Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stripe Crypto

stripe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 450 posts

Re: Stripe Crypto

#381

Post by almostkorean »

fivre wrote: post #339
almostkorean wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Royalties are built into marketplace smart contracts. Individuals can do P2P trades where the artist doesn't receive any royalty but this doesn't happen very often. Anecdotally, it typically only happens on large deals and people who do a P2P trade often send the artist their royalty anyway (but still benefit from not paying the OpenSea fees for example) Not sure what you mean by the second question

Wait, so the purported royalty benefit of wrapping this in a contract can be circumvented, but the NFT tech is still good because people who circumvent this kindly send the artist the royalty anyway? Would they not be able to send the same courtesy royalty if no NFTs were involved?

Not what I was trying to say at all, I'm saying that NFT tech is good because the default option is that the artist gets royalties and this happens probably >95% of the time?

I think I felt compelled to mention that people send it anyway because it's good behavior and not all scams/crimes people say it is. In general I think the royalty thing is just one nice bonus of using smart contracts

Re: Stripe Crypto

#382

Post by uoaei »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #355
shafyy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The alternative that does work is simple -- don't do crypto until the extreme carbon emissions are handled to a reasonable degree. It is clear that is not the case now. The end goal is vague but with due diligence you can keep mining crypto and the environment can keep at least some of its richness.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#383

Post by StewardMcOy »

joshmarlow wrote: post #327
StewardMcOy wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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)?

There are a few reasons I can think of. I'll be upfront about the iffiest of them. I philosophically don't like the notion of digital scarcity. I've blogged about it [1] before, but in short, capitalism is a pretty good system for dealing with scarcity in the physical world, but like any system, it doesn't work well for everyone. Cryptocurrencies can allow those who have been failed by the existing capitalist system to improve or worsen their situation, but they do so by introducing digital scarcity, which doesn't make more sense. Increasing the number of capitalistic systems on the Internet reinforces the capitalistic systems in the physical world, and I believe the flaws of capitalism can't be solved by more capitalism in the long term.

Secondly, renewables have been falling in price long before cryptocurrency mining picked up. The economics of renewables don't need the help.

But more realistically, as I alluded to upthread, blockchains don't only run on renewable spikes. Even if they ran on 100% renewables, that would mean solar panels, dams, and wind/wave farms would be rolled out specifically for mining. There's also the mining rigs that are constructed. That equals rare earth mineral mining, manufacturing, and transportation of resources for the sole purpose of cryptocurrency mining, and those actions all have environmental consequences.

When those consequences are in furtherance of something that I think is a net negative for society, I'd rather have the resources used for something else.

[1] https://meipouchou.com/blog/web3-metaverse-lain/

Re: Stripe Crypto

#384

Post by dougb5 »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #315
atlantas wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely. Too bad this hadn't been invented when Ted Nelson was alive.

You scared me. He is very much still alive. (Or do you know something I don't?)

Re: Stripe Crypto

#385

Post by StewardMcOy »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #352
StewardMcOy wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't mean to imply that NFTs were the biggest economic driver of ETH, but rather that they occupy the zeitgeist. There are systems that are successful because they are successful. If you look at Bitcoin, ETH, and a couple other altcoins, they are much more popular than all the other blockchains out there, and are seen as much more important than other blockchains. They have a perceived legitimacy and large numbers of people participating that other cryptocurrencies do not. Due to the nature of human attention and competition, there's room for a handful of cryptocurrencies in this space, and the rest, including Beacon, will never garner the same kind of attention or participation unless they replace one of the big ones.

When you have way more forces in the market, many who aren't motivated by making it work, I think that's where PoS has some real weaknesses, and I don't think we'll see practical attacks against it until one of the important ones goes PoS.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#386

Post by StewardMcOy »

rvz wrote: post #373
StewardMcOy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said in my original post, it would be great if that happened. I'm skeptical proof-of-stake will work at scale. If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work. They damage they're doing in the meantime is more detrimental than their recapture efforts are beneficial.

> If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work. Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto? Since that is a blockchain that is not only more eco-friendly [0] and many times faster than both Ethereum and Bitcoin put together but one can use right now today rather than waiting for Ethereum Proof-of-S…

> Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto?

