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Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

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Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#801

Post by rollcat »

jakewins wrote: post #737
DennisP wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not that much CPU involved. Most of the stablecoins are on Ethereum, and I think the rest are on other proof-of-stake platforms, not Bitcoin.

Ethereum is able to process something like 150 transactions per second, using about 1,000,000 validator machines. Postgres running on a single Raspberry Pi is something like 200 TPC-B read/write transactions per second. Saying Ethereum “is not using very much CPU” is baffling to me. It is the state-of-the-art in this regard, and it uses something like six orders of magnitude more CPU than a normal database running a…

First things first, I'm a crypto-sceptic - to put it in the mildest terms possible.

You're spot on with CPU usage. However: how would you design a RasPi-efficient, fault-tolerant, decentralised ledger with strict ordering and a transparency log?

Consider CAP. Existing banking systems choose partition tolerance (everyone does their own thing all the time basically), and eventual consistency via peering - which is why all settlements are delayed (in favour of fraud detection / mitigation), but you get huge transaction throughput, very high availability, and power efficiency. (Any existing inefficiencies can and should be optimised away, I guess we can blame complacency.)

The system works based on distributed (each bank) but centralised (customer->bank) authority, held up by regulations, capital, and identity verification.

Online authority works in practice - we collectively trust all the Googles, Apples, etc run our digital lives. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts trust the authors and contributors of the software, CPU/OS vendors, so it's not like we're anywhere near an absolute zero of authority.

Online identity verification objectively sucks, so that is out the window. I guess this could work by individual users delegating to a "host" node (which is what is already happening with managed wallets), and host nodes peering with each other based on mutual trust. Kinda like Mastodon, email, or even autonomous systems - the backbone of the Internet itself.

Just a brain dump.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#802

Post by antirez »

woah wrote: post #614
antirez wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No bizantine distributed agreement (work / stake), no blockchain. Otherwise we can name everything as everything.

There is no bright line difference between proof of stake and any other type of consensus, committee or voting body. Proof of work of course is very different.

The difference is enormous: in one case, you don't need any centralized N entities, just a big percentage of the network, whoever wants to participate, runs the protocol and there are no 50 institutions / companies that can block it without reaching the majority of work / stake. In the other case, you are delegating the consensus to a fixed amount of parties. Now, we against the crypto / blockchain shitstorm advertised the alternative of old-style federated consensus with N trusted organizations for years and years. And now, no: you can't say, this is a form of blockchain. You admit failure and acknowledge that classical consensus was good enough and even better in most cases.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#803

Post by baq »

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…

> You trust your stablecoin's issuer that they hold enough fiat in reserve to match the coin? You might as well trust your bank

stablecoin issuers are for all intents and purposes banks.

they'll try very hard to stop anyone from calling them that, but in essence, they give you a note (a crypto coin, in this case) in exchange for a promise that they'll give you back the amount of fiat printed on the note. this is the primary purpose of a bank.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#804

Post by jgilias »

coppsilgold wrote: post #145

Stablecoins are for all practical purposes Numbered Swiss Accounts v2. I actually don't understand how they were allowed to exist, it's impressive really.

They are the opposite of that. Once you interact with a KYC’d system, all your financial history is freely available to any sufficiently advanced actor who can get a hold on said KYC data.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#805

Post by bloggie »

jdminhbg wrote: post #464
bloggie wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So transactions are difficult because they are illegal, and blockchain helps to facilitate crime? Are there other uses? Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases?

> Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases? You are literally in a thread whose top post is the Stripe founder describing use cases.

I don't think he does...? He says companies have found utility but doesn't say what that utility is.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#806

Post by bloggie »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #588
bloggie wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So transactions are difficult because they are illegal, and blockchain helps to facilitate crime? Are there other uses? Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases?

> So transactions are difficult because they are illegal, and blockchain helps to facilitate crime? Let's say I make drinking water illegal, would you still do it? Sure you would, you need it to live, laws be damned. In Argentina it was a similar situation, financially speaking, but with USD, as Argentina had like 1000% accumulated inflation since 2019, so basically the ARS melted in your hands, and the USD/Euros/cry…

I'm certainly not going to moralize against breaking the law, just curious why an American company would (apparently) build a business off of facilitating it.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#808

Post by corimaith »

madamelic wrote: post #420
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,…

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…

The activities you listed are not the main business of a bank. It's getting deposits and loaning them out with interest. In that regard, they are very successful and it's hard to see how Uber or AirBnB would do better given the disaster of microfinancing.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#809

Post by Yizahi »

whimsicalism wrote: post #749
idontwantthis wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, it would be easier if we could just trust our banks to offer instant settlement and very low fees, but they don't. I think everywhere but America has already figured this out. Instant bank payments are pretty standard everywhere else, even third world countries.

not between countries

Last time I paid for something across borders, transaction has completed in less than 10 seconds and I got both updated state in outgoing bank account, and at the receiver side.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#810

Post by cogogo »

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…

> For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets.

I genuinely do not understand this example. What is spacex actually doing? And why do they even have money in “long tail markets” at all?

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