Sure, still a lot of things Jack does doesn't make sense. Michael Saylor did the pure Bitcoin play, he gets it much more: make the company buy as much Bitcoin in the treasury as possible, and get into low interest rate debt that is not marked to market value.
While Jack Dorsey is just talking about helping poor countries, Jack Mallers went there to launch the product, and has a great vision about using the lightning network to compete with VISA / Mastercard.
5 letter tickers are frowned upon generally unless its a different share class or if its in some kind of credit/corporate action I thought. Like .E means Ch11 (iirc)
Twitter bios are pretty bad in general. I'll check someone's bio and it just says something like "optimist, player of games" which doesn't help my poor literal-minded brain decide whether to follow them or not.
Interesting… thinly veiled play on blockchain? With Jack’s recent leave of twitter, I think it’s clear this is his new vision for the future.
With Facebook’s recent re-org to Meta, is this spurring a new wave of companies re-branding to be seen as relevant by associating with future technologies?
Something interesting is happening in other industries, where large conglomerates are spinning off high-growth potential divisions, specially pharmaceuticals https://www.fiercepharma.com/topic/spinoff all for that sweet sweet stock growth
It's only a 90 billion dollar company running a significant share of the POS market and peer to peer money market, why would they have a sensical, logical or straightforward parent site?
Exactly - and they are talking / working with at least some boring accountants in all of this who don't care if things are curated by Jay-Z in their point of sale and merchant clearing systems.
It has been fascinating to watch the corporate cryptocurrency world try so hard to project the fringe, edgy, anti-corporate nature of cryptocurrencies that attracted so many in the first place.
All of these corporate cryptocurrency pushes have strong "How do you do, fellow children?" vibes.
But the funny part is a lot of the crypto people are eating it right up, mostly because they have to accept any and all big business investment in the crypto space to further pump their own assets.
> the fringe, edgy, anti-corporate nature of cryptocurrencies that attracted so many in the first place.
That was the first wave. This much bigger wave is people like your uncle who's not tech savvy but bought $100 in Bitcoin because they heard you could get rich from it. The ideological component is just window dressing (eventually a lot of ideology becomes window dressing so that's not too unusual).
> That was the first wave. This much bigger wave is people like your uncle who's not tech savvy but bought $100 in Bitcoin because they heard you could get rich from it
Random uncles putting $100 into BitCoin isn't driving the market.
Cryptocurrency is very corporate now, including a mix of shady corporations who love playing in this unregulated space.
The average joe is just along for the ride, but they're being pitched the idea that decentralization is democratization. Meanwhile, there's nothing stopping a decentralized cryptocurrency from being owned by very centralized players. It is, after all, tradable by anyone.
It more mirrors the "FOQNEs" or "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities" from Snow Crash. Sovereign individuals that hold massive bitcoin stores can transact to anyone because they can afford the fees. Normies that can't will be beholden to these large corporate interest. Transferring money to a business or person will happen in a database in Coinbase or other exchange, much like now with a bank. Settlement will happen between banks and organizations they've partnered with. For the common person the interface will be the same. Settlement between organizations will change.
I'd like to say that the fees are an artifact of the poor scaling of both Bitcoin and Ethereum, but proof of work schemes are by design horrendously inefficient and suggested alternatives like proof of stake have yet to be proven in practice.
Ironically, intuit and SumUp did have BTC payments in 2014 but stopped it due to low demand. (Of course… what people don’t get is BTC is not for spending. It is for saving.)
Maybe early to the pre party and late to the after party?
Square is hoarding Bitcoins; can't recall SumUp getting involved and popularizing Bitcoin the way Jack is! Yes, sometimes companies accept Bitcoin, but that's a totally different story, and are not directly involving themselves in this scam and eco disaster!
I'm not super bullish on crypto and frankly it terrifies me a bit, but Intuit charges rent to the US population by lobbying to maintain complicated tax forms and processes...is that what you'd rather support?
I think that's fine, but why create so much chaos with a rebrand on a product that currently has very little to do with blockchain tech? Why not spin off a separate entity, "Block (powered by Square)" to prove the idea and slowly migrate?
This name change is going to be extremely confusing to end users who are out of the loop given the current dominance of the Square brand.
The key public brand cash app tidal etc is the same. Square was vendor facing mostly so the name isn’t that important as b2b names change frequently. I don’t think as big a deal as Meta name change, being a consumer brand, and that’s not really a problem with consumers so far.
Because they need to offload their crypto assests on the unsuspecting masses before they loose all value. And the hope is that driving crypto front and center would help that
Come now, most expensive! That’s ETH for sure, btc is never more than $1 at peak times of multiple MB of mempool and currently at 1sat/vB which is $0.08
That makes sense in a Brand pitch meeting, but there are so many things called Block in this space I think they could have been more unique. I thought this was about The Block (the news site) at first glance.
It looks like a turn of the century art project or album launch site at first: there's nothing on the page mentioning Square until you click on the arrow at the bottom which does some animation before showing the copyright notice and the pseudo-Python on their home page doesn't look like a $100 billion dollar company or a tech company (it'd be valid syntax).
Okay I'll bite. I just see a flexing cube (agree it looks like a 90s demo). But is this site meant to do anything else? I tried scrolling or tapping and it didn't do anything.
H&R Block is well known as Block in the Kansas City area, where they’re headquartered, though I don’t know if that’s only among tech people or the general public.
It’s interesting comparing Facebook to others; Facebook sought to leave their main brand behind while others generally seek to keep brand equity.
Google => Alphabet
Square => Block
Facebook => Meta ??
For Facebook they were dealing with the opposite, trying to shift past a torrent of negative press, the move to an Abstract name has been highly effective in turning down the (short term) negative press heat. Yes they announced new things but arguably it was critical timing from a PR perspective.
For others as confused as I was: Square bought Tidal earlier this year. Spiral was Square Crypto. TBD54566975 appears to be some sort of decentralized exchange Jack Dorsey tweeted about at one point. & they're all being put under this Block banner, apparently.
