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PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

financemagnates.com

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Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#31

Post by PragmaticPulp »

jyu wrote: post #16

Remember that there are people behind these decisions and they are largely rational actors. Someone at PayPal is getting a big promotion and bonus from pushing this deal. If crypto goes nowhere and they shut down this project, then it can be rationalized as "getting in too early" or some other "unforeseen externality" that happened, totally out of their control. But the promotion and risk taking executive will have s…

Anything cryptocurrency related is very hot in the fintech investing space right now. Companies don’t necessarily think that crypto is going to supplant traditional currencies, but they do salivate over the unbelievably high fees that cryptocurrency business can charge their customers.

If you’re a stock brokerage, $0 trades are the cost of doing business these days. Meanwhile, companies like Coinbase are more than 60X more profitable than traditional exchanges simply because the industry hasn’t become a race to the bottom (yet). Bitcoin remains popular despite the fact that it costs $10 or more per transaction. There are huge opportunities for companies to come in and create ways to transact in Bitcoin-denominated transactions without touching the blockchain or L2 networks.

They’ll gladly collect exchange fees in both directions, because exchange fees are profitable whereas moving money around is not. As much as we hear about cryptocurrency upending the traditional banking system, having an environment where users have to deal with all of the complexities of managing, holding, exchanging, and transacting with crypto is a dream come true for financial companies who thrive on extracting a couple percent here and there at every friction point in the system.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#32

Post by nassycheezy »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #19
nassycheezy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built a similar product for a well-known company in the space (and competitor to this company & Coinbase) and co-led the development of the crypto custody at Novi (Blockchain subsidary of Facebook). Happy to answer more questions though they do not provide much insight into their technology publicly. Curv provides MPC-based crypto custody solution wi. I'll be over-simplifying but they allow private keys that pro…

> Happy to answer more questions... Does these kind of solutions work for every cryptocurrencies? For example does is support Bitcoin? Or is this something that needs some kind of smart contract like those provided by Ethereum? And another question: what about optionally fully anonymous transaction as in ZCash, does the scheme work to sign tx done using ZK proofs too? Or fully anonymous ones, like David Chaum's upcom…

So there are lots of papers and work that has been done for MPC over ECDSA, EdDSA and Schnorr (that covers the majority of the crypto-currencies). MPC unfortunately sounds unfair to me at the moment because it's not widely available for retail in a production-grade state afaik.

The only blockchain-native mechanism that's getting more popular but unfortunately not supported everywhere yet is multi-sig. I consider multi-sig equivalent in term of security to MPC in practice. Bitcoin and many blockchains supports multi-sig addresses (ethereum does this through smart contracts but is still very much a native feature).

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#33

Post by PragmaticPulp »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #25

I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

Cryptocurrency isn’t going away, but it’s dishonest to pretend that it’s not without major problems such as the energy consumption issues. The popular narrative has also become almost indistinguishable from a pump scheme, where we’re all supposed to buy and home (never sell) until we’re all rich.

If cryptocurrency becomes commonplace, it likely won’t look anything like our current crypto infrastructure. The problem is that this isn’t what all of the current holders want to hear, because they only want people to buy into whatever crypto they personally hold. This makes it difficult to have honest conversations because so many of the participants are biased toward convincing others to buy into their investment while ignoring anything else.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#34

Post by nassycheezy »

maayank wrote: post #17
nassycheezy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built a similar product for a well-known company in the space (and competitor to this company & Coinbase) and co-led the development of the crypto custody at Novi (Blockchain subsidary of Facebook). Happy to answer more questions though they do not provide much insight into their technology publicly. Curv provides MPC-based crypto custody solution wi. I'll be over-simplifying but they allow private keys that pro…

The difference between multi-sig and no private key is that the former is an implementation of the blockchain protocol (e.g. different in Stellar and Ethereum) while the latter is a generic algorithm/service. Different layer.

Yes, I just meant that in practice the risks are the same from a security perspective (and most legit blockchains support multi-sig at this point), especially for the shares so I wouldn't call it 'no private key' :D

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#35

Post by PragmaticPulp »

This seems like a clear “sell picks and shovels” play. With more and more companies rushing to add crypto to their services offering to capture some of the highly profitable exchange rate and other fees, it makes sense to provide services to securely hold crypto for these companies.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#36

Post by f430 »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #25

I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

The ponzi scheme will end one day and it will continue to be traded OTC without a way to redeem it for fiat.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#37

Post by ceilingcorner »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33
ceilingcorner wrote: post #25

I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

Cryptocurrency isn’t going away, but it’s dishonest to pretend that it’s not without major problems such as the energy consumption issues. The popular narrative has also become almost indistinguishable from a pump scheme, where we’re all supposed to buy and home (never sell) until we’re all rich. If cryptocurrency becomes commonplace, it likely won’t look anything like our current crypto infrastructure. The problem i…

Lots of things have environmental problems. I don’t understand why Bitcoin mining gets singled out for it. If the benefits of using it outweigh the downsides, then I don’t see the issue.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#38

Post by trident5000 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33
ceilingcorner wrote: post #25

I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

Cryptocurrency isn’t going away, but it’s dishonest to pretend that it’s not without major problems such as the energy consumption issues. The popular narrative has also become almost indistinguishable from a pump scheme, where we’re all supposed to buy and home (never sell) until we’re all rich. If cryptocurrency becomes commonplace, it likely won’t look anything like our current crypto infrastructure. The problem i…

I can name 10 other uses of energy that could be categorized as "wasteful" which is completely subjective. From large homes with the AC cranked, to rendering of pointless video on youtube and social apps, to destination aeroplane travel, idle electronics, etc.

BTC for many is a way to stop central banks from eroding their lifetime savings which they paid for with their physical labor and time. Thats not a waste of energy in my opinion.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#39

Post by janandonly »

seibelj wrote: post #24
jyu wrote: post #16

Remember that there are people behind these decisions and they are largely rational actors. Someone at PayPal is getting a big promotion and bonus from pushing this deal. If crypto goes nowhere and they shut down this project, then it can be rationalized as "getting in too early" or some other "unforeseen externality" that happened, totally out of their control. But the promotion and risk taking executive will have s…

Crypto has been around for 12 years and has gone from zero to well over $1 trillion mcap. I doubt it will go back to zero.

You misspelled “bitcoin” there. Bitcoin has existed for 12 years now and gone over 1 trillion dollars.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#40

Post by anonAlways »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #25

I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

>But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me.

Every social platform with upvote / downvote moderation will trend to groupthink over time as the losers are pushed out.

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