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Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

reuters.com

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Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#271

Post by dogman144 »

cableshaft wrote: post #218
dogman144 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re paying cash, average final settlement time is ~90 days, in reality. That’s just been abstracted away from the credit card user. Bitcoin settles in 6 blocks (60 mins) Now, on the UX topic, btc has a lot to improve. But I’m always surprised how rapidly people assume their transactions in fiat are settling as a comparative criticism for Bitcoin.

> Unless you’re paying cash, average final settlement time is ~90 days, in reality. Do you have a source for that? I tried looking and everything I saw is it would take between 24 hours and 3 days on average, for credit cards. You very well could be right, I'd just like to see something that confirms it, and wasn't able to find anything. Example source: https://lifehacker.com/this-is-why-your-credit-card-transact...

One way to look at it is w/ credit cards, bill isn’t due until the end of the month (for a reason, and then all settlement starts occurring once you pay it). Would like a better source, I have that timeframe from an Anthony Pompliamo (VC in the space) interview by Lex Fridman, but I’m looking for a primary source as well.

Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#272

Post by almost_usual »

cambaceres wrote: post #240
almost_usual wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So make all of your transactions in Bitcoin and don’t convert to fiat. Problem solved?

Can I buy food with Bitcoin? Pay my rent? Get clothes for my kids?

Maybe Bitcoin isn’t the solution then?

Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#273

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

argvargc wrote: post #241
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely an apples to hand grenades comparison. First of all, global credit card volumes are much larger than Bitcoin volumes. Asia Pacific has been a bigger credit card market than the U.S. for some time - for example. Secondly, credit cards payments are overwhelmingly payments for services or goods; effectively none of Bitcoin's total volume is in that category. In fact, virtually all of Bitcoin volume is…

Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day . I'm not referring to those. On-chain transactions are for a variety of things, but they are all payments , which was the criteria in question you brought up. Regardless of how you might opine on those payments "merit" (I could equally deride the usefulness of plastic trinkets ordered from China on Amazon - for what good it would do), they are not insignif…

>Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day. I'm not referring to those.

Where does that number even come from? I've been trying to source anything that's even vaguely in the same ballpark and coming up empty. Most of the sources I can find suggest ~$100bn a day.

But no, in any case, that's not what I'm talking about either. Nor am I trying to apply any moral value to the purposes to which payments are put.

The point is: you can't say "credit cards are small relative to BTC" without consider the segmentation of the payment market in the fiat world.

I encourage you to provide evidence of the size of the "credit card" usage (i.e. goods and services payments) of BTC. Good data is hard to find but it's self-evidently not in the "trillions of USD per year" order-of-magnitude.

If you want to talk about the gross settlements segment, again, BTC is a minnow. Sure counting every transaction on the BTC blockchain, it's a few $tn a year currently. Fedwire does that much every day, and that's only for inter-institutional transfer.

Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#274

Post by yladiz »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #262
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is going to lose the stability afforded by centralized Western government for crypto. That's a false dichotomy.

What stability? Governments are literally printing money at unprecedented rates. Fiat currencies are losing value at increasing speeds. We're discussing cryptocurrencies in a thread about Turkey attempting to force citizens to use their own rapidly depreciating currency instead of bitcoin.

> currencies are losing value at increasing speeds

Wouldn't that imply high levels of inflation, which isn't happening in many economies, especially widely available and exchanged ones like USD, EUR, etc.? The value of the Lira is falling and there is high inflation, but it's disingenuous to pretend this is common for currencies and economies around the world.

Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#275

Post by rini17 »

yladiz wrote: post #274
matheusmoreira wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stability? Governments are literally printing money at unprecedented rates. Fiat currencies are losing value at increasing speeds. We're discussing cryptocurrencies in a thread about Turkey attempting to force citizens to use their own rapidly depreciating currency instead of bitcoin.

> currencies are losing value at increasing speeds Wouldn't that imply high levels of inflation, which isn't happening in many economies, especially widely available and exchanged ones like USD, EUR, etc.? The value of the Lira is falling and there is high inflation, but it's disingenuous to pretend this is common for currencies and economies around the world.

Right, current value is stable. But there's so much fiat money being issued into circulation without corresponding increase of wealth. That makes its future value risky. Or if there's an explanation why it is not risky I'd like to see one.

Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#276

Post by koonsolo »

Max_aaa wrote: post #268
koonsolo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is leading with a 50% market share. So big but not really a monopoly.

The question what will happen when Bitcoin flops. Will people trust other crypto? It looks like for the crypto train to keep on chugging, bitcoin needs to be sustained.