Thank you. Completely missed the Tidal acquisition, will never care about TBDXYZ, but was curious, and clicking on the twitter link did nothing useful.
> Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now).
I suspect this has something to do with it. I had a co-worker once describe Jack as a magpie. He's usually much more interested in the new shiny thing. That was Cash App for a while. Now the blockchain stuff I guess. I haven't worked there in many years so I don't know for sure.
Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff.
I had a big WTF with this move, and have a similar feeling about the blockchain efforts. But I also tend towards the new and shiny, so I have a harder time faulting that.
Square had been trying to do Bitcoin stuff for years. When I left in 2016 they had built accepting Bitcoin into Square's Online Store product a few years ago, because it was shiny. I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off. I guess the popularity of BTC speculation among retail investors brought the whole thing back.
> I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off.
Accepting Bitcoin as payments has never been about facilitating payments. It's not rational to go through all the trouble of transferring Bitcoin, paying transaction fees, waiting for the transaction to clear (took over an hour when I tried it a few months ago), and then surrendering all of the protections you'd normally get when using a credit card.
Accepting Bitcoin is about propelling the Bitcoin narrative: The more you can put "Bitcoin accepted here" on everyone's website, the more you can convince other people that Bitcoin is going mainstream and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).
> and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).
I disagree with this part of the paragraph. Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less.
> Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less.
I mean the "pay for starbucks using bitcoin" ship sailed, what, 10 years ago? Bitcoin is absolutely nothing more than a giant pump & dump scam. Of course pedants will say "technically it isn't a pump & dump" just like "technically it isn't a pyramid scheme"... Bitcoin might not meet the technical definition of any of those... but it is a scam none the less.
I'd love to hear the life-changing events, if possible. Because I've been trying to convince myself that BTC might be good. But I really couldn't find a reason. The "pump and dump" thing is the one that makes most sense right now. I'm open to contrarian ideas.
> Some things are a little more appealing when you are in a country without a competent Federal Reserve
Why bother with Bitcoin, when you can just use money from a country with a competent Federal Reserve? IIRC many countries have "dollarized" (either de jure or de facto).
> Simple: there is no country with a competent Federal Reserve (Central Bank)
Eh, that's pretty obviously untrue under any reasonable definition of "competent Federal Reserve."
Now, there are definitely unreasonable an/or extreme ideological definitions under which you could make such a statement (e.g. the most reasonable of these are monomanically overoptimizing to one metric), but those definitions are irrelevant and can be ignored.
> Eh, that's pretty obviously untrue under any reasonable definition of "competent Federal Reserve"
It's not obvious. Is any central bank that debases currency through money printing without some kind of fixed peg/ratio to a scarce asset competent?
No. This is self-evidently true as, by doing so, they are perniciously taxing the savings of the poor in order to feather the nests of the (asset-)rich.
There is no avoiding the truth of this inviolable fact as Cantillion himself described many years ago.
Bitcoin promotes hoarding no more than gold does. And speculation no more than FX or commodities trading does.
If a payment currency was pegged to bitcoin and the backing ratio remained fixed things would be fine like they were when we had the gold standard or even the later USD reserve currency standard when the USD was backed by gold.
However history had shown that these arrangements did not hold as central bankers simply couldn't resist firing up the printer and breaking the peg with the scarce backing asset. Political pressures, wars, whatever the reason. Every peg was broken.
Human greed, misplaced albeit well-intentioned mistakes, and simple human fallibility will continue to tempt even the most honourable people close to the money spigot. It's happened throughout the ages and human nature will not change in this regard.
Bitcoin _algorithmically_ prevents this debasement and so it is literally the perfect base monetary asset. No one can fuck with it.
No it isn't. For instance, I can see carefully controlled debasing (e.g. inflation) as motivation to put money some use rather than sit on it, for instance.
> Bitcoin promotes hoarding no more than gold does. And speculation no more than FX or commodities trading does.
Maybe gold promotes hoarding too much, as well. When you get down to it, it's also questionable to tie your money supply to the availability of some arbitrarily-chosen commodity. Do you want deflation until someone discovers some big gold deposit, then things swing inflationary? Bitcoin seems even worse since it's designed to be deflationary, since people will irretrievably loose them and at some point no more will be made.
maybe because the country with the FED can print new dollars and spend it on stuff they like (infrastructure bill, paying back debt, …) while such dollarized countries, (beside yes the short term stable currency) just see medium-long term inflation (without the aforementioned benefit the dollarizing country gets).
Google for: „cantillon effect“ (also accounts for inequalities inside one country like the US)
The fact that nobody adopted Freicoin is a sign that there is nothing of substance in the cryptocurrency space. Freicoin is Bitcoin without the speculation. Freicoin can only be used as a medium of exchange.
It's far more likely that in 50 years we will see negative interest rates on cash and thereby complete abolishment of the business cycle, involuntary unemployment and growth dependence than a move back to a currency designed to maintain dynasties.
>No point in debating, they will buy in when it clicks for them.
Yeah, it didn't take long for the aristocracy to click that owning land and passing it onto their heirs for all eternity is good for humanity and the landless peasants are just jealous that they can't abuse their own landless peasants.
Bitcoin is the most egalitarian money ever created. Nobody will ever refuse to sell you Bitcoin because you're a "peasant".
And comparing money with land is also incorrect - having Bitcoins in a wallet that you're never going to spend is as useful as having no Bitcoins at all. Unlike land, where you can live, extract resources, grow food, etc.
The “greater fool” effect — most of them think the price will continue to rise so they’ll be able to sell it later and make even more money. It has little to do with a bunch of people suddenly believing that Bitcoin has intrinsic value
Miners have discovered that by going public they can simply sell shares in their Bitcoin without selling it, making them yet another degenerate ETF. DeFi lending has opened an avenue for old wallets to obtain liquidity without selling. This side-steps both the liquidity issues in BTC and also negative price pressure.
It's a technology, and open source. You could say it is literally the opposite of a scam.
Alternatively, you could say everything is a scam. For example the USA is a scam. It only exists because people play along and collectively decide it exists.