This would be a great argument if Solana were the only cryptocurrency that Stripe was supporting, or if Stripe was only supporting cryptocurrencies with similar carbon footprints, but the top image above the fold is a screenshot of using Stripe to purchase Bitcoin. ETH and other PoW blockchains are also featured on the page.

My core argument is that supporting PoW blockchains does more damage than their carbon recapture efforts reduce. The presence of Solana in the list doesn't invalidate that.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#387

Post by wahnfrieden »

Nextgrid wrote: post #367
wahnfrieden wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The only reason NFTs sell for more is because of the hype and the likelihood of there being some bigger sucker to resell it to at an inflated price. This won't last forever and then you'll end up with the same same 30$ t-shirt-like prices but in NFT land. The "art" and "artist" involved is irrelevant here - what matters is that you have something that the current market has a lot of demand for.

fwiw I’m interested to explore the $30 NFT price point with a broader project (not pfp or 1/1 or jpeg stuff) and am a lot more optimistic for it than trying to deliver as much value or as little ecological impact with tshirt merch. I think you’re focused on the speculative peaks of what’s going on now, or only what’s happening within eth

Re: Stripe Crypto

#388

Post by uoaei »

unreal37 wrote: post #324
colesantiago wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask Elon's manipulation tactics of that specific dog coin and it's derivatives like SHIB. All scams.

You keep using the word scam. I don't think it means what you think it means. ;) 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.

It's not a scam as long as you stay in crypto-space. Then one token equals one token and there is no concept of value beyond that.

It is a scam in the traditional sense of failing to deliver expected value, since we want crypto to carry value and thus people still expect to be able to use crypto to buy things. The rub is that prices of things are still typically tied to fiat currencies, even if expressed as crypto prices. E.g., buying eggs with crypto depends on the price of the eggs, which is almost always controlled by the global economic order which is essentially governed by the (petro-)dollar, because of the economies of scale that have grown around egg production and distribution.

The only reason any plausible deniability still exists about this basic feature of the crypto space is that crypto does not concern itself with participation in economies of scale, and the prices set in crypto-space are essentially just in crypto-space (even if all the reporting equates buys of NFTs, etc. to equivalent fiat amounts).

One could say this is the ideal, but when the source of that value-as-expressed-in-crypto is value-as-expressed-in-dollars, you are siphoning realizable value from naive folks in a way that is functionally indistinguishable from a scam.

Re: Stripe Crypto

#389

Post by wahnfrieden »

goosedragons wrote: post #316
wahnfrieden wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs don’t need to be as expensive as that, that’s only because currently all attention is on high-priced eth ecosystem Patreon is also a huge rent seeker, we can do better for artist direct payment Patreon is not passive income - people expect regular updates and special work/insight for private audience In terms of consistency, meat space has big issues with accessibility and reach Lastly you can look at the result…

I never said Patreon is passive income but it's consistent. The artist gets money for their output every month. People are only going to pay so long as they feel they get value. Unlike a subscription for rarely updated software you can still use that Wallpaper you got from being a patreon even if you're not subbed anymore. NFTs aren't passive either nor are they consistent. The whole point of NFTs is the scarcity asp…

Scarcity of ownership not necessarily access

Re: Stripe Crypto

#390

Post by hutzlibu »

rosndo wrote: post #378
hutzlibu wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"By choosing to only have an EC card" That was the standard normal card, I had ever since with that account - which is what all the people around me have - but it does work all across europe, in every shop I went. Paypal is fine with it, so is coinbase. And every other online service I used. (while backpacking international, I indeed had a credit card at that time) So I recently only got a credit card(again), to be a…

> but it does work all across europe, in every shop I went. That’s because deep inside it’s secretly something like a mastercard maestro, no? Why don’t you just get a “normal” card from N26 or similar? I used to have one of these weird not-visa not-mastercard debit cards, trying to use it internationally was just asking for trouble.

"That’s because deep inside it’s secretly something like a mastercard maestro, no?"

Maybe? There is a maestro sign on it, but it is not a debit card.

But my point was, that I do not know, nor want to know all the details of banking communication. I want it to work.

It is a normal card around here and it does work in europe. So I never had the need to change, until now. So now I have a credit card, too and that is fine for me. But most other people here still don't, as most do not do international transactions.

So if Stripe wants to get into that market, they likely will have to adopt. No one here would offer stripe on their webshop - with only a few being able to use it.

Post reply on HN