431–440 of 1001 posts
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In EU, regulations are heavy and the result is I can send money instantly for free. That’s actually what the regulations are for. To protect free trade from bad actors.
Try sending money to a supplier in Iran or Russia and tell me how helpful those EU regulations are.
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In EU, regulations are heavy and the result is I can send money instantly for free. That’s actually what the regulations are for. To protect free trade from bad actors.
Try sending money to a supplier in Iran or Russia and tell me how helpful those EU regulations are.
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In this case, Stripe is adding themselves as a middleman. Whether or not it was the point of Bitcoin from the start, "removing the middlemen" is bullshit because you still need exchanges, wallet providers, people running nodes, etc. Cryptocurrency in practice just transfers power from traditional middlemen to new technically-advantaged middlemen.
The middleman that bitcoin is cleaved from is banks (that have control over all balances and transactions), and payment processors (same controls). Previously these were required unless you handed physical cash to someone. Now electronic transactions are free of those controls and the associated risk. Exchanges are not bitcoin, you can transact freely without them. Wallet providers are not bitcoin, they are 100% opti…
Miners now replace this since there is a network fee required to transact.
I'm not sure what the current state of affair is, but ETH gas fees were egregious last time I transacted ETH.
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> 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,…
Personally, I think US banking needs something an Uber or AirBnB style shake-up to get their act in order. It's awful how behind the times the US is when it comes to banking. 2 - 3 days to get money from one account to another is beyond embarrassing in the modern day. It took the US something like 15 years to get chip-and-pin. Banks are still these monolithic entities that don't care to innovate or listen to customer…
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>But, if the use case for crypto keeps being fostering illegal transactions then it doesn’t solve anything a functioning economy needs. In many countries what the economy needs to function well includes things that are illegal.
Which means it will only ever be a tiny niche market since the amounts are irrelevant when the service is needed. Then as the country’s economy develops the need for these illegal services disappear, or quickly gets you in trouble.
This is not necessarily the case given how large the online illegal drugs market is in pretty much every developed country. Just because weed was legalised, it doesn't mean all other narcotics will be legalised in future too.
I don't get it. Why does Stripe want to creatively ruin their reputation by venturing into crypto / blockchain? I don't see anyone in the real world using blockchains at all. I get AI as it was a real world paradigm shift, but I have never seen anything in this blockchain / crypto space that has reached 100-500 million users let alone 1 billion users, that isn't based on speculation.
Dorsey and Tobi (Shopify CEO) are insane crypto true believers. It feels like they're trying to realize some ancap dream of Randian ubermensch controlling the whole economy and being answerable to noone.
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It's still there though. Why not use it?
tech debt, plus the EVM ecosystem has morphed into something beautiful, and robust in the meantime. I.e. it doesn't make sense to use something that's so far behind industry standard
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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.
The processing fees are lower for vendors than credit card fees if they accept LN Bitcoin. For me the “savings” account is completely self custody held in a non-inflationary non-depreciating currency called Bitcoin.
Massive value for everyone by cutting out the legacy banks. As I said earlier, unless you actually do it, and use it, you won’t understand how rapidly crypto is embedding itself and likely will take over in next decade for sure.
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I’m as cynical about crypto as any sane person but I think you’re hand-waving away the challenges of international business. How can you transact in dollars if you’re a business in Argentina? As you say, if you’re operating in Europe, this is a solved problem, but lots of businesses are operating across borders that don’t have the same payment options. Banks could solve this problem but they haven’t and this is what…
SEPA also works easily because it's single currency for a single unified economic zone. If currency change was involved then you'd likely be back to routing through central banks or currency change banks and such.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
I don't know if I'd call that a "unified economic zone" without some qualifications.