At most you could argue that tanks would come and force people to play along if they stopped. So is that perhaps your threshold for something not being a scam? What is the minimum number of tanks that stand ready to enforce an idea, to make you call it "not a scam anymore"?
Clearly people are playing along with Bitcoin, so I don't see your point? I also don't fully understand what you are saying. You mean if dollar would gain in value as fast as Bitcoin, people would stop using dollars?
> You mean if dollar would gain in value as fast as Bitcoin, people would stop using dollars?
Yes, did you not realize that?!
Are you really rallying this hard against people discarding its economic value without understanding something as basic as deflation?
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Deflation is more deadly to a currency than inflation. By far.
You reduce interest rates to 0% and then what? You can try negative interest rates, but with the kind of deflation BTC has seen you would need negative triple digit interest rates which is a complete absurdity.
You'd probably see the government outlaw physical cash to boot, forcing you to use a bank and forcing the bank to constantly siphon your money if you don't spend it quickly enough.
I know about the usual "deflation scares" by economists and governments. I think they are a bit overblown, though. They seem to assume people spend money just for fun. But people also spend money because they need things. If you are hungry, you have to go out and buy food. It doesn't matter that your 1$ may be worth 10$ tomorrow, if you need an Apple now or you will starve. So I think people would still be spending, and things would even out after a while. I don't believe we need those centralized banks manipulating prices to keep some inflation rate so that people keep spending.
I also don't think Bitcoin will just keep doubling every year forever.
But all that is besides the point.
As for "people discarding the economic value of Bitcoin", clearly right now it has value, so those people are wrong. Whether it will still have value next year is another question. But right now, you can sell 1 Bitcoin for 56000$, so it provably has value.
You are completely out of your depth, you have no idea what you're talking about, and it is not worth any effort to explain to you how a currency increasing in value by 10,000% in 5 years would cripple the economy.
Understanding why that would be disastrous to the point of irrevocably destroying a nation and leaving millions in abject poverty should be table stakes when you have the bravado to shrug off the fear mongering economists who study this stuff for a living.
Bitcoin exists and hasn't left millions in abject poverty yet.
Maybe you are the one who is clueless?
Are there even any examples of deflation ruining things, apart from Krugman's babysitting exchange? I don't think we should hinge the faith of nations on that one story, which may as well have many other explanations besides the deflation theory.
You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
Also new currencies have been created a lot of times in the past, technically their value would also have been increasing by 10000% over night.
Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x". There are economists advocating socialism and economists advocating capitalism, for example. There are even economists advocating Bitcoin.
> Are there even any examples of deflation ruining things, apart from Krugman's babysitting exchange? I don't think we should hinge the faith of nations on that one story, which may as well have many other explanations besides the deflation theory.
Ever heard of The Great Depression???? Go read up on it and tell me if deflation made things better or worse.
> Bitcoin exists and hasn't left millions in abject poverty yet.
Bitcoin is not the official currency of a country! The closest cases we have to that are failing economies where BTC is used as a life raft and its taken * 10 million percent * inflation to finally make BTC an attractive alternative!
>You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
The only way it wouldn't have is if it was highly regulated... sounds like a great match for BTC right?
Like you realize we ran this experiment before right? Do you know what the gold standard was? And why we moved away from it? Hint: Go look up deflation and it's role in the Great Depression again.
Leaving the gold standard gave the government tools like interest rates that didn't have to compete with a commodity. Let alone a commodity increasing in value 10,000% in 5 years
> Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x".
This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks.
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Your comment as a whole just tells me this is not even worth the effort I've put in to get to this point. I'm not even trying to be rude, you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here.
I know about the Great Depression. Economists are discussing the causes to this day. And why it ended is also up to debate. Yes, they left the gold standard and all that, but there also was WW II and war economics. Politicians love Keynes theories because they can employ them to rationalize government spending and money printing.
It seems quite ridiculous to claim the Great Depression was caused by Deflation. It might as well have been the other way round.
I have a Billion Reichsmark at home. Was the collapse of Nazi Germany caused by Inflation? I rather doubt it. An egg cost 100000 Reichsmark in the end because there were few eggs to go around. In the Great Depression, presumably labor was cheap because there were more workers than demand for work.
As for the gold standard, most economists agree that we don't know how the experiment will end yet. What if the central banks keep interest rates low forever - nobody knows how that game will end. And they can not easily raise rates again now without bankrupting a lot of people.
In any case it seems humans have existed for thousands of years without central banks setting interest rates.
"This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks."
What an idiotic comparison.
"you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here."
Yeah you know nothing about reasoning. But you are entitled to your beliefs and cherry picked "facts", of course. Let's hope you won't get responsibility for any nations money supply any time soon.
Being used for scams is not the same as being a scam. Dollars are being used for scams all the time.
In what sense do you claim BTC is used "almost exclusively for scams"? Seems to me for the most part it is simply being traded. Do you mean Ransomware? What fraction of BTC transactions happen because of that?
"When people say "Bitcoin is scam" they mean the way it's used, not the tech itself."
It just comes across as "those people have no idea what they are talking about".
Honestly I don't care that much about people using BTC for scams. I care about the tech.
I find it difficult when people say "BTC will be worth xxxxxxxx$ soon". That kind of statement may be scammy, or at least speculative. But that is different from the tech.
"When the tech is exclusively used for hoarding and scamming"
There are a gazillion startups in Bitcoin, I don't think they are all into hoarding and scamming.
Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
"This really is a non-sensical statement. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum."
Of course I care about what can be done with the tech, but not about the scams. There are many other uses. However, I don't have to convince you, it doesn't matter to me.
> There are a gazillion startups in Bitcoin, I don't think they are all into hoarding and scamming.
They are.
> Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. Show me a start up, and I will show you how the very same things can be done and are being already done faster, and more efficiently without Bitcoin.
Apart from the very, very, very small use case of sending money to failed states, and even that use case is hinging on a lot of ifs.
> And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
Yes, but that's not their primary use.
> There are many other uses.
If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now.
