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Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

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Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#901

Post by gamblor956 »

jdminhbg wrote: post #689
gamblor956 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's left unsaid because the truth is that businesses are not finding crypto easier, faster, or better. In most cases, it's the exact opposite. But crypto excels at one thing: obfuscation. A regular log or ledger file could accomplish the same thing as a blockchain for significantly less technical debt or ongoing expense. And note that the best use cases Stripe could find for "real world" use cases were a company try…

> A regular log or ledger file could accomplish the same thing as a blockchain It is kind of wild how a bunch of people hyping blockchains five years ago has resulted in a thermostatic reaction where a bunch of other people have decided that distributed computing is easy, actually, you just need a ledger file.

You do understand that a blockchain is just a hashed ledger? It's called "crypto" because they use cryptography principles to hash the ledger into multiple parts.

But it's still just a ledger.

With blockchain, you just get a ledger that's harder to use and dependent on external connectivity.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#902

Post by jdminhbg »

bloggie wrote: post #805
jdminhbg wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The sentences that follow “found utility” say what that utility is:

> For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#903

Post by sunshine-o »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #830
sunshine-o wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In EU, regulations are heavy and the result is I can send money instantly for free. I can assure the cost of those regulations is enormous for the banks. They were forced to make the SEPA transfers free but you ended up paying for it everywhere else.

you guys are talking about free SEPA transfers, but I just checked a couple of banks in Hungary, Austria and Germany, and I don't see this.

N26 has free SEPA transfers in Germany I believe.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#904

Post by shawndrost »

pc wrote: post #340
jchw wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo? I don't think that customers or businesses should see Tempo very much. In the success case, Tempo is a platform like SWIFT or ACH that others employ behind the scenes to orchestrate transactions. "Decentralized, internet-scale SWIFT" isn't exactly the right analogy (there are clearly lots of differences), but it's not totally wrong either. Why are…

I think of you as a direct person, so it's strange to hear you dismiss "stablecoins are regulatory arbitrage" as misguided or incurious. Maybe I am wrong about something.

Would you agree that "actual regulatory evasion" has been a top-three use case across the history of stablecoins? (That is: hackers, money launderers, sanctioned entities, and crypto exchanges do things with stablecoins expressly because doing them with dollars in banks would be illegal in an enforceable way.)

And, would you agree that GENIUS is a formalization of the low-regulation status quo of stablecoins? (That is: the bank system does KYC, AML, and reporting on both sides of every transaction; the stablecoin system generally only does that for onramps and offramps.)

This is not to say "regulatory arbitrage" is the only thing going on with stablecoins. Existing payment rails are imperfect and rent-seeking for reasons that don't have to do with the above. I'm just surprised you're describing the arb as such a non-issue.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#905

Post by School-Cotton »

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

What? How so? If by "stablecoin" you just mean "any USD-denominated balance maintained by a third party in a ledger" then every bank balance is a "stablecoin".

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#906

Post by School-Cotton »

runarberg wrote: post #636
allknowingfrog wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What we're talking about is a much more specific phenomenon than "unregulated free market capitalism". In fact, in an unregulated market, there would be no regulatory arbitrage opportunities, by definition (e.g. Uber would have no reason to exist since taxis would already be unregulated).

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#907

Post by sunshine-o »

Kbelicius wrote: post #846
sunshine-o wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. SEPA was a success but it was only a first step to modernise the banking system. The following regulations/directives like PSD2 failed in my opinion. The ECB also had one of those CBDC built much earlier than people have been told. They already had something quite advan…

> The ECB also had one of those CBDC built much earlier than people have been told. They already had something quite advanced around 2020, with a optimist launch date in 2022 I believe. > It obviously failed miserably They had a CBDC but hid it from everyone... but then somehow it failed miserably. If it wasn't released, how? They even had it before they decided to have it (2021). This seems just like a load of bulls…

When they saw Bitcoin and Ethereum they obviously understood a great disruption was coming and acted on it. SWIFT too.

A Central Bank do not share everything they consider/plan with the public. It is not really hidden or secret, but they also do not make a press release about it.

Also if they are fundamentally gonna transform our banking system they better start early because a lot of things can go wrong. I estimate the time to build such a system is about 10 years if everything goes well.

I do not know exactly what went wrong, my guess is the banks pushed back as much as they could because most of them would have been made irrelevant under that model. Now they are talking about Ethereum and Solana because they understood they have to fight against the Dollar in this arena.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#908

Post by dcposch »

rfw300 wrote: post #298
dcposch wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many skeptics assume that stablecoins are just about regulatory arbitrage. That's part of it, but: 1. Progress often depends on evolving obsolete regulation. Uber works much better than taxis (once upon a time, people could "call a dispatcher" an hour in advance, wait on hold, etc) and yet in the early years they had to work around taxi regs. 2. Blockchains are a fundamentally more robust way to run a ledger. If any…

I wonder if some of the non-robustness of the tradfi system is a feature, not a bug. If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen rather than a beautifully efficient, irreversible machine consensus. The bottlenecks and intermediaries create friction, sure, but that isn't per se bad. My hang-up with crypto is that it solves the ledge…

> If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen

This is a nice lens for looking at when stablecoins make sense.

If you're an American using your Chase account to buy coffee at Starbucks, the permissioned, heuristically fraud-checked, slow-settling tradfi system is well optimized for you.

If you are an importer buying $3m worth of bulk coffee from Kenya, you would much rather have an instant 1:1 USD transfer on beautifully efficient machine consensus.

In many countries in the world, the banking system is extractive and unreliable. The "confused employee" is not there to help you. The two weeks of money in transit is no benefit, just a source of additional counterparty risk, cost, and delay.

An immutable and transparent ledger is not for everything but it is a useful primitive.

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#909

Post by ta12653421 »

Saline9515 wrote: post #847
sunshine-o wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. SEPA was a success but it was only a first step to modernise the banking system. The following regulations/directives like PSD2 failed in my opinion. The ECB also had one of those CBDC built much earlier than people have been told. They already had something quite advan…

SEPA allows this in theory; in practice, for amounts >10k€, most banks will require you to provide proofs for the transaction due to the maximalist AML laws in the EU. My bank requires me to download a PDF on their website, print it, fill it out by hand, scan it, and then send it by mail. After a few days, someone will decide to allow it (or not). If it is refused, I don't get any reason why and have to call the clie…

working in the field: Would you please share name or BIC of this institute?

Re: Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo

#910

Post by ta12653421 »

baq wrote: post #803
dperfect wrote: post #348

Earlier 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…

> 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…

no, second-layer-bank :-D
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