631–640 of 1001 posts
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Venmo is essentially a stable coin
You are correct but with Venmo or PayPal there’s a middleman charging fees who can lock your funds. A decentralised PayPal is appealing.
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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…
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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,…
banks are an excuse to have closed source ledgers that don't operate efficiently for internet capital markets
if they wanted to, they could open source their ledgers and let anyone make them faster, more interoperable, more programmable, etc.
stablecoins operate on infra that is more like linux for finance, anyone can contribute to blockchain rails and even run their own nodes
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Yes, you can absolutely do that with stablecoins. Why couldn't you?
How would the “out of thin air” value creation work in a blockchain ledger? Pardon my very naive understanding of both subjects.
thats effectively what already happens with their own internal ledgers anyways
There 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…
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.
More examples include Uber to bypass taxi regulation, and generative AI to bypass copyright regulation (as well as consumer protection regulation in both cases as well as labor protections).
There 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…
https://www.wired.com/story/genius-act-loophole-stablecoins-...
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Venmo is essentially a stable coin
You are correct but with Venmo or PayPal there’s a middleman charging fees who can lock your funds. A decentralised PayPal is appealing.
Let me help explain whether blockchains are useful or not: They're not. The US gov let Circle be a less-regulated bank than other banks. This is called "regulatory arbitrage". You can take advantage of it by checking the box that you have a "blockchain". Stripe noticed "wow, things labeled blockchain are nice for some people to use" because of this dumb inconsistent banking regulation situation. Stripe doesn't mentio…
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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.
In my circles we have been calling it unregulated free market capitalism, or laissez faire capitalism. More examples include Uber to bypass taxi regulation, and generative AI to bypass copyright regulation (as well as consumer protection regulation in both cases as well as labor protections).