costs cheaper. It does.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#237

Post by sanswork »

mrb wrote: post #236
sanswork wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but people can't so it doesn't.

Yes they can, and here is one more example: according to the World Bank the lowest remittance costs to send 140.00 EUR from Italy to China are 12.00 EUR (this is 8.6%!) see http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en/corridor/Italy/Chin... . However thanks to Bitcoin exchanges existing in both Europe and China, and with their low fees of typically So do not say that Bitcoin "would not" make remittance costs cheaper. It…

The world bank includes a very small number of possible remittance services and basically ignores any of the small grey networks most people actually use.

http://www.cabel.it/media/documents/cemla_slides.pdf has an example of a remittance service that offers fees of 1.15%(See page 7).

So that service would cost 1.61 EUR.

With bitcoin the process would be:

Transfer money to BTC-E which is 1% + the payment source fee so we're already over and we haven't even gotten our bitcoin yet.

ok lets try another one since that didn't work out and I'm sure we can find cheaper.

Kraken is free for SEPA deposits. I can't find any example fees for SEPA transfers from Italy to Germany but lets say 0.10.

Trading fee: 0.28 Withdraw fee is in btc(0.00050) so hard to say but currently around 0.31 then there is the bitcoin fee to deposit on the chinese side in okcoin which is another 0.06 then luckily its free to trade at ok coin and only 0.4% to withdraw in CNY which is 0.56

Total cost: 1.31

So assuming no slippage(which there would be since any country receiving a lot of remittances like this would be a buyers market) you can go through 3 extra transfers and save yourself 0.30 EUR on your 140EUR transfer. This also assumes my SEPA fee is right which I think it might be quite low for reality. Italian banks tend to have very high transfer fees even nationally.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#238

Post by mrb »

sanswork wrote: post #237
mrb wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they can, and here is one more example: according to the World Bank the lowest remittance costs to send 140.00 EUR from Italy to China are 12.00 EUR (this is 8.6%!) see http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en/corridor/Italy/Chin... . However thanks to Bitcoin exchanges existing in both Europe and China, and with their low fees of typically So do not say that Bitcoin "would not" make remittance costs cheaper. It…

The world bank includes a very small number of possible remittance services and basically ignores any of the small grey networks most people actually use. http://www.cabel.it/media/documents/cemla_slides.pdf has an example of a remittance service that offers fees of 1.15%(See page 7). So that service would cost 1.61 EUR. With bitcoin the process would be: Transfer money to BTC-E which is 1% + the payment source fee s…

I was tempted to reply that your unknown service, mentioned on page 7 of some slide deck written by some obscure tiny Italian financial holding company probably does not even exist, because it is referred to as a future potential project ("The company will be working...") so it probably means you were unable to find proof of its current operations.

But you would miss my main point. Even if it existed, you are wrong: most people actually use Western Union/Moneygram/etc. This is why they are companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars and not some footnote on a slide deck. At best, if you tried to support your side reasonably by bringing Hawala in the discussion, know that even Hawala represents a minority share of the total remittance market. And Hawala has fees typically higher than 1-2% anyway.

So, you did demonstrate my point that Bitcoin can make remittance costs cheaper for MOST people.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#239

Post by sanswork »

mrb wrote: post #238
sanswork wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world bank includes a very small number of possible remittance services and basically ignores any of the small grey networks most people actually use. http://www.cabel.it/media/documents/cemla_slides.pdf has an example of a remittance service that offers fees of 1.15%(See page 7). So that service would cost 1.61 EUR. With bitcoin the process would be: Transfer money to BTC-E which is 1% + the payment source fee s…

I was tempted to reply that your unknown service, mentioned on page 7 of some slide deck written by some obscure tiny Italian financial holding company probably does not even exist, because it is referred to as a future potential project ("The company will be working...") so it probably means you were unable to find proof of its current operations. But you would miss my main point. Even if it existed, you are wrong:…

The people that use western union/moneygram etc do so because they need their family on the other side to be able to stop by a location near their house and get the money and they probably need the same on their side too.

Bitcoin isn't going to help those people at all at any lower costs. Since it is the person on the other side with a shop that is the reason for the higher fees not the transmission of funds.

Edit: and the people on this side. Bitcoin ATMs average around 5% at the moment. LBC is the same or worse depending on supply in your area.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#240

Post by mrb »

sanswork wrote: post #239
mrb wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was tempted to reply that your unknown service, mentioned on page 7 of some slide deck written by some obscure tiny Italian financial holding company probably does not even exist, because it is referred to as a future potential project ("The company will be working...") so it probably means you were unable to find proof of its current operations. But you would miss my main point. Even if it existed, you are wrong:…

The people that use western union/moneygram etc do so because they need their family on the other side to be able to stop by a location near their house and get the money and they probably need the same on their side too. Bitcoin isn't going to help those people at all at any lower costs. Since it is the person on the other side with a shop that is the reason for the higher fees not the transmission of funds. Edit: a…

I point you back to my 1st example: this overheard (offices, employees) is what Bitcoin makes unnecessary if users can spend the coins directly, or exchange them directly for cash with friends/family/people in their community, or use a Bitcoin ATM (ATMs cost less to operate than a full blown WU-type office so they would lead to lower fees - anything below the average worldwide remittance costs of 8.5% is better.)

You say Bitcoin WOULD (conditional tense) not make things cheaper, but if adoption continues (the condition we are talking about) it WOULD. Perhaps you do not communicate clearly and meant to say WILL instead of WOULD. In other words you don't believe in its adoption? But then your statement becomes obvious ("if Bitcoin's adoption fail it will not make things cheaper", duh).

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