291–300 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a LOT more than that. You are still stuck in satoshi-era. Things have evolved quite a bit that it's no longer just a db sync
Yes. There's also a drug money laundering level (Monero, mixers, etc.) and a built-in scam enhancer (NFTs).
There are lots of crypto skeptics on HN (and we ourselves were disappointed with crypto's payments utility for much of the past decade), so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind over the past couple of years: we started to notice a lot of real-world businesses finding utility in stablecoins. For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing…
Compare and contrast L1 to FedNow. 1.5% vs $0.045 per credit transfer $0.01 per request for payment message $1.00 per liquidity management transfer Nice work if you can get it. BTW, it is crypto. So the promise that none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit is a provisional promise at best. Hyrum's Law argues an opposite future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm still unclear what the crypto really adds to this play. stripe customers need to move their money around, and they need a trusted source to hold money. stripe could just do that. why add crypto into the mix?
total shot in the dark, but im assuming there is much lower regulatory burden to holding lots of crypto than trying to be a bank
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the other comments are missing the point: using blockchain technology is a means to bypass regulation. That's it. That's always been the point of cryptocurrency.
Incorrect; it's to bypass the middlemen that create the links of trust between two parties exchanging money. That was the point of Bitcoin from the start. (The many other crypto coins since then are mostly BS freud.)
Whether or not it was the point of Bitcoin from the start, "removing the middlemen" is bullshit because you still need exchanges, wallet providers, people running nodes, etc. Cryptocurrency in practice just transfers power from traditional middlemen to new technically-advantaged middlemen.
How ironic. Why would anyone trust you over bitcoin, which has been around for decades?
Stablecoins are way better, albeit on more decentralized chains like Ethereum.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just an attempt at obfuscating the governance for non-technical regulators to think it's beyond the control of stripe. It's the game that all these L1s are doing, participating in the minimum amount of decentralized theater in order to evade regulations.
Given my past experiences trying to get EU-compliant invoices for Stripe transactions this is unfortunately also how I feel about the situation. This decentralization has immediate benefits for plausible deniability.
> EVM-compatible, built on Reth Anyone know what this actually means? Both literally (what is Reth?) and what it means qualitatively: are Stripe’s crypto efforts competing with Ethereum or strengthening it?
Reth is a rust implementation of the EVM used for running nodes, made by a very prominent research and venture group.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they are legally barred to doing the same thing in USD. Which is exactly what’s going to happen to this once enough people actually use it.
Many skeptics assume that stablecoins are just about regulatory arbitrage. That's part of it, but: 1. Progress often depends on evolving obsolete regulation. Uber works much better than taxis (once upon a time, people could "call a dispatcher" an hour in advance, wait on hold, etc) and yet in the early years they had to work around taxi regs. 2. Blockchains are a fundamentally more robust way to run a ledger. If any…
My hang-up with crypto is that it solves the ledger-keeping part of running a financial system, but it isn't clear that's actually the hard part! Preventing and remediating fraud, money laundering, etc. are, and crypto makes those issues worse, not better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not. One way of thinking about a blockchain is to think of it as a shared datastructure to keep databases in sync. Any time you want to distribute your database over more than just a single central place, in a cryptographically secure way, you're probably going to re-invent a blockchain to do it.
> One way of thinking about a blockchain is to think of it as a shared datastructure to keep databases in sync. Any time you want to distribute your database over more than just a single central place, in a cryptographically secure way, you're probably going to re-invent a blockchain to do it. Even more specifically, a blockchain is for when you want Byzantine fault tolerance, i.e. you don't trust one or more of the…
Often yes. But also blockchain's can be useful simply for backups and scaling: by cryptographically linking every bit of data together you can be confident that you actually have a complete copy without any errors.
Git is basically a blockchain for this exact reason: starting from a git commit hash, git works backwards, checking that every byte of data is what it should be. Similarly, modern filesystems like btrfs use strong (if not cryptographically strong) hashes for this same reason.
Though in a sense, you're still correct: the "actor" you aren't trusting here is your own computer hardware.
Here's the play. It's very simple, and it's quite good. Stripe processes a LOT of money. The customers that get that money need to move it around. Often to banks. Stripe makes no money on that. Over the last few years, stablecoins have become a preferred means to hold and move money (for convenience, etc). Stablecoin providers make money on their float -- selling stablecoins means you get free deposits, and risk-free…
i'm still unclear what the crypto really adds to this play. stripe customers need to move their money around, and they need a trusted source to hold money. stripe could just do that. why add crypto into the mix?
Part of the very high level play is the US Govt seeks to diversify away from depending on nation states for borrowing, and to promote tech companies to the status of reserve holders.
This doesn't add much to the consumer however. I think in fact we are looking at a "fragmented currency" future where you hold like 36 different stablecoins in your wallet because certain platforms accept certain stablecoins. The GENIUS act doesn't offer strict guarantees for getting out of a stablecoin into USD, so I predict dark patterns and "incentives" to make it hard to get out of a stablecoin.