421–430 of 1001 posts
There 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…
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It sounds great, but every time I see this argument, I end up going down the rabbit hole of actually studying how stablecoins operate. And every time, I come to the same conclusion: they always rely on trust in an off-chain oracle or custodian. At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent. Bitcoin (and possibly a few others) is one of…
> a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent. Stablecoin is not a technology. It's an excuse. An excuse to do what banks do while not being regulated like a bank or using the infrastructure banks use. Similar to how Airbnb is not a technology but an excuse to do what hotels do without hotel's license. So it makes no sense to compare it to database,…
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What banks are those? The debit card issuer is a non-bank issuer on the Visa payment network. LN coins are self custody origin coins. No banks I see, except the grocery store’s on the other side of me. But soon they will accept LN directly in a few years or less.
Why would they ever bother? To serve a tiny percentage of their customer base that just ends up finding an already supported method anyway? Where exactly is the value for them?
The value proposition for everyone, consumer and vendors is both lower fees and ability to easily diversify their income/assets into non depreciating digital assets.
Somewhere there is a Steak n Shake presentation that explains their investment into accepting Bitcoin (via LN) has already paid for itself in fees.
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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…
Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo? I don't think that customers or businesses should see Tempo very much. In the success case, Tempo is a platform like SWIFT or ACH that others employ behind the scenes to orchestrate transactions. "Decentralized, internet-scale SWIFT" isn't exactly the right analogy (there are clearly lots of differences), but it's not totally wrong either. Why are…
These are slow by design - abuse/fraud. How does blockchain solve that issue?
> * Fees that are lower than cards. Card payments are instant, which is often valuable (and superior to many bank transfers), but card transactions are also expensive relative to stablecoins. (And while card authorization is instant, settlement is not.)
Once again - CCs are instant because the % fee pays for fraud and customer service. What is to stop centralized blockchains from incremently increasing fees to the level of CCs over time? ...nothing.
> Crypto is punishing if you make a mistake, but, if you do things correctly, reliability is all-but guaranteed.
Once again - this is a feature not a bug. Things are slow because of bureaucracy AND abuse, not JUST bureaucracy. Crypto is only beneficial today because the actors using it are savvy. When the laggards join, we'll just fall back to the norm.
FWIW - the banking system in the US is awful and the experience to transfer money into other fiat is just as abysmal. However I think crypto's current idealism is a factor of the parties involved, not the technology itself. We're just reinventing finance...it's just this time with Silicon Valley in control instead of Manhattan.
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Still doesn't answer why you would need any crypto here. Why can't the USD transferred to stripe just be a record in an SQL database saying customer X has N USD in the account, and transferring that around could be done instantly at zero cost by changing an sql row.
That sounds like banking or payment processing. Albeit with later Paypal has proven that you do not always need to return funds, but still there is regulatory history on that... Stable coins are new enough and have not catastrophically crashed yet so there is less oversight.
It's also a very open secret that the largest Tether stablecoin is not actually 1:1 backed with USD, as they very often claim https://paymentexpert.com/2025/07/24/tether-stablecoin-regul...
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it depends, regulators can still force validators to censor. I have kept up with the scene in a minute, but i remember builders and even some wallets were dropping tx from tornado cash because of some compliance issues, dont think the trump admin would care
You can have 99% of validators on Ethereum censor your transaction, and you'll still be eventually included. With 12 second block times, your transaction would be included in roughly 20 minutes.
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Still doesn't answer why you would need any crypto here. Why can't the USD transferred to stripe just be a record in an SQL database saying customer X has N USD in the account, and transferring that around could be done instantly at zero cost by changing an sql row.
That sounds like banking or payment processing. Albeit with later Paypal has proven that you do not always need to return funds, but still there is regulatory history on that... Stable coins are new enough and have not catastrophically crashed yet so there is less oversight.
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It sounds great, but every time I see this argument, I end up going down the rabbit hole of actually studying how stablecoins operate. And every time, I come to the same conclusion: they always rely on trust in an off-chain oracle or custodian. At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent. Bitcoin (and possibly a few others) is one of…
> At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent. Except they are frequently _not_. I dislike crypto on principle, but you can't look at the exorbitant transfer fees and latency that a lot of banks charge for common transactions (Visa/MasterCard are especially bad) and say that crypto has no potential. Yes, it would be easier if we could…
How long is settlement for you and what are the fees. Are you talking about banks for credit card payment processors A business needs a processor which will take fee and add some delay