Stripe Crypto • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe Crypto

#351

Post by gonehome » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

Nathanael_M wrote: post #252

This is unrelated to the specific story, but as more and more companies and people I respect get involved with it, the more I realize I need to have a working knowledge of Crypto Currency so at the very least I can be involved in the discussion. Does anyone have any good resources for learning the building blocks/vocabulary of Crypto Currency?

This is the highest signal list I'm aware of on the topic: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/

For a book with more in the weeds details: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Technologies-C...

Re: Stripe Crypto

#352

Post by michaelsbradley » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

StewardMcOy wrote: post #328

michaelsbradley wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Yes, and it's definitely impressive, and I know this might seem like moving the goalposts, but the market cap of Beacon is very small compared to ETH Mainnet. More importantly, it's not _the_ ETH blockchain. Beacon may be working so well because PoS is optional. The people participating in Beacon have bought into PoS on a conceptual level and are working to make it work. When you're incentivized to, you can ignore th…

There's roughly USD $26 billion equivalent staked on Beacon, which puts it squarely in top-10 territory of crypto market caps, so I'm not sure why you consider it "very small", even compared to the ETH1 mainnet, but I guess "very/small" might be subjective.

While NFTs are a non-negligible component of trade volume on the Ethereum blockchain, numbers I've seen recently put monthly volumes of e.g. OpenSea in the single-digit USD billions equivalent. The daily volume of ETH is currently about USD $14 billion equivalent. I don't think the NFT marketplace is what's greasing the wheels.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#353

Post by vmception » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

the_gastropod wrote: post #231

vmception wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The questionable stable coins are 10% of the total market capitalization ($180bn) and even the worst , most fear addled estimates are that 90% of that is paid up capital, where dollars were exchanged directly to create an equivalent stablecoin, and a large portion of it is overcollateralized. The people just wish that was 100%, in the case of Tether. Strawman arguments are interesting, because usually it involves cre…

Hmm. I'm not sure I follow. My point was two-fold: 1. Market capitalization is fairly meaningless, especially when you don't know how much money is changing hands (wash trading, for example, is rampant in the crypto world). I'm confused why you're citing market caps, again, to try to suggest stable coins don't play a significant role in crypto's liquidity. That doesn't make any sense. 2. Liquidity is very much lackin…

> Market capitalization is fairly meaningless

I agree with that. Marketcap + Volume can still be compared to other assets. Determining how much is wash trading versus something else is unfalsifiable in crypto, the nature of transactions cannot be determined with only a limited analysis available on centralized and decentralized exchanges. But not the unlit markets, or the nature of transactional demand.

Compared to currencies, crypto assets function similarly with M0 and M1 being the tiny liquid cash thats actually moving and M2 and M3 being the illiquid much larger aspect of the currency. It requires a completely new standard to criticize crypto assets based on the exact same observation.

Compared to securities and commodities, crypto's much lower marketcap and high volume (see my first paragraph for why I don't mind the volume) is a great proportion. So, in your two-fold point, there still must be some standard for relative comparison, what would your alternative be? I choose market capitalization, understanding that a significant portion of it is relevant to value transferred from other financial ecosystems directly for exchange of the crypto asset, supporting its valuation much better than a low float asset we make in a spreadsheet.

> Liquidity is very much lacking in the crypto world

Its pretty decent. The unlit markets are bigger than the lit ones. Any OTC desk can corroborate that. Someone trying to swap in and out can use both the lit markets and the darkpools. For the size of the market, crypto's liquidity again relatively great. Of course, I see how paradoxical it is to mention "size" of the market, again, but you're not leaving me with much in the English language to work with for relative comparison. Although its totally fine for me. The market works for me.

> Stable coins were developed not in a vacuum, but precisely because liquidity was so lacking.

Although I disagree with the liquidity issue, I don't ... care about this distinction? I consider stablecoins to fulfill a market need and are crypto assets, the market noticed and used them, some of the biggest ones are currently surrogates of fiat assets. Liquidity begets liquidity, so anything that attracts liquidity is a net good to me. I don't consider the crypto space to "need" them, I consider the market to have chosen the thing that fulfilled a need, and that grows/grew the market.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#354

Post by wahnfrieden » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

QuikAccount wrote: post #320

almostkorean wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it a shit way of supporting artists? I have seen some fraud like you describe, but I think it makes a lot of sense for digital only artists.

The fraud I describe makes it a shit way of supporting artist. As for digital only artist, there are plenty of non-NFT ways to support them. Commissions, Patreon, and merch to name a few.

Have fun living and getting ahead off some $30 tshirt sales / supporting the artists you like that way

Re: Stripe Crypto

#355

Post by therealdrag0 » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

shafyy wrote: post #333

StewardMcOy wrote: post #131

It's very strange seeing the option near the bottom of the page to donate a fraction of your revenue from Stripe Crypto to carbon recapture efforts. I agree with Stripe that, at this point, the solution to our climate problems must include carbon recapture, but it's not an ideal situation to be in. Businesses entering the crypto space always seem to tout carbon offsets and sidechains that use less energy, but offsets…

Stripe doesn't give two shits about the environment. It's just good PR. If they did, they would know that investing money in carbon recapture is not an effective way to combat climate change. I've had it up to here with people trying to find a technofix to all our problems. It's much more simple than that.

