Man i would like to see border less payments for evyerone.
One card works everywhere, every vendor, low transaction fee.
Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
461–470 of 1001 posts
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why not have a central bank currency that can be traded on the blockchain, especially since converting it to real money will still entail KYC? Because literally the only point is to avoid the existing banking system and you can do that with a postures database with much less cpu involved.
But with multiple parties involved, who has the rights to read and write to the postgres instance? How do we make sure transactions were not forged? How do we know data at rest is not being tampered with? Blockchain solves that. Newer blockchain protocols especially an L1 is much faster, easier on the environment, and provides all the immutability, transparency, and traceability benefits.
You know you can just use regular cryptography to validate data, right?
Also, you always have to trust someone, in this case Stripe.
Regarding L1 blockchains, how exactly do they solve the speed problem for a distributed global database that needs to be replicated everywhere for the security guarantees to actually work?
What do they forgo out of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem ?
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Banks have banded together to create Zelle for mostly instantaneous payments for individuals. As far as transactions between individuals, moving money quickly is a solved money. As for moving money from individuals to businesses, taking a long time gives customers more "float" and more time to earn interest, and it is a feature not a bug.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the case of Argentina, and similarly for my country, access to USD is fraught and often involves off-market transactions.
So transactions are difficult because they are illegal, and blockchain helps to facilitate crime? Are there other uses? Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases?
> Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases?
You are literally in a thread whose top post is the Stripe founder describing use cases.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What other countries are you comparing to? I did a multi year assignment in Germany and holy fucking hell does their banking system suck. It took weeks for my checks to be deposited and reconciliation times were longer. Not defending the US here by my only non-US banking experience was atrocious.
You take a bad example and compare it to another bad example. Germany is well known to be behind the curve like the US. It's the only western European country I still bring a healthy amount cash when I go there. Wouldn't be the first time I had to pay parking with cash in recent times. Every where else this is a non issue. It's rapidly changing though, but I don't like the common in use PIN terminals as they have no way of hiding the PIN entry.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 instantan…
I don’t think more than a handful of Europeans have ever heard of wiring the way you describe. Everyone over here has a bank account with a debit card and is used to transferring money to someone using their international bank account number; PayPal is in use for convenience, but not really necessary actually. People have credit cards for travelling abroad or online purchases, but that’s about it.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Neither Uber nor AirBnB got anyone’s “act in order”.
Uber just captured wealth via operating at a loss until competition was absorbed or destroyed.
AirBnB just helped further drive up the prices of single family homes and didn’t really have much effect on the hospitality industry at all - it caused a minor observable loss in profit which ultimately resulted in nothing.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#469There 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…
So Elon Musk and Nayib Bukele. Two solid reasons.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
> removing the levers of power from world governments A lever of power is never removed unless the act itself can no longer be performed. All you can do is take someone's hand off the lever and hope that whoever grabs it next is better than the last hand that had it. I find it very unlikely that wresting power away from government—which at least has some level of citizen participation—will end up with it in better ha…
No, it's possible. Imagine, for example, that you are concerned about growing political control of the central bank in your country and you want to remove the ability of central banks to set an inflation rate for the currency you use. That's quite easily achieved if ownership of the currency system is distributed among all users of that currency.
> is distributed among all users of that currency.
Right. What you propose is that you take government's hand off the lever and a million users will all equally get to gently rest their pinky on it and distribute the power equally.
I have never seen anything in the history of the world or my understanding of sociology to indicate that such a power structure has any stability. If you give out power in a free-for-all, what tends to happen is:
1. All of the participants already have some unequal distribution of power going in.
2. Those who have more are able to use that to claim a little more of the new resource.
3. Once they do they, they are able to use the increased inequality to claim even more.
4. Go to 2.
The natural tendency is towards increasing inequality. It takes a ton of work to build and maintain structures that encourage any level of egalitarianism.