Would very much appreciate a comparison to USDT and USDC, both of which seem to have become more legitimate in recent times
Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
381–390 of 1001 posts
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#382This is off-topic to their grand blockchain adventures, but I need to mention it: I would love for stripe to start paying appropriate VAT on transactions between their merchants and EU citizens, I've been on their ass about it for nearly a year now. I've reported multiple merchants to them which simply refused to provide an VAT invoice for any transactions. Legally, merchants outside EU are required to pay VAT on the…
People on HN fighting for the EU VAT clusterfuck ... wasn't on my Bingo card.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#383I think it's more like "SWIFT but using blockchain" instead of Bitcoin competitor. Regardless of that, I wonder how's Bitcoin/ETH's market value with the introduction of Tempo? Since it's like the better version (if you don't mind oligarchy)
Gold and Visa don't compete so I would say Bitcoin and Tempo don't compete either.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of us are not really deep into the finance space. Maybe there's a good reason it's left unsaid, but the question I came away with after reading that page and this comment is, why are businesses finding crypto easier/faster/better? To me, it's not 100% clear exactly who Tempo is for and not for, and why blockchain is more suitable than traditional centralized database technology here. And it sounds like this sys…
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.
You say tomato I say removing the levers of power from world governments who have proven time and time again that they can't help but pull them to help themselves
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the technology of blockchain is irrelevant. If something can be accomplished on the blockchain, which requires N nodes, a business can probably replicate that same objective with less than N nodes because they don't have to pay the cost of verifying that nodes are acting honestly. This business is incentivized to be honest because otherwise they lose their business. Someone has to pay those costs for the N no…
The most important aspect of blockchain that is relevant here is that your counterparty half a world away and you both agree that you trust the state of this blockchain, and thus can transact on it. For business running the same code on their 1 node instead of N is not a replacement, because their counterparty has no reason to trust whatever is running on that 1 node. Your reasoning re: N nodes are expensive is also…
> For business running the same code on their 1 node instead of N is not a replacement, because their counterparty has no reason to trust whatever is running on that 1 node
I mean, why are you doing this kind of business with someone where you can't even trust that?
Aside from that, block chains only provide trust if they're meaningfully decentralized. These hyper specific b2b ones seem unlikely to pass that test. Exactly who all is running verifier nodes?
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#386There 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…
A lot of us are not really deep into the finance space. Maybe there's a good reason it's left unsaid, but the question I came away with after reading that page and this comment is, why are businesses finding crypto easier/faster/better? To me, it's not 100% clear exactly who Tempo is for and not for, and why blockchain is more suitable than traditional centralized database technology here. And it sounds like this sys…
The status quo of cross-border, bank-to-bank money movement today is actually somewhat decentralized:
- SWIFT is really just a messaging protocol between a distributed, decentralized set of global banks that are all passing messages/money between each other. Your SWIFT wire might pass through an arbitrary number of correspondent banks, sort of like a flight route with multiple stops, until it reaches its destination.
- Consequently: money moves slowly (up to 5 days), is expensive to move (variable fees assessed either to the payor or payee, by every bank in the chain), and there is an indeterminate amount of manual ops burden, multiplied by every bank in the chain.
- As another commenter points out - services like Wise really just use massive amounts of liquidity spread out globally to try to minimize the number of true, bank-to-bank cross-border settlements required to get low-value payments from A -> B internationally.
Ironically, I think the great accomplishment of stablecoins is its "centralizing" of cross-border money movement into a single ledger -- reducing it to a "book transfer" of sorts -- where getting all the world's money to pass through a single ledger would otherwise be a very difficult (probably intractable) challenge _if it were not for_ the permissionless-ness + global neutrality of the blockchain that is tasked with doing so.
(I wrote about this in a slightly longer post here: https://text-incubation.com/The+great+irony+of+stablecoin)
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll attempt an answer: Today, if you want to transact between businesses or retail (folks like you and I), you need to find a route between the two entities' banks. This route might take several hops, passing through some central banks, and some of these hops might be instant or might take days to actually settle. On top of that, you need to pay the service that helped you find a route (SWIFT) and potentially the no…
I think the technology of blockchain is irrelevant. If something can be accomplished on the blockchain, which requires N nodes, a business can probably replicate that same objective with less than N nodes because they don't have to pay the cost of verifying that nodes are acting honestly. This business is incentivized to be honest because otherwise they lose their business. Someone has to pay those costs for the N no…
> If something can be accomplished on the blockchain, which requires N nodes, a business can probably replicate that same objective with less than N nodes because they don't have to pay the cost of verifying that nodes are acting honestly. This business is incentivized to be honest because otherwise they lose their business.
