PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv • Hacker News Board

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#91

Post by rawtxapp » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:00 PM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #85

rawtxapp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've seen billion dollar IPOs on hype alone. Can you give some examples? I would expect a company of this magnitude to have done a proper research before paying out half a billion dollars for an acquisition that's not based on hype alone.

Instagram. C3.ai. Uber. Heck, Tesla. Curv has the advantage of actually being profitable.

These all had and continue to have enormous amount of users. I'm not sure how you can argue that these all got their valuations based on hype alone.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#92

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

rawtxapp wrote: post #86

ceejayoz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I hear about a cryptocurrency's "market cap" I think of https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-... . > 37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

Except for the fact that Bitcoin's current 24hr trading volume is in the billions.

Shuffling money around between my savings and checking accounts doesn't mean I wind up with more money.

Being able to unload a Bitcoin for $50k doesn't mean the market can withstand unloading a million at that price.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#93

Post by Geee » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

zucker42 wrote: post #67

G3rn0ti wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> major problems such as the energy consumption issues You don’t seem to know much about crypto currencies to name energy usage as a real problem of crypto. While Bitcoin will keep it’s “proof of work” approach to mining in the foreseeable future, there are now quite a few alternative crypto currencies in circulation employing “proof of stake” that do not suffer from large computer power usage e.g. Cardano, Solana or…

If you think that proof of stake will take over, do you think that Bitcoin will crash? When will Bitcoin stop having the insane environmental impact it has now? If proof of stake is the future, why is the market cap of BTC so high compared to other cryptocurrencies?

Proof-of-work is still the most secure way, and also the most fair way to distribute new currency, because it's just energy converted into currency.

If proof-of-stake or something else actually works, then bitcoin's algorithm can be changed to that.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#94

Post by xur17 » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #87

xur17 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay, so it isn't 3 tx/sec. It's a bit more than that. Not an order of magnitude more, or two orders of magnitude, or the five orders of magnitude more to have the throughput required for everyone on earth to be able to transact once per day, say to buy lunch. > You talk about BTC as a settlement layer. A settlement layer for what? The lightning network? Laughable. Personal opinion: I think the part you are missing…

> Personal opinion: I think the part you are missing here is that lots of transactions shouldn't be occurring on the base layer. What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee). > Why is it "laughable" for the lightning network to use BTC as a settlement layer? It's laughable because peop…

> What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee).

That is not at all what I am saying. I'm saying that technically only a very small subset of transactions should be settling on the base BTC layer, and hence that is how incentives should be (and are) setup.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#95

Post by NorwegianDude » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how insanely garbage the linked to site is?

The first thing you see is a large floating ad in the middle of the screen. Then there's a huge banner at the bottom of the screen asking for permission to send you notifications. Then there's a large banner at the top asking you to subscribe to a newsletter, and right under that there's an ad asking you to download (in my situation) curve. Once you close all that out, there are more banners underneath telling you that the site uses cookies.

A perfect example of how not to do things.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#96

Post by rawtxapp » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #92

rawtxapp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the fact that Bitcoin's current 24hr trading volume is in the billions.

Shuffling money around between my savings and checking accounts doesn't mean I wind up with more money. Being able to unload a Bitcoin for $50k doesn't mean the market can withstand unloading a million at that price.

The market depth could handle couple million dollars without changing the price too much, but if you want to buy/sell large amounts, you'd go to OTC.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#97

Post by Geee » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33

ceilingcorner wrote: post #25

I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

Cryptocurrency isn’t going away, but it’s dishonest to pretend that it’s not without major problems such as the energy consumption issues. The popular narrative has also become almost indistinguishable from a pump scheme, where we’re all supposed to buy and home (never sell) until we’re all rich. If cryptocurrency becomes commonplace, it likely won’t look anything like our current crypto infrastructure. The problem i…

The energy consumption issue is silly. It's like saying that Google won't be successful because they consume so much energy. It's not a major issue, it's just a silly talking point for those who oppose or don't understand cryptocurrencies.

Also, there is no such popular narrative. Your argument is like saying, "so we're supposed to buy stocks until we're all rich, that's a scam". Everyone makes their own investment decisions based on the available information. Brushing off good investment opportunities as a pump scheme is not very wise.

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#98

Post by flibberaloo » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:08 PM UTC

BTC is the energy saviour to the USD. USD is the largest energy suck of any currency ever known when you actually start adding up the system to keep it's value in place (i.e. militaries, central banking system, wars, oil, etc.)

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#99

Post by Specie33 » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

ahelwer wrote: post #41

ceilingcorner wrote: post #25

I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me. Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.

I think it's an interesting example of people being too close to something, technically, to really see its totality. I'm a distributed systems person so I basically blew off Bitcoin two bubble-cycles ago because of the 3 tx/sec issue and the obvious deficiencies of the proposed lightning network workaround. I also took an in-depth look at a cryptocurrency with a supposed better protocol (Nano) and was very unimpresse…

I did the same thing. Following since before MT GOX. Never purchased because of that TPS issue which i felt killed the system. Was interested in SOL because they supposedly solved that problem, still havent purchased. Feel smuuckish now.. But there you go

Re: PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv

#100

Post by tomlagier » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #65

ceilingcorner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of things have environmental problems. I don’t understand why Bitcoin mining gets singled out for it. If the benefits of using it outweigh the downsides, then I don’t see the issue.

> I don’t understand why Bitcoin mining gets singled out Because then he'd need to name an actual different reason to hate on bitcoin that hasn't been debunked

Here's mine: it doesn't seem socially useful if everyone holds a small amount of bitcoin and does nothing with it, particularly if all of those holdings are centralized on a small number of exchanges. I have no idea whether that is the true use for most BTC, but (mod exchanges vs private wallets) it's been the case for every single person I've talked to that owns some.

I just don't get it - we're all holding pieces of this stuff because it keeps going up in value because we're all holding pieces of it? And that's somehow worth the enormous computing cost to maintain the network?

Yeah, I'm sure that BTC is great if you're a Syrian refugee or a billionaire evading capital controls but it feels like the majority of the stuff is just... sitting there...

I'm actually really thankful that exchanges are in the picture because ledger-only transactions aren't nearly as wasteful as on-chain transactions, but still don't understand why people want it. A cryptocurrency seems useful to me, inflationary crypto-assets seem like their only use is to reward early adopters?

The value proposition of BTC seems more-or-less like "there is a limited supply and more people will want some in the future because it has made some people rich".