" I will show you how the very same things can be done and are being already done faster, and more efficiently without Bitcoin."
Right, so how can I get a bank account that nobody can shut down?
"Yes, but that's not their primary use."
Neither is bitcoin's. So is gold also a scam, in your opinion?
I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever? How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
"If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now."
> Right, so how can I get a bank account that nobody can shut down?
What's a bank account when there's literally nothing useful you can do with it, except hoard, scam, and trade other meaningless tokens?
> Neither is bitcoin's.
The absolute vast majority use cases for bitcoin are scams and hoarding.
> I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever?
It's not. It's very, very simple.
> How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
You assume that having many lines of code is equal to something not being a scam.
There exactly two kinds ow people who peddle bitcoin and crypto: scammers who know what they are doing (and yes, writing millions of lines of code), and gullible idiots.
> So gold is also a scam?
Outside of technical uses? Yes, mostly, as in the usual scenario of "you need to hoard gold because soon everything will fall, and you'll need gold". So are diamonds. There are very many scams. But blockchains, and bitcoin among them, take the current crown.
"I have given you that. "Bank account that can't be shut down" is meaningless if it doesn't provide any function beyond storing bitcoin."
You can not just store bitcoin. Your assumptions are ridiculously wrong.
While you can not pay everywhere easily with Bitcoin yet, you also have to think of it in terms of insurance. When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled, more and more people will seek refuge in Bitcoin. There are many scenarios where Bitcoin can provide a way out. Extreme cases like having to flee the country - are you going to carry gold bars across the border?
A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
> you also have to think of it in terms of insurance.
Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year.
> When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled
There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely.
> A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
Ah. "For some reason or another". Could you tell me those "some reasons"?
Let me help you.
--- start quote ---
[In the US] the majority of the unbanked and underbanked are American-born while a growing number are immigrants where the two groups have low income as a commonality and lack the minimum balance to open checking and savings accounts
--- end quote ---
Wells Fargo requires you to have 25 dollars to open a checking account. People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year.
Same goes for other unbanked populations across the world, the vast majority of whom live in developing countries.
> With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality.
You can transfer BTC. What else can you do with a bank account?
"Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year."
It's still early days. Fluctuation is better than devaluation to zero.
"There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely."
At least a billion people in China, for starters. And you vastly underestimate the number of people who are being cancelled. You only hear about the famous cases. The number of people whose funds have been frozen by PayPal is legion. Also the people who are not cancelled yet may still be unhappy about constantly having to worry and having watch their steps to avoid being cancelled. It's not a good feeling. Sometimes stories even make it to Hacker News, maybe you missed them.
"People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year."
Even those people will have banking needs, and the transaction costs are being tackled with things like Lightning. Fiat banking is not free, either.
"There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality."
Or people who see the issues in our current system and try to create something better. People like you will probably be unable to understand the mindset of pioneers.
Most legal fictions can effectively be regarded a scam, if enough people don't buy into it(and by those who don't buy into it).
MtGox & Bitfinex & the Satoshi mystery should have been enough to end cryptocurrency's future as a security instrument. They weren't. There's more than 1 fool born every minute, I suppose.
Seeing the Satoshi mystery as a discrediting factor points to a genetic fallacy, doesn't it? Does it really matter who made it, as long as it is open?
I am aware of the pre-mined Satoshi coins, but it's perfectly possible that the key to those got lost forever by now if they weren't explicitly designed as a pump & dump/kill switch for Satoshi's benefit.
Not really, IMO. Knowing the actors in a scenario often illuminates more than the declared intentions & motivations. I can't help but refer to MS's embracing Linux, for example.
It's not a scam. It's a parody of the USD back when it was on the gold standard.
Why is a fixed supply a bad idea for a day to day currency? Just look at Bitcoin.
A currency is effectively a public good, it's needed to facilitate trade. People sell stuff for currency and this creates a chain of transactions. If someone saves money beyond what they intend to spend, it's like damming a river. There are less transactions on the other side, in extreme cases no transactions may happen, which means an infinite chain of transactions has been interrupted. If the owner of the dam periodically releases the water (spends the money) then people downstream don't mind it. However, the dam owner may abuse his power and charge these people for the privilege of not having their water drained. (real interest) People get indebted to the dam owner but at least the infinite chain of transactions is no longer interrupted.
However, there is a problem with this. The dam owner makes it harder to make a living. Everyone starts building their own dam because it is more profitable than working. Suddenly, there are droughts everywhere even though there is no lack of water in the dams. That's how you get a 30s style depression. It's like panic buying money instead of toilet paper. All these Bitcoin investors are panic buying into it, for whatever (possibly valid) reason.
When you think about it, a fixed supply currency is meant to be exclusive for elites that don't want to give up their power.
In my opinion we might be in a mini depression (Japan and euro area) since 2008 or maybe even 2001. Our money systems are more flexible than a gold standard, however, pessimistic outlooks prevent banks from lending to small businesses. So you get a lopsided recovery at the top income spectrum where the rich are highly credit worthy and get their shoes kissed by the banks, meanwhile the average person still gets up to 10% interest for a small $10k loan.
>People sell stuff for currency and this creates a chain of transactions. If someone saves money beyond what they intend to spend, it's like damming a river. There are less transactions on the other side, in extreme cases no transactions may happen
Please explain how does me not spending money stops others from spending theirs?
Not hoarding, it's called saving. And people would still spend money because everyone has their own time preference and we're all going to die someday anyways.
On the positive side, economy with a large number of savers would be less vulnerable to crisis. Governments won't be afraid to let zombie-companies die, because they know that people are not going to starve when this happens.
This was largely based on an implicit technical promise that did not pan out. Bitcoin simply doesn't scale well enough to ever be a functional payment system, certainly not a commonly used one. I doubt any digital currency will ever be performant enough to work like a credit card while being widely adopted, not without some level of centralization, but then why bother?
