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Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

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Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#491

Post by gamblor956 »

kccqzy wrote: post #458
raincole wrote: post #403

Earlier 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,…

Large banks like JPMorgan Chase are also looking into launching their own stablecoins, just because it has less regulation than normal banking. In fact Jamie Dimon himself says so. The idea is really simple: creating stablecoin deposit accounts for customers allows banks to skip existing customer protections that are normally afforded to traditional deposit accounts.

Stablecoins will end subject to just as much regulation as a normal bank, maybe even more.

JPMorgan Chase, BofA, and their ilk have R&D budgets large enough to have already launched a dozen stablecoins by now. They haven't, not because they can't (on a technical level) but because they don't actually see the value to it (on a business level). They're simply paying lip service to crypto because it pumps up share value, the same way every business was bragging about their AI investments just a few months ago.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#492

Post by jrm4 »

fruitworks wrote: post #262
jrm4 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll chime in here;e.g. Ethereum is more than a database. It's a computer. You can write and execute code on it. (but also, as OP, Stripe will almost certainly not have any use for this)

Etherium is a database. It's a database that contains scripts (not unlike bitcoin) that some computers can run if they want to determine the balance of accounts. Etherium itself is not a computer, that's marketing speak.

You are wrong; if a smart contract is successfully deployed to the Ethereum blockchain, a thing that happens all the time -- it is not as if individual computers have the choice to run that code (or to make the app available). The action is objectively run, Blockchain-style.

In other words, I can unilaterally and without permission deploy code to the Ethereum chain, at the price of "writing the code" and "paying the Ethereum fees to do so." And when I do that, the ENTIRE CHAIN must follow.

That's closer to "a computer" that just "a listing of optional scripts."

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#493

Post by thisgoesnowhere »

davidlee1435 wrote: post #482
dperfect wrote: post #348

Earlier 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…

I think the most disruptive thing about stablecoins is the ability to opt-into your monetary system of choice. It's hard for the average non-US person to opt-into the US financial system. Sure, they could hold dollars in banks, but local monetary policy can nix that privilege at anytime by imposing foreign exchange controls. It's happened before, in some of the largest economies in the world: China in 2015, India in…

> But regulation can be a prison where you can pay to be free.

As opposed to no regulation where you can't? I don't understand this sentiment at all.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#494

Post by taberiand »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #479
raincole wrote: post #403

Earlier 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,…

Do we have a term for this phenomenon yet? Airbnb is a great example. Uber is another. Regulatory loopholes are the way that these companies actually make money, but they call it "technology" and everyone kind of shrugs.

[flagged]

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#495

Post by siddthesquid »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #387
siddthesquid wrote: post #211

Earlier 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…

> 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 problem…

My point is that blockchain is just a technology - nothing about the technology itself makes the concept of transferring money cheaper. I agree that it is another competitive avenue for transactions, but if it became a threat to payment processors, my theory is that they could lower their costs more than blockchains potentially can. This is because the software and infrastructure needed to build something that assigns numbers to accounts and allows transfers is obviously going to be cheaper off the blockchain.

If trust is an issue, the bank can provide cryptographically signed receipts that show they've confirmed the entire lineage of your account, in the same way a blockchain does, but they would be the only verifier. The question becomes about how the cost of the additional trust from the blockchain relates to the incentive of doing honest business. I imagine that trust cost is pretty high.

> can you have a blockchain with lower fees than payment processors currently have? And the answer appears to be yes

The transaction fee is not the only thing being paid. They are also getting mining rewards. If a blockchain has mining rewards, maybe in the form of Bitcoin Cash, then that will dilute the entire pool of Bitcoin Cash.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#496

Post by fnordpiglet »

slashdave wrote: post #411
SR2Z wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Yes, it would be easier if we could just trust our banks to offer instant settlement and very low fees, but they don't. All transactions must be derisked (there is a fallback if the transaction fails). This usually means backed with reserves, which also means they cannot be instant. Now if you don't care for the risk management of a bank, sure, go ahead and do what you would like.

This isn’t even the reason, because the reserve status can be immediately verified across institutions and is often backed by a sovereign in some way in case of a run and payment systems can circuit break, etc. There are legacy reasons depending on the bank network such as business hours and batching and liquidity optimization, but these are increasingly less meaningful and systems like FedNow and others offer instant and final transfer.

The real and continuing reason for the delay is to give time for repudiation and assessment of fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes risk. The risk of instant transfer is instant theft or otherwise absconding with money that shouldn’t be yours. In fact settlement delay makes reserve problems worse because you effectively “hold” money that could potentially not be properly secured during the hold and cause a default on a transaction that was otherwise taken out of balance and pending transfer. Instant clearing and settlement makes this unambiguous. But it also makes transactions as risky as a cash transaction - instant and irrevocable.

