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Bitcoin can actually be quite resilient to that. Also the USD failing, doesn't necessarily mean a global world war. The US can go the way of the Soviet Union or the British Empire.
Can you elaborate on that please
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How many people would have noticed, if not for the headlines?
Anyone trying to send money using ACH. Maybe that doesn’t include you, but many regular people use it on an everyday basis.
If Fed/ACH going down for a few hours bothers you a lot but electricity/mobile network reliability doesn't faze you, you must be living in a truly unique place.
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Also almost all governments have KYC/AML/CFT regulations that apply to crypto exchanges as well. And governments can monitor, control, sanction your bitcoin transactions by controlling these exchanges through regulations. When the local currency becomes unstable and the local government becomes unstable, one should assume access to crypto exchanges like coinbase will be very very hard.
this is where decentralized exchanges like Uniswap come into play, no KYC, no account
Argentina is a great example. I am an American and have been there many times. They have extreme inflation and regressive policies against USD or foreign currency. Take a look at https://bluedollar.net . Official rates are buy at 89.98 and sell at 94.98 (ARS). Unofficial rates are buy at 138 and sell at 143. That's a massive spread saying that the people on the street are willing to spend 35% more because they know t…
I’m not an economist or even a very well versed person in the matter, but it is my understanding that Argentina is always almost out of dollars in its reserves and the local currency has been devaluated steadily since 2001. People figured out rather quickly that holding dollars is the only way to save money, but if let free, the demand would make the exchange rate skyrocket. So the Government (who put us there in the first place) has put limits on how much people can acquire per month.
This of course has implications for the whole economy I’m not equipped to answer or understand, but by “faking ” a lower official rate, most legal business happens at the official rate, while the street market dictates what the real value should be close to.
If you do business internationally and it’s bank to bank and all legal, you exchange at the official rate.
If it’s cash business then you exchange at the blue rate. Or if it’s in Pesos but it’s an imported good, calculate pesos value based on blue value.
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> These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial system. At the time of writing this comment, if you want your BTC transaction confirmed in the next hour it would cost you ~ 10USD ( https://bitcoiner.live/ ) . What planet do you live on where you think a non-negligible percentage of people in ANY country, let alone a…
regarding the transaction cost, wells fargo charges me $15 to receive a wired payment. If the use case is only large gold like transactions, the BTC use case makes more sense. Tbd.. shake it out.
Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks. In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
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Entirely unregulated markets are not good, they are awful, and they can go on for quite a while before blowing up, taking the life savings of lots of ordinary people with them.
I mean, no disagreements that unregulated markets can turn out disastrously (and hurt ordinary people). But regulated currencies can also turn out disastrously bad (see: Venezuela, Zimbabwe hyperinflation, Nigeria, Argentina). This hurts ordinary people too. There's an Argentinian in this very thread that's chimed in with their personal experience. I won't pretend one approach is strictly superior to the other, nor a…
Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks. In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
I don't care if it is centralized or not
So almost all of the comments here are about bitcoin generally. While that’s not totally surprising, does anyone have any insight on whether or not this S1 reveals interesting data that might inform the public about investing in coin base (eg why they filed an S1)?
Their growth rate is staggering, and they are enormously profitable. I was most stunned by the gross margins. They spend so little to make so much. It illustrates how feverish the crypto investing world is.
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> It'll never work it's too complicated It usually seems far more nuanced to me. People seem somewhat skeptical on some finer points of cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledger ideas. But then they see supporters trumpeting 'this is good for Xcoin' on every piece of news, good or bad, and can't help but get a snake-oil-salesman-y feeling from that. Everything in life has many ways in which it can or does…
I love HN but I think you're giving it too much credit on this one. Many (most?) of the conversations I see on here around crypto are copiously littered with straight FUD. Very little arguing on the actual nuances and intricacies of crypto. Seemingly low understanding / imagination of the possibilities allowed by the underlying concepts. Histrionics about power consumption in every thread. Disclosure: I liquidated my…
So when I see someone advocating for Bitcoin specifically they come off as transparently self-serving and having no real interest in the technology. I see a lot of parallels to projects refusing to migrate off of Python 2, except in this case Bitcoin enthusiasts are compelled to actively evangelize the inferior technology instead of just sticking to it as the rest of the technology space moves along.