It's just a talking point. Only about 2x as many people are using it as 3 years ago, and due to being boat-anchored to the molasses slow L1, it would take 75 years, $500,000,000,000 worth of electricity and all the remaining block reward to open a lightning channel for everyone on earth. Even then its quadratic routing complexity would likely render it completely ineffective long before that many people tried to onboard. It's like a Soviet phone line, if you apply now, you might get a channel before you shuffle off this mortal coil.
So you're against the lightning network because it can't be scaled infinitely?
The overall system is just software, and it can be improved.
L1 is capable of 4.6 transactions per second.
L2 is capable of 25 million per second currently.
L3 will be in existence long before getting a channel to every human on Earth becomes a problem (please note that this is something the traditional financial system has also failed to do, despite hundreds of years and legislative support).
I’m against it because it’s physically impossible to sign up people in any quantity and doesn’t offer the same guarantees as the L1. We can talk about an L3 when there is one.
I've not even got anything against LN per se, what I'm pushing back on is the marketing that it's some sort of panacea, that it makes BTC a viable payment mechanism, or even that its particularly interesting.
Well, credit cards are very expensive to use (3% of every transaction on average). Digital centralized stable coin type of currency could compete with those.
Not to the customer. I don't pay 3% more for anything if I choose a card vs. cash, in fact the card gives me a 1% cash back reward.
Meanwhile buttcoins have ridiculous spikes in miner fees. New bullshit "distributed app" like the next cryptokitties is clogging Ethereum again? Now moving $10 costs $40! Money of the future!
Current stablecoins are fraudulent wildcat banks. Research Tether.
Due to technical reasons Bitcoins are lost every day though. There is nothing that keeps the dead Bitcoins moving. So the supply is shrinking over the long term.
Presuming population continues to rise, any currency whose volume does not rise at the same rate is de facto deflationary. Similarly, assuming an increasing supply of goods and services in the market, the same logic applies. It’s possible to have a currency that’s neither deflationary nor inflationary, but Bitcoin is not that.
> While this view of Bitcoin might sound like it is a betrayal of Bitcoin's original vision of fully peer‐to‐peer cash, it is not a new vision. Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto, wrote this on the Bitcoin forum in 2010: Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin‐backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases. Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others. George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and self‐regulating.
All their hardware engineering positions say they’re working on a mining ASIC, but it just seems like a huge stretch how that’s part of their business.
> Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff.
That sounds good, then? Hope you are not implying that it's a negative thing.
Actually points the other way: Apple tends to preserve names, rather than obfuscating them with changes. Beats isn't now "AirPod Fast" after company acquisition, 'i'-prefix names haven't been switched to "Apple "-prefix, etc.
The earned media from this announcement is worth an absolute fortune. Imagine you’re a marketer for a major tech company. How much would you pay to get an organic HN front page discussion of your company’s roadmap?
Short term this is good PR, long term it’s about positioning the brand. If blockchain hype continues to grow, it will be powerful to have a brand closely associated with it.
I'm pretty sure I ruined a job opportunity for myself by expressing my distaste for crypto. I mean, I might as well go work at a multi level marketing company if I'm willing to work in crypto.
> How much would you pay to get an organic HN front page discussion of your company’s roadmap?
Dozens of dollars! Seriously, that is the going rate for boosting an article to the HN front page (not to say it will stay on the front page, flagging and dang are quite effective).
Point is doing a whole rebrand to get a burst of news about it is dumb. The burst is over in days, but you're stuck with the new brand for years. Some short lived publicity is at best a small side effect, not a big reason to do it.
On the contrary, this move means that their core brand and cash cow (Square) can remain "safe" and only associated with secure payments and PoS sales rather than all their bets on crypto, blockchain, music and whatever else Jack Dorsey is cooking up.
Sounds more like the parent holding company name change, Facebook.com is still Facebook and not changing, meta is just the parent company like Alphabet. I'm assuming the same for square.com.
They all did this for different reasons, right? Google, I'm not sure about. Block: because their other brands are really tied to particular things, like Square is super tied to payment processing, there's no upside to using it elsewhere. Facebook: trying to break into new markets as Facebook is hard, because everyone knows Facebook is fundamentally bad.
I guess every company that rebrands has a specific reason to do so. Apple hasn't done anything to soil their name too badly, so they don't have to.
And presumably the whole point was a link to blockchain. Otherwise Cube definitely would've been more logical. Not that there was anything wrong with Square.
It's so strange. Square has good branding. Why would you just drop that completely? Crypto stuff aside, changing the name of your company like this just feels insane to me.
I'd argue Apple started this loooong ago. Their first few products where literally named "Apple", but then they quickly moved towards establishing independent brands for all products, starting with the Macintosh, I believe.
That left their well known company name as an umbrella brand, whereas Google, Facebook et al came up with some obscure umbrella brand way late.
I'm not an Apple fanboy at all, but I think this shows they had more vision than most. Most tech giants had one very focused, ridiculously successful product and tried to find meaning beyond that later. From everything I've heard around the early Apple decades, they always had this mentality of focusing on new product (lines) as their way forward. Probably to some degree because their focus is/was hardware, not software, but I don't believe that's all there is to it. They literally create new products that have the potential of making their established, more expensive products obsolete: For example the iPad.
Yep, a block is like a square, but brings to mind a blockchain. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someday soon we're reading about Block's new product, Chain.
Apple stopped selling "Apple Computers" decades ago. They sell Macs. If someone is talking about Beats and Apple, it doesn't get confused with the computer. Apple is the parent company and Beats sells audio hardware. In 2007, they changed their name from "Apple Computer" to "Apple Inc." The same year AppleTV and the iPhone were announced.
That said, Apple has some terrible branding in some areas. Is AppleTV the hardware, the subscription service, or Apple's TV app?
378 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadWhile Jack Dorsey is just talking about helping poor countries, Jack Mallers went there to launch the product, and has a great vision about using the lightning network to compete with VISA / Mastercard.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409382
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409497
It's just a picture of a musician and #Bitcoin and a picture of a hat. https://twitter.com/TBD54566975
Is anyone in this space serious?
- @blocks (https://twitter.com/blocks/status/1466159597194907649)
That's annoying.