This is missing something important, which we can see by considering one of the major problems merchants want to solve right now.
The credit card companies charge them ~3% and then give ~1% back to the customer, implying that there is a ~2% net gain to be had by cutting out the middle man. So why hasn't this happened? Because the alternative with the lower fees is ACH, but customers are less willing to give out their bank account number than their credit card number to a random small business.
This is the easy case for some centralized service to fix it, right? Have some large trustworthy company take the customer's bank account info and transfer the money to the merchant for a very small processing fee. But this is the part where your assumption falls through. Once the merchant has signed up for this, the payment processor is the only one with the customer's payment info. In other words, it's hard to switch, and then the payment processor can charge higher fees (eroding the benefit) and the high switching costs also cause the market to consolidate. And because you're tied to a single payment processor, when their fraud AI has a false positive they can erase your business overnight by locking you out and not answering the phone.
Now suppose you don't have a centralized system. Instead, the customer acquires a store of value (Bitcoin, stablecoin, something else) however they want. Customer A can get it from Coinbase, Customer B can get it from Stripe, Customer C can get it by selling something on eBay and accepting it as payment, and the merchant doesn't have to do business with any of these third parties to accept payments from customers who do, because they all support the same transfer medium.
Now you have a competitive market. Currently a new payment processor has to earn the trust of a large enough percentage of the general public for merchants to be willing to use them; a new exchange would only need the trust of enough people to be doing enough business to cover their costs, a far lower threshold. If a merchant wants to switch payment processors or has a dispute with one of them, their own customers wouldn't have to do anything different because the means customers use to convert dollars to tokens is independent of the means merchants use to convert tokens to dollars.
> Someone has to pay those costs for the N nodes on the blockchain - who will it be?
That's the boring question. The interesting question is, can you have a blockchain with lower fees than payment processors currently have? And the answer appears to be yes, e.g. the transaction fee for Bitcoin Cash is around a penny.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#388Blockchain people have always hated chargebacks, but any successful payment rail needs a system for dispute resolution.
I run e-commerce business and I’ve received bullshit chargebacks before. But I’m also a consumer and I’ve filed legitimate chargebacks before.
Related: I’ve also had my bank send money to the wrong place before.
There must be some means of reversing transactions in some cases. Some arbitration mechanism. Some dispute resolution procedure. Some means of doing escrow.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#389Earlier 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?
So many of the crypto skeptic comments on this story are massively out of touch with the products and sophistication of the crypto industry. For those of us who aren’t, the question has basically been flipped to “what does a bank add to this situation?” . I’m typing this shortly after buying my groceries with a visa debit card that was funded 30 seconds before the transaction over Lightning Network with Bitcoin that…
That sounds like a needless pile of complicity and expense that offers literally zero value in return.
Crypto isn’t going to take over anything.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll attempt an answer: Today, if you want to transact between businesses or retail (folks like you and I), you need to find a route between the two entities' banks. This route might take several hops, passing through some central banks, and some of these hops might be instant or might take days to actually settle. On top of that, you need to pay the service that helped you find a route (SWIFT) and potentially the no…
So why can a traditional bank not solve this? In Europe you can wire money across borders for free, you just need to know the account number. Arrives in seconds at 0 cost. I feel like a lot of the fintech in the US is purely a result of a lack of regulation. For the example of Argentina, the real reason that business is using crypto is because their currency is unreliable. It might be a good fit there but trading in…
>in Europe you can wire money across borders for free
do you mean "electronic funds transfer"? because "wiring" is an old school thing that uses Telex machines and and gets processed by people and I would doubt it carries no fee. (It's probably been modernised so that people handle virtual slips of paper, but it very much carries the feel of an "order on a slip of paper" type of transaction and is far from instantaneous.)
I'm genuinely asking, I only know about the US systems where electronic funds transfer is known as ACH which is an automated clearing house, and wiring is called wiring. From the US, I can wire to European banks. I can't ACH.