For some customers this is legitimately ok. But by and large most customers benefit from the delays more than they’re hurt by virtue of having a window to repudiate a transaction that is illegitimate. It’s just they don’t recognize that value until they need it. We all benefit from a system that disincentivizes criminality overall. It’s hard to recognize it because we exist day to day with that benefit and it’s hard to prove the negative, but there were times without the protections against financial crimes and financial oversight and they were NOT better times. They were objectively worse, so our ancestors built a set of guard rails to prevent the endemic badness around us.

It appears though as they die off, and as we become less attuned to history, we are very busy ripping apart the guard rails our ancestors very carefully and thoughtfully built into our societies like some junior engineer who assumes every line of code written before them was written by an idiot. Take the American CDC as a case in point - the modern public health system was a very hard won victory against endemic diseases by generations - and as the generation who established it expires, we rip their legacy to tatters.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#497

Post by paperpunk »

stale2002 wrote: post #169
jrm4 wrote: post #125

Ah the layers. Okay, so one: Obviously pointless from a tech POV. There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not. But then, why? Sadly, as someone who does like the ideals of true cryptocurrency, yet another way to make sure "real" crypto doesn't happen, much like what is happening to BTC. Here's hoping (yeah, it's a long shot) people see through all of this and maybe, MAYB…

> There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not. There absolutely is. Its called having access to the ecosystem. The money features that exist in the current blockchain landscape are simply a better developer ecosystem, with many more features, than the non existent "Database driven", uhh money tools. Blockchains are no longer about the singular feature of having a trustle…

I think this may be an insightful comment.

It's not for lack of trying that traditional, "database driven" cross-border payments are costly and unreliable. SWIFT have thrown technology at this problem: GPI, Swift Go, ISO20022, etc.

Unfortunately the ecosystem has an extremely weak technical culture. Banks rarely follow the standards as written – your perfectly crafted API payment may be re-keyed by a low-paid human operator on a slow, buggy UI written a decade ago.

I could believe that the developer experience and technical standards of the participants is where the value lies right now.

The one thing I'm not sure on is to what extent those ecosystems depend on reduced regulatory scrutiny compared to banks.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#498

Post by forgotTheLast »

taberiand wrote: post #494
allknowingfrog wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have a term for this phenomenon yet? Airbnb is a great example. Uber is another. Regulatory loopholes are the way that these companies actually make money, but they call it "technology" and everyone kind of shrugs.

[flagged]

That term has a very specific meaning and I wish people stopped using it to mean "big tech doing something bad"

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#499

Post by stale2002 »

jrm4 wrote: post #258
stale2002 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not. There absolutely is. Its called having access to the ecosystem. The money features that exist in the current blockchain landscape are simply a better developer ecosystem, with many more features, than the non existent "Database driven", uhh money tools. Blockchains are no longer about the singular feature of having a trustle…

All pointless. None of those things require a blockchain and are all made less efficient by doing them that way. Again, truly decentralized cryptocurrency ADDS slow clunky overhead; that's the price of decentralization. Everything you're imagining is ALL done much easier with good ol' databases et al.

> ADDS slow clunky overhead; that's the price of decentralization.

Actually, you can just use a federated blockchain.

> Everything you're imagining is ALL done much easier with good ol' databases

There is an ecosystem of 10s of thousands of developers that can run specifically ethereum contracts on a database, while being compatible with all existing stable coin onramps?

You have to show me the 10s of thousands of developers is the point. Thats an ecosystem. It means that you can connect to all of these existing apps and on ramps, and smart contracts and more. There isn't a database version of that.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#500

Post by taberiand »

smoovb wrote: post #361
udev4096 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. The biggest stable coin, Tether, is pure scam. They are essentially creating money out of nowhere. They were found guilty of massive fraud and were fined $18M [1]. They refuse to get audited by a third-party [2]. The ones that do audit them are just as sketchy as them [3]. I would recommend watching this video to grasp the scope of their fraud [4] [1] - https://coingeek.com/tether-bitfinex-prohibited-from-o…

Counterpoint. Tether has grown into one of the most profitable, well funded companies on the planet. Their past growing pains are irrelevant to where they are now. They make $30-50 million per day with just 200 employees. They are the 18th largest holder of US debt, ahead of UAE and Germany. Last year, Tether achieved $14 billion in profit, surpassing Pfizer, Tesla, and BlackRock. https://www.bitget.com/news/detail/1…

The pinnacle of fake it till you make it. Still a scam.
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