With Facebook’s recent re-org to Meta, is this spurring a new wave of companies re-branding to be seen as relevant by associating with future technologies?
Pity the poor person out there trying to understand what is going on / what is block.xyz.
At least we are told nothing will change with TBD54566975 (?).
https://twitter.com/tbd54566975?lang=en
The bitcoin world is crazy.
All of these corporate cryptocurrency pushes have strong "How do you do, fellow children?" vibes.
But the funny part is a lot of the crypto people are eating it right up, mostly because they have to accept any and all big business investment in the crypto space to further pump their own assets.
But it's curated by JAY-Z!
That was the first wave. This much bigger wave is people like your uncle who's not tech savvy but bought $100 in Bitcoin because they heard you could get rich from it. The ideological component is just window dressing (eventually a lot of ideology becomes window dressing so that's not too unusual).
Random uncles putting $100 into BitCoin isn't driving the market.
Cryptocurrency is very corporate now, including a mix of shady corporations who love playing in this unregulated space.
The average joe is just along for the ride, but they're being pitched the idea that decentralization is democratization. Meanwhile, there's nothing stopping a decentralized cryptocurrency from being owned by very centralized players. It is, after all, tradable by anyone.
No, but the companies providing easy ways for tens of thousands of uncles to put $100 into the market definitely are driving the market.
See: Robinhood, Venmo, PayPal, Coinbase, etc.
I do not know what is true anymore in this world. It feels like stupid people are running the show.
Maybe early to the pre party and late to the after party?
This name change is going to be extremely confusing to end users who are out of the loop given the current dominance of the Square brand.
Name change makes sense, especially in cryptocurrency services.
I'd agree if all their services were financial related but don't think Tidal fits.
You can say what you want about megaholding corporate conglomerates, but this has so much more style than abc.xyz.
You can also click and drag to rotate the cube. But yeah, it doesn't do anything particular spectacular.
"Square" => "Cube"
but
"Square" => "Block" just seems mediocre by comparison.
Certainly they want "Block" to invoke blockchain, but it seems more gimmicky with just "Block".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp
Google => Alphabet
Square => Block
Facebook => Meta ??
For Facebook they were dealing with the opposite, trying to shift past a torrent of negative press, the move to an Abstract name has been highly effective in turning down the (short term) negative press heat. Yes they announced new things but arguably it was critical timing from a PR perspective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395518
Two examples here -- When I read both titles and took a min to realize "OH FACEBOOK!"
galaxy brain: blockchain holding company
Square, as a name, is simple and well-known, and the logo is recognizable, inoffensive, and amenable for design updates.
Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now).
I suspect this has something to do with it. I had a co-worker once describe Jack as a magpie. He's usually much more interested in the new shiny thing. That was Cash App for a while. Now the blockchain stuff I guess. I haven't worked there in many years so I don't know for sure.
Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff.
I had a big WTF with this move, and have a similar feeling about the blockchain efforts. But I also tend towards the new and shiny, so I have a harder time faulting that.
Accepting Bitcoin as payments has never been about facilitating payments. It's not rational to go through all the trouble of transferring Bitcoin, paying transaction fees, waiting for the transaction to clear (took over an hour when I tried it a few months ago), and then surrendering all of the protections you'd normally get when using a credit card.
Accepting Bitcoin is about propelling the Bitcoin narrative: The more you can put "Bitcoin accepted here" on everyone's website, the more you can convince other people that Bitcoin is going mainstream and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).
I disagree with this part of the paragraph. Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less.
I mean the "pay for starbucks using bitcoin" ship sailed, what, 10 years ago? Bitcoin is absolutely nothing more than a giant pump & dump scam. Of course pedants will say "technically it isn't a pump & dump" just like "technically it isn't a pyramid scheme"... Bitcoin might not meet the technical definition of any of those... but it is a scam none the less.
You can't convince them - in their mind, you are part of the "scam", and hence not trustworthy.
No point in debating, they will buy in when it clicks for them.
Why bother with Bitcoin, when you can just use money from a country with a competent Federal Reserve? IIRC many countries have "dollarized" (either de jure or de facto).
Eh, that's pretty obviously untrue under any reasonable definition of "competent Federal Reserve."
Now, there are definitely unreasonable an/or extreme ideological definitions under which you could make such a statement (e.g. the most reasonable of these are monomanically overoptimizing to one metric), but those definitions are irrelevant and can be ignored.
It's not obvious. Is any central bank that debases currency through money printing without some kind of fixed peg/ratio to a scarce asset competent?
No. This is self-evidently true as, by doing so, they are perniciously taxing the savings of the poor in order to feather the nests of the (asset-)rich.
There is no avoiding the truth of this inviolable fact as Cantillion himself described many years ago.
You're...
>> monomanically overoptimizing to one metric
As long as they do the debasing competently, as in the currency is able to sustain a healthy economy, then they're a competent central bank.
Bitcoin could never sustain a healthy economy, for instance, because it strongly promotes hoarding and speculation.
This is a contradiction in terms...
Bitcoin promotes hoarding no more than gold does. And speculation no more than FX or commodities trading does.
If a payment currency was pegged to bitcoin and the backing ratio remained fixed things would be fine like they were when we had the gold standard or even the later USD reserve currency standard when the USD was backed by gold.
However history had shown that these arrangements did not hold as central bankers simply couldn't resist firing up the printer and breaking the peg with the scarce backing asset. Political pressures, wars, whatever the reason. Every peg was broken.
Human greed, misplaced albeit well-intentioned mistakes, and simple human fallibility will continue to tempt even the most honourable people close to the money spigot. It's happened throughout the ages and human nature will not change in this regard.
Bitcoin _algorithmically_ prevents this debasement and so it is literally the perfect base monetary asset. No one can fuck with it.
> This is a contradiction in terms...
No it isn't. For instance, I can see carefully controlled debasing (e.g. inflation) as motivation to put money some use rather than sit on it, for instance.
> Bitcoin promotes hoarding no more than gold does. And speculation no more than FX or commodities trading does.