Right now it seems to be the main driver indeed. If the 'store of value' Bitcoin fails, I guess in the short term, all crypto's will crash. And then the question will be if one has a decent enough value proposition to rise up again. Although a lot of people are opinionated on this last part, the fact remains that none of us really knows.

Another option is of course that one crypto would just overtake Bitcoin. If I remember correctly this almost happend with Ethereum and was called the flippening. This scenario would be better for crypto of course than a real Bitcoin crash.

Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#277

Post by qJ25D3vAzmfp »

Karsteski wrote: post #269
qJ25D3vAzmfp wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you are American from the US. See, the problem is that you are savages, no offense. Of course smoking in public offices must be restricted by the government, which represent the voters and which in turn are elected to govern the State. The public cannot harm the health of the citizens that it has to protect by mandate. If you wanna smoke and harm yourself (I am a smoker myself) do it on private property, away…

First off, I'm not American, nor have I been to the US. Given that you started off with "Americans are savages", I don't really see the point in trying to have any sort of reasonable exchange here...

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck

The definition of the word "savage" from the Cambridge dictionary states

savage

adjective

uk /ˈsæv.ɪdʒ/ us /ˈsæv.ɪdʒ/

extremely violent, wild, or frightening.

Americans from USA are savages under that definition.

But I'm interested to know why you think that the government shouldn't care about pollution and who actually should.

Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#278

Post by argvargc »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #273
argvargc wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day . I'm not referring to those. On-chain transactions are for a variety of things, but they are all payments , which was the criteria in question you brought up. Regardless of how you might opine on those payments "merit" (I could equally deride the usefulness of plastic trinkets ordered from China on Amazon - for what good it would do), they are not insignif…

> Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day. I'm not referring to those. Where does that number even come from? I've been trying to source anything that's even vaguely in the same ballpark and coming up empty. Most of the sources I can find suggest ~$100bn a day. But no, in any case, that's not what I'm talking about either. Nor am I trying to apply any moral value to the purposes to which payments…

You're probably missing the futures contracts.

You said "credit cards amount to $3tn of payments [my emphasis] in the U.S annually.", doing so as if this somehow made crypto appear small. I pointed out that Bitcoin alone does more than this per year in payments since 2018, and that there are thousands of other crypto projects. Many of these are also making comparable numbers of payments.

By the simple metric of how much value cryptocurrency users are transmitting with each other as payments, versus how much users of credit cards are doing - which was the original framing as I understood it - crypto wins. And of course it does, you may be right its an apples to hand grenades comparison, but the simple fact of the matter is we are comparing apples to hand grenades.

In some ways this is all about as useful as comparing how many miles horses and carts are doing versus steam or combustion engines.

The point is, even early on, per mile travelled, engines win. And they do so not just because they can travel further faster, but because they enable new use-cases by doing so - just like crypto.

Crypto has been here for ten years already and despite being derided as a toy early on, is now worth, and transferring, trillions.

See you after the next ten years, when credit cards will almost certainly be as VHS tapes are now.

Re: Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments

#279

Post by tgv »

dogman144 wrote: post #259
tgv wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[1] doesn't say anything like that.

Did you miss this... - me: criminal activity not a majority of btc use and severely overstated overall, and it enables surveillance, aka intelligence gathering for LEO/IC if properly utilized. - 30 year veteran, ex-deputy director of the CIA: “However, based on our research and discussions with industry experts, I have confidence in two conclusions: • The broad generalizations about the use of Bitcoin in illicit fina…

The report isn't written by Michael Morell, the aforementioned 30 year etc., but "co-authored", and the whole thing was sponsored by Coinbase and Square. Who pays the piper, and all that. And if you want to use his CIA experience as authority: his expertise was counter-terrorism, not "normal" crime, and he defended the use of drone strikes and torture.

Their evidence is: "the firms we spoke with believe the unseen illicit activity is relatively small". That's it. The confident conclusion that it's overstated doesn't even allow you to infer if it's more or less than 50%; it doesn't even say which statistic they actually used.

If it's total percentage of transactions or sum of traded bitcoins, that isn't even that important: you can amass a small fortune in just a handful of transactions, whereas trading bitcoin for investment generates many more transactions, all completely irrelevant to the influence of bitcoin on crime.

There are other quotes from experts available, such as “Bitcoin — and virtual currency in general — is widely used in the trafficking of weapons and drugs, and in ransomware and extortion cases. It is used a lot by criminals.”

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