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Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

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Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#651

Post by buildbuildbuild »

raggi wrote: post #650
pc wrote: post #46

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…

Can you expand on "easier" and "faster" in easier/faster/better. I understand "better" in terms of transparency, shared standards for integration, and various other properties. I can less immediately expand "easier" and "faster". Easier: on chain VMs are far from simple or easy, recovery from mistakes is far more complex. Some other aspects such as the implicit common standard might reduce some amount of need for "gr…

Easier: I can earn or spend real money 24/7 without anyone’s permission, at any age, in any location.

Faster: Payments settle lightning fast compared to ACH/Wires, permanently and internationally.

Better: I don’t need anyone’s approval to be “banked” and I don’t have to operate in fear of clawbacks. Programs are the ultimate unbanked, and that’s the “agentic economy” that is emerging.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#652

Post by thehappypm »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #601
thehappypm wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What fees?

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#653

Post by raggi »

buildbuildbuild wrote: post #651
raggi wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on "easier" and "faster" in easier/faster/better. I understand "better" in terms of transparency, shared standards for integration, and various other properties. I can less immediately expand "easier" and "faster". Easier: on chain VMs are far from simple or easy, recovery from mistakes is far more complex. Some other aspects such as the implicit common standard might reduce some amount of need for "gr…

Easier: I can earn or spend real money 24/7 without anyone’s permission, at any age, in any location. Faster: Payments settle lightning fast compared to ACH/Wires, permanently and internationally. Better: I don’t need anyone’s approval to be “banked” and I don’t have to operate in fear of clawbacks. Programs are the ultimate unbanked, and that’s the “agentic economy” that is emerging.

Please forgive my pushback but:

No third party: Almost certainly as a user there are still third parties involved, this isn't (AFAICS and based on other discussions) a user facing chain (edit: correction, they do say the chain is public, but here I really mean user facing value: you aren't minting stablecoins, you have to get them from somewhere). At "envisioned" transaction rates you would in practice not be syncing the chain and interacting with it yourself in any meaningful way.

Settlement: chain settlement is different from financial settlement. Between clearing ends there will still need to be sufficient demonstration of KYC, exchange of some form of actual holdings and so on. Typically the attraction of /to stablecoins is that they're used to perform transactions ahead of movement of actualizable value in target currencies. A possible alternative model is that all invested parties sink actual value into a global sink fund backing the stablecoin that is sufficiently protected to ensure that it does not devalue. In practice organizations almost certainly aren't going to part with wealth on those volumes and will operate secondary private exchange markets and settlement in bulk to escape concerns of short term loss, leverage, inflation and many other dynamics.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#654

Post by worik »

have_faith wrote: post #548
narrator wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you do fractional reserve banking with stablecoins where you lend out the underlying dollars to people and don't have full reserves? That's what makes banking tricky. When there are a surge of loan defaults across the banking system the money supply shrinks rapidly unless the government bails them out. Thus, the need for regulation. One reason the U.S government has to like stablecoins is because Tether is one of…

In FIAT money lending is the act of money creation, rather than lending existing money held in account. I’m guessing that wouldn’t have a parallel with stablecoins because the technology won’t let you just make new money at will?

> In FIAT money lending is the act of money creation

That depend on how you view money. Lending does increase the volume of money in circulation, in that sense it creates money. But that view is too simple to be useful.

The regulators that regulate, and in particular control reserve ratios (complex calculations that banks have to make about the relationships between their various assets) and base interest rates are the real creators of money.

The side stepping of those regulators is interesting. The conventional view is that it will lead to the same sort of financial instability as existed before the gold standard was abolished and we (pretty much the entire western world) moved to modern banking and fiat currency.

A hundred years of quite stable money was quite an achievement.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#656

Post by arcticbull »

thehappypm wrote: post #582
kccqzy wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Venmo is essentially a stable coin

Other way around. Stablecoins are essentially Venmo for crime. They get zero benefit from a blockchain. They are centralized, trusted and permissioned. Circle can freeze the USDC in your self-custody wallet at any time and you’re on your own bud. This whole thing is antithetical to crypto’s core ethos.

You could replicate USDC with a website where you log in with a password and move money between numbered accounts and they don’t run any AML/KYC checks on you. If you did that it would be super illegal. In fact someone did exactly this, it was called Liberty Reserve and everyone went to prison.

But because it’s got the magic of the blockchain laws don’t apply.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#657

Post by zackify »

dperfect wrote: post #348
pc wrote: post #46

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…

100% why am I going to use a permissionless blockchain….

To get coins fully controlled by circle.

On a chain with low fees controlled by Coinbase (base) for example.

In this case this new L1 won’t even be distributed by anyone initially too.

It all seems like a Ponzi scheme or small utility for international users. Otherwise I don’t know why you’d trust these centralized authorities.

What stops someone at circle deciding to issue more usdc without real dollar backing

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#658

Post by staplers »

jchw wrote: post #148
pc wrote: post #46

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…

A lot of us are not really deep into the finance space. Maybe there's a good reason it's left unsaid, but the question I came away with after reading that page and this comment is, why are businesses finding crypto easier/faster/better? To me, it's not 100% clear exactly who Tempo is for and not for, and why blockchain is more suitable than traditional centralized database technology here. And it sounds like this sys…

This is a very bad place to ask. Very anti-bitcoin crowd.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#660

Post by smoyer »

pc wrote: post #46

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…

We're starting to seek access to our services using the x402 protocol. It's practical for micro-payments and can facilitate subscriptions and most importantly, completely under the control of the end user. See https://x402.org
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