Maybe gold promotes hoarding too much, as well. When you get down to it, it's also questionable to tie your money supply to the availability of some arbitrarily-chosen commodity. Do you want deflation until someone discovers some big gold deposit, then things swing inflationary? Bitcoin seems even worse since it's designed to be deflationary, since people will irretrievably loose them and at some point no more will be made.
Google for: „cantillon effect“ (also accounts for inequalities inside one country like the US)
I would mock them, call it a ponzi scheme, call them shills, etc.
I think Satoshi did it right. He said -
> If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
He said this when Bitoin was still extremely niche and inexpensive.
But because you asked, I'm going to tell you what the personal event taught me - people are irrational.
Watch "Gods Must be Crazy" and try to understand the allegory of the bottle and what effect it has on the tribe.
That's what Bitcoin has achieved in cyberspace.
It's far more likely that in 50 years we will see negative interest rates on cash and thereby complete abolishment of the business cycle, involuntary unemployment and growth dependence than a move back to a currency designed to maintain dynasties.
Sounds like Herbalife to me.
Yeah, it didn't take long for the aristocracy to click that owning land and passing it onto their heirs for all eternity is good for humanity and the landless peasants are just jealous that they can't abuse their own landless peasants.
And comparing money with land is also incorrect - having Bitcoins in a wallet that you're never going to spend is as useful as having no Bitcoins at all. Unlike land, where you can live, extract resources, grow food, etc.
Alternatively, you could say everything is a scam. For example the USA is a scam. It only exists because people play along and collectively decide it exists.
At most you could argue that tanks would come and force people to play along if they stopped. So is that perhaps your threshold for something not being a scam? What is the minimum number of tanks that stand ready to enforce an idea, to make you call it "not a scam anymore"?
These kinds of arguments held water when BTC doubled after two years or something, not anymore.
Yes, did you not realize that?!
Are you really rallying this hard against people discarding its economic value without understanding something as basic as deflation?
-
Deflation is more deadly to a currency than inflation. By far.
You reduce interest rates to 0% and then what? You can try negative interest rates, but with the kind of deflation BTC has seen you would need negative triple digit interest rates which is a complete absurdity.
You'd probably see the government outlaw physical cash to boot, forcing you to use a bank and forcing the bank to constantly siphon your money if you don't spend it quickly enough.
It would be a literal hellscape.
I also don't think Bitcoin will just keep doubling every year forever.
But all that is besides the point.
As for "people discarding the economic value of Bitcoin", clearly right now it has value, so those people are wrong. Whether it will still have value next year is another question. But right now, you can sell 1 Bitcoin for 56000$, so it provably has value.
Understanding why that would be disastrous to the point of irrevocably destroying a nation and leaving millions in abject poverty should be table stakes when you have the bravado to shrug off the fear mongering economists who study this stuff for a living.
Maybe you are the one who is clueless?
Are there even any examples of deflation ruining things, apart from Krugman's babysitting exchange? I don't think we should hinge the faith of nations on that one story, which may as well have many other explanations besides the deflation theory.
You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
Also new currencies have been created a lot of times in the past, technically their value would also have been increasing by 10000% over night.
Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x". There are economists advocating socialism and economists advocating capitalism, for example. There are even economists advocating Bitcoin.
Ever heard of The Great Depression???? Go read up on it and tell me if deflation made things better or worse.
> Bitcoin exists and hasn't left millions in abject poverty yet.
Bitcoin is not the official currency of a country! The closest cases we have to that are failing economies where BTC is used as a life raft and its taken * 10 million percent * inflation to finally make BTC an attractive alternative!
>You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
The only way it wouldn't have is if it was highly regulated... sounds like a great match for BTC right?
Like you realize we ran this experiment before right? Do you know what the gold standard was? And why we moved away from it? Hint: Go look up deflation and it's role in the Great Depression again.
Leaving the gold standard gave the government tools like interest rates that didn't have to compete with a commodity. Let alone a commodity increasing in value 10,000% in 5 years
> Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x".
This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks.
-
Your comment as a whole just tells me this is not even worth the effort I've put in to get to this point. I'm not even trying to be rude, you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here.
It seems quite ridiculous to claim the Great Depression was caused by Deflation. It might as well have been the other way round.
I have a Billion Reichsmark at home. Was the collapse of Nazi Germany caused by Inflation? I rather doubt it. An egg cost 100000 Reichsmark in the end because there were few eggs to go around. In the Great Depression, presumably labor was cheap because there were more workers than demand for work.
As for the gold standard, most economists agree that we don't know how the experiment will end yet. What if the central banks keep interest rates low forever - nobody knows how that game will end. And they can not easily raise rates again now without bankrupting a lot of people.
In any case it seems humans have existed for thousands of years without central banks setting interest rates.
"This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks."
What an idiotic comparison.
"you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here."
Yeah you know nothing about reasoning. But you are entitled to your beliefs and cherry picked "facts", of course. Let's hope you won't get responsibility for any nations money supply any time soon.
The fact that it's technology, and that it's opensource doesn't mean it's not used for scams (and almost exclusively for scams).
In what sense do you claim BTC is used "almost exclusively for scams"? Seems to me for the most part it is simply being traded. Do you mean Ransomware? What fraction of BTC transactions happen because of that?
You have to read context and understand what people are saying. When people say "Bitcoin is scam" they mean the way it's used, not the tech itself.
> In what sense do you claim BTC is used "almost exclusively for scams"?
In the sense of the word scam.
I was wrong though. Bitcoin is used almost exclusively for two things: scams and hoarding. There are almost no other uses.
> Do you mean Ransomware?
No, I don't.
It just comes across as "those people have no idea what they are talking about".
Honestly I don't care that much about people using BTC for scams. I care about the tech.
I find it difficult when people say "BTC will be worth xxxxxxxx$ soon". That kind of statement may be scammy, or at least speculative. But that is different from the tech.
It doesn't. When the tech is exclusively used for hoarding and scamming, it becomes synonymous with its use.
