971–980 of 1001 posts
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send money fast and cheap maybe you are just stupid?
Grandma asks how she can send her grandson 1 of these table coins for his birthday. Is it fast enough to get to him by Tuesday night? How much does it cost to send it on email?
This isn't even for you or I, nevermind grandma.
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…
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Is Uber subject to taxi regulations yet?
Outside of the U.S., Uber is subject to taxi regulations in most of the places it operates. In the U.S., it is subject to a new set of regulations governing "rideshares" that are similar to the regulations governing taxis. The primary differences are that medallions aren't required for rideshare vehicles, nor are rideshare drivers required to know anything about the location in which they're driving. Objectively spea…
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…
> Who will run validator nodes? "A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model." I think Zuck tried to do this. It was called Libra or Diem or I can't remember what it ended up being. Ultimately trust is what matters. In the end whether it was regulation or governments or anything else that killed i…
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So why can a traditional bank not solve this? In Europe you can wire money across borders for free, you just need to know the account number. Arrives in seconds at 0 cost. I feel like a lot of the fintech in the US is purely a result of a lack of regulation. For the example of Argentina, the real reason that business is using crypto is because their currency is unreliable. It might be a good fit there but trading in…
Australia too has instant and fee free transfers, so American staples like venmo just simply don’t exist here. People just send money to and from each other’s banks directly instantly and for free. So why would we need another service? Crypto here would similarly make very little sense.
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…
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> Can you do fractional reserve banking with stablecoins where you lend out the underlying dollars to people and don't have full reserves? In a manner of speaking. You need to trust that the issuers have the reserve they claim. There's no way around this, unless the asset in reserve is equally ethereal (i.e. another cryptocurrency). Tether, for one, almost certainly doesn't have the reserves.
Correct, this is fundamentally the oracle problem. There is no link between the blockchain and the real world which is why only money-like instruments have been successful for whatever value of success this constitutes.
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…
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My biggest reason to be a crypto believer right now is stablecoins, international payments, and agentic AI. It's inevitable that agentic AI will handle a lot of workload online eventually. We can't expect these agents to work on existing payment rails, what with their fees and slow settlement and international payment hurdles. AI agents that can pay each other when necessary - even tiny fractional amounts - will be a…
That can pay each other? For what? Genuinely curious.