You think “carbon captures” is better PR than alternatives that do work such that they picked this instead? Or you think they just pulled it out of a hat? Or is your explanation just not that good?

Re: Stripe Crypto

#356

Post by Gwypaas » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #341

quadrifoliate wrote: post #166

It is important to recognize that Stripe is largely selling well-made shovels for the gold rush here. They have a history of diving more deeply into this market [1] and withdrawing from it before [2], so this is just Take 2. This time around, they are not themselves buying Cube Thingies or similar and don't have any exposure to the volatile world of ETH or other coins. I think there will be decent transfer of money f…

I have a friend of a friend who has a really low salary (think less than $500/month - third-world country) who spends 1/3 of his income on LoL digital items. Knowing that really changed my perspective on the viability of NFT. It's more addictive than digital stuff that you buy but can't sell. Now you can buy to maybe sell for a higher price in the future. That should increase engagement and the user base. It is still…

It's really attempt 2.0 and some sprinkles of "you may get rich" on the steam market with a hugely more inefficient system, which you can't even showcase in game to your friends. All the while the gas fees causing a constant drain on any transaction.

Try looking how many pages you need click through before you emerge from the minimum $0.03. The market for digital "art" is a hard one, because scarcity can only centrally be enforced.

https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?appid=730#p1_price_...

Re: Stripe Crypto

#357

Post by quadrifoliate » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

cuteboy19 wrote: post #264

wahnfrieden wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interest in web3 + art is from finding new livable income sources for artists generally. Less about big money speculation, more about getting more artists supported such that they don’t need a day job or purely commercial art pursuits (as opposed to “fine art”). I understand the current state of crypto isn’t near offering this outside of hyped speculative investments I’m also not interested in ideas on a shelf tha…

Unfortunately most new NFT projects are computer generated (no humans need apply). They have basically figured out that paying an actual human for the art is not needed when people will just buy cg art for the same price. There is one that just minted RGB colors. Its reddit AMA was pretty hilarious actually. Those that do include human art have a strong tendency to just lift uncredited art from Pinterest or deviantar…

Yeah, this is kind of what I meant by it being hard to project the combination of artisanship and rarity. I suppose that I personally would pay some money for beautiful programmatically generated art too, but that's probably a very niche market.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#358

Post by mattdesl » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

StewardMcOy wrote: post #196

elefanten wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “ecological damage” is a rounding error and being mitigated in several ways. This is not a serious concern for cryptocurrency, despite how often and blindly its repeated.

This is not a convincing argument, but even if it were, carbon recapture is currently even more of a "rounding error" in the grand scheme of carbon emissions. Current carbon emissions are somewhere around 50 billion metric tons a year. I've seen varying estimates of crypto emissions, so I'm going to cite one [1] on the low end here, since it's more favorable to your argument, but the highest I've seen is less than do…

Perhaps worth clarifying: emissions are tied to hash rate (and price action), not transaction count which is effectively capped by limited block space. Your post makes it seem that Stripe’s service getting used will quickly increase emissions, but if ETH price and hash rate drops significantly in the coming months, the emissions would also follow suit regardless of transaction count.

I agree though, the tech is currently immature and energy inefficient, and Stripe could have committed to PoS chains (eg: Tezos) if they really wanted to avoid bearing any additional emissions responsibility.

Personally I am happy to see this service, as I currently have to rather painfully roll my own crypto-commerce stack to support ERC20/ETH as a payment option in my business operations, and I would rather a well-engineered product to remove some of this overhead.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#359

Post by Gwypaas » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

Tenoke wrote: post #307

OGWhales wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With NFTs they can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely How does that work? Also, what is to stop people copying it anyway and what is to stop artist from getting underpaid? All serious questions that I'd like to see answers to but don't understand how NFTs would solve any of them.

Ownership transfer is done by a function call. The function often has extra logic like % of the funds for the transfer going to the artist. I guess you can cheat by sending a small amount in the transfer and seperately paying the seller the rest but then you make the thing you bought seem cheaper in the official records so that's in most cases counter-productive.

So I guess the next goal here is a startup to implement this as a smart contract to go full circle. The market will do it because any transaction fee is a hindrance to it's liquidity and is a possibility to undercut someone else.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#360

Post by z3c0 » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

VHRanger wrote: post #257

drdrey wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you limit your scope to digital art? There are plenty of other potential applications, from tickets, music and gaming to gumroad-like marketplaces

This had been discussed a lot of times. All of those proposed uses are better served by regular databases When crypto proposes something that *is*, rather than something that *could be* people will stop considering it as a big casino.

> All those proposed uses are better served by databases

I've often wondered how NFT's would fare in a situation like Diablo 3's colossal failure of a marketplace, where people could sell their rare items to other players. The whole concept broke, because "rare" doesn't mean anything when players can just flood the market with weapons created via modding. This seems to be exactly the use case NFT's are made for.

For the record - as a digital photographer - I find NFT's for art to be a laughable concept. Keeping possession of my raw files has always been a sufficient means of copy protection for me.