321–330 of 450 posts
Oh please. Long time Stripe fan and customer here - this makes me sad from the inside. They even mention NFT marketplaces - scams all over the places. Why would they want to support use cases like that?
> Why would they want to support use cases like that? Money? They are a business
with poor ethics
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stripe is largely selling well-made shovels for the gold rush here. ... This time around, they ... don't have any exposure to the volatile world of ETH or other coins. Which is... even more evil? They're encouraging an externality which harms normal people but not them.
They're not encouraging crypto anymore than a liquor store encourages alcoholism. The liquor store may lower the barrier to entry for obtaining a bottle of alcohol, but it's ultimately the alcoholics choice to enter the store and purchase it. Offering a product is not evil or immoral. It may be amoral but that's not the same as immoral. Ultimately the market decides what stays and goes except in extraordinary circums…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how this applies to their crypto offering, but: > Stripe currently does not support users located in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. While users with direct or indirect activities involving Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are not broadly considered prohibited by Stripe at this time, all major credit card networks have announced that they are ceasing services to Russian financial institutions. Additionally, Str…
Why the fsck would they block Ukrainians? Makes no sense.
[1] https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/moving-money-international...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> isn't a pyramid scheme BitConnect was an actual Ponzi scheme. I don't see how buying my coffee with DOGE counts as a "predatory investment opportunity."
Ask Elon's manipulation tactics of that specific dog coin and it's derivatives like SHIB. All scams.
If two people want to send some bits between each other, and they both know what they're doing, it's not a scam. It may be risky, it may be unwise, it may be speculation... but scams involve deception between the receiver and the sender. And crypto is equivalent to dollars in this sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How to participate in crypto? Just head to a privately owned exchange that might be traded at a stock exchange! Alternatively use a startup service that in turn relies on a privately owned backend that might as well go public at any point.
Or get to localcrypto, localbitcoin, localmonero and find a peer who is willing to give you crypto for your cash.
Just last year Stripe wouldn't even allow any crypto business to be their customers. You could not use Stripe if you business was crypto related. A client of mine had to switch implementation to checkout.com because of that. I wonder what changed...
Yep. Until very recently, we weren't able to support businesses selling crypto. (The regulatory details are complex.) We're now rolling out support and this page is basically about that change.
My sense is it's more about the window shifting enough that it's palatable enough for a Stripe product team to stake their professional rep on now. "If Twitter and Square are doing it..."
To an extent, I wonder what the impact of the SEC ruling for BlockFi (crypto exchange) did to clarify the regs for larger companies like Stripe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the energy usage of Proof-of-Stake systems like Bitcoin does seem embarrassingly excessive at first glance, I think there's more nuance here than it first may appear. One of the problems with renewables is that they are spike-y and there's a limit to how much you can control the spike. When renewable sources peak, they can put more energy into the grid than the grid can safely handle (too much power can cause d…
If that were the only energy used for blockchains, then that would definitely eliminate the environmental arguments against cryptocurrencies, but I doubt you could run large blockchains on only renewable spikes. Even then, if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs.
I don't exactly disagree - with better storage tech, we could put the energy to more immediate uses. But why postpone improving the economics of renewables until we have better battery tech (which has an unknown timeline)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm following the progress. I don't like estimating release dates for other peoples' work, but I wouldn't be surprised if your EOY estimate is correct. The biggest concern I have though, is that you can run as many testsnets as you want, but that doesn't mean the rollout is going to survive contact with the enemy. I'm very pessimistic that PoS can replace PoW in real-world usage. Once everyone is on the PoS ETH, I su…
The Ethereum PoS Beacon Chain mainnet (it’s not a testnet) has been running since December 2020: currently over 300k validator are active, with nearly 10 million “real money” ETH staked. https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconscan.com/
Once ETH tries to get everyone into PoS, that's where I think problems start.
If ETH weren't so established right now through the NFT marketplace, I might suspect you'd see a jump to other blockchains, like Bitcoin, that are still on PoW. Since it is established, I worry that people will try to make it work for a few years, but it ultimately won't work, and ETH Mainnet will either be forced to revert to PoW or lose popularity to another fork.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>IMO if you encounter any non-technical artist "excited" about NFTs, tell them to stay the hell away, or risk being seen a bad friend. Fuck that, despite me being incredibly skeptical of NFTs I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge the fact that some of my non-technical artist friends have earned 6-7 figure amounts selling NFTs.
6-7 figure amounts selling something of no worth to people who on average do not have any comprehension of it and which opens them up to fraud and scams. Great. If an artist friend of mine sells an NFT I am going to struggle with continuing to see them as a friend, because it's morally bankrupt. If a non-technical artist comes to you and asks for help selling an entirely phantom product to their presumably only-avera…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a solved problem: you pay them for their work, which is how artists have made money since time immemorial. The degree to which artists can make a living off their art is a function of demand and discoverability, not whether they have a payment system (they do need this, but they already have them). I'd be curious to know what fraction of NFT enthusiasts had previously commissioned a piece of art, and of those…
In the current system when an artist creates something and sells it, they typically get paid once, often lowballed. The buyer may turn around and sell it for 100x. The buyer made far more than the artist, who gets nothing in this scenario. With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.