[flagged]
Bugger off.
[flagged]
Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#502Earlier 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…
> Criptography You mean criptography and trust right?
If I'm bank of america, and i publicize a public key, and then everytime everyone does a transaction, i sign a receipt using my public key such that my customers can prove that transaction happened, then that would be the cryptography.
if bank of america does something malicious, i can prove in court very trivially through those signed receipts that they did so.
So I don't need to trust bank of america - i just need to trust the courts to charge financial institutions that provably are breaking the law.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
[deleted]
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#504Earlier 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…
> the non existent "Database driven", uhh money tools. Are you claiming here that things like banks and stock markets don't exist? Genuinely curious though; what kind of 'money related features', that have no non-crypto counterparts, are you referring to?
> Are you claiming here that things like banks and stock markets don't exist?
No, I am claiming that I couldn't spin up a bank or a stock market on my laptop, that is compatible with all the other stock markets, by forking a git repo.
> that have no non-crypto counterparts, are you referring to?
The git repo fork button, that slots right into a whole ecosystem that has 10s of thousands of contributors to it.
Ease of use, and developer experience and existing markets and existing integrations with all of these businesses is a big deal. It doesn't matter if someone could hypothetically spend 1 billion dollars recreating all of that, using a database. Because that would require 1 billion dollars.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#505There 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…
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…
Stablecoins are generally used:
- by USA government (indirectly) to re-dollarize the world without generating too much USA inflation, another IMF SDR mimicking China usage of foreign currencies to avoid hyperinflation;
- by many migrants in the I world to send money home, something in the III world could be converted to USD at a much cheaper rates and with much simplicity than classic banking/money transfer solutions;
- as a hedge against local currencies, considering dollar or some other currencies much more stable (see for instance the Argentina forcibly conversion overnight of USD accounts to ARS with enormous loss in 2002;
- as a decorrelated asset for DeFi trading on non-stablecoin cryptos (meaning market timing, buying BTC, ETH, SOL, ... when they dip, swapping then to some stablecoins when they top, waiting with the stablecoin for the next dip to buy).
In that regard the (unlikely) real existence of the collateral they claim is not much relevant: as long as most trade on stablecoins come from DeFi the Venezuelans, Bolivians, ... who choose them to bring USD home, the few company using them to pay B2B stakeholders in various countries are still happy anyway, as long as the stablecoin remain de-correlated to other crypto traders are happy anyway.
Tokenised stocks are more likely used to circumvent regulations since you can buy them swapping non-KYC coins against them avoiding capital gains taxes, at least partially.
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm still unclear what the crypto really adds to this play. stripe customers need to move their money around, and they need a trusted source to hold money. stripe could just do that. why add crypto into the mix?
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…
i don't know why this fence is here or who named it chesterton but i'm DAMN sure it needs to go!!
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#507Earlier 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…
Other countries managed to regulate their banks to innovate just fine without blockchain technology, though. It doesn’t always need a startup to disrupt something by flipping the finger to lawmakers. Sometimes humble regulation is enough. Take SEPA as an example: I can transfer money free of charge to any European bank account, in a few seconds.
To be fair, European Central Bank also wants to introduce its own official Euro-backed "stablecoin" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_euro), mostly because they are scared of the posibility that Dollar-backed stablecoins could make Euros less relevant in the future (https://www.politico.eu/article/lagardes-euro-moment-busted-...).
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#508Earlier 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…
>At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent. This is missing the fundamental idea behind blockchain. You need a consensus mechanism and immutable ledger in order for it to be secure and truly transparent. Once you add those boom you have yourself another blockchain :-) >So what are stablecoins really trying to do? Circumvent regulati…
> You need a consensus mechanism and immutable ledger in order for it to be secure and truly transparent
Consensus between who? The stablecoin issuer, stripe in this case, is a single party, who are they coordinating with that requires a consensus algorithm?
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What is complicated? It takes seconds on my phone, must less complicated than writing a comment on HN! 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 turns out that legal regulations are Actually Good and Really Important
Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
#510Wow, they invented a database on a blockchain /s