> Honestly I don't care that much about people using BTC for scams. I care about the tech.
This really is a non-sensical statement. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum.
There are a gazillion startups in Bitcoin, I don't think they are all into hoarding and scamming.
Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
"This really is a non-sensical statement. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum."
Of course I care about what can be done with the tech, but not about the scams. There are many other uses. However, I don't have to convince you, it doesn't matter to me.
They are.
> Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. Show me a start up, and I will show you how the very same things can be done and are being already done faster, and more efficiently without Bitcoin.
Apart from the very, very, very small use case of sending money to failed states, and even that use case is hinging on a lot of ifs.
> And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
Yes, but that's not their primary use.
> There are many other uses.
If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now.
Right, so how can I get a bank account that nobody can shut down?
"Yes, but that's not their primary use."
Neither is bitcoin's. So is gold also a scam, in your opinion?
I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever? How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
"If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now."
So gold is also a scam?
What's a bank account when there's literally nothing useful you can do with it, except hoard, scam, and trade other meaningless tokens?
> Neither is bitcoin's.
The absolute vast majority use cases for bitcoin are scams and hoarding.
> I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever?
It's not. It's very, very simple.
> How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
You assume that having many lines of code is equal to something not being a scam.
There exactly two kinds ow people who peddle bitcoin and crypto: scammers who know what they are doing (and yes, writing millions of lines of code), and gullible idiots.
> So gold is also a scam?
Outside of technical uses? Yes, mostly, as in the usual scenario of "you need to hoard gold because soon everything will fall, and you'll need gold". So are diamonds. There are very many scams. But blockchains, and bitcoin among them, take the current crown.
So you can not give me the thing that Bitcoin delivers, without Bitcoin. Case closed.
Sorry, you are clueless, and your attitude may bite you in the ass in the long run. Discussion is over. You can keep your beliefs.
I have given you that. "Bank account that can't be shut down" is meaningless if it doesn't provide any function beyond storing bitcoin.
> Sorry, you are clueless,
I'm not.
> You can keep your beliefs.
These are not beliefs. These are things grounded in reality. Unlike, you know, anything bitcoin-related.
You can not just store bitcoin. Your assumptions are ridiculously wrong.
While you can not pay everywhere easily with Bitcoin yet, you also have to think of it in terms of insurance. When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled, more and more people will seek refuge in Bitcoin. There are many scenarios where Bitcoin can provide a way out. Extreme cases like having to flee the country - are you going to carry gold bars across the border?
A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
So, what else are you going to store there?
> you also have to think of it in terms of insurance.
Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year.
> When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled
There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely.
> A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
Ah. "For some reason or another". Could you tell me those "some reasons"?
Let me help you.
--- start quote ---
[In the US] the majority of the unbanked and underbanked are American-born while a growing number are immigrants where the two groups have low income as a commonality and lack the minimum balance to open checking and savings accounts
--- end quote ---
Wells Fargo requires you to have 25 dollars to open a checking account. People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year.
Same goes for other unbanked populations across the world, the vast majority of whom live in developing countries.
> With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality.
You can transfer BTC. What else can you do with a bank account?
"Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year."
It's still early days. Fluctuation is better than devaluation to zero.
"There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely."
At least a billion people in China, for starters. And you vastly underestimate the number of people who are being cancelled. You only hear about the famous cases. The number of people whose funds have been frozen by PayPal is legion. Also the people who are not cancelled yet may still be unhappy about constantly having to worry and having watch their steps to avoid being cancelled. It's not a good feeling. Sometimes stories even make it to Hacker News, maybe you missed them.
"People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year."
Even those people will have banking needs, and the transaction costs are being tackled with things like Lightning. Fiat banking is not free, either.
"There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality."
Or people who see the issues in our current system and try to create something better. People like you will probably be unable to understand the mindset of pioneers.
MtGox & Bitfinex & the Satoshi mystery should have been enough to end cryptocurrency's future as a security instrument. They weren't. There's more than 1 fool born every minute, I suppose.
I am aware of the pre-mined Satoshi coins, but it's perfectly possible that the key to those got lost forever by now if they weren't explicitly designed as a pump & dump/kill switch for Satoshi's benefit.
Why is a fixed supply a bad idea for a day to day currency? Just look at Bitcoin.
A currency is effectively a public good, it's needed to facilitate trade. People sell stuff for currency and this creates a chain of transactions. If someone saves money beyond what they intend to spend, it's like damming a river. There are less transactions on the other side, in extreme cases no transactions may happen, which means an infinite chain of transactions has been interrupted. If the owner of the dam periodically releases the water (spends the money) then people downstream don't mind it. However, the dam owner may abuse his power and charge these people for the privilege of not having their water drained. (real interest) People get indebted to the dam owner but at least the infinite chain of transactions is no longer interrupted.
However, there is a problem with this. The dam owner makes it harder to make a living. Everyone starts building their own dam because it is more profitable than working. Suddenly, there are droughts everywhere even though there is no lack of water in the dams. That's how you get a 30s style depression. It's like panic buying money instead of toilet paper. All these Bitcoin investors are panic buying into it, for whatever (possibly valid) reason.
When you think about it, a fixed supply currency is meant to be exclusive for elites that don't want to give up their power.
In my opinion we might be in a mini depression (Japan and euro area) since 2008 or maybe even 2001. Our money systems are more flexible than a gold standard, however, pessimistic outlooks prevent banks from lending to small businesses. So you get a lopsided recovery at the top income spectrum where the rich are highly credit worthy and get their shoes kissed by the banks, meanwhile the average person still gets up to 10% interest for a small $10k loan.
Please explain how does me not spending money stops others from spending theirs?
On the positive side, economy with a large number of savers would be less vulnerable to crisis. Governments won't be afraid to let zombie-companies die, because they know that people are not going to starve when this happens.
The overall system is just software, and it can be improved.
L1 is capable of 4.6 transactions per second.
L2 is capable of 25 million per second currently.
L3 will be in existence long before getting a channel to every human on Earth becomes a problem (please note that this is something the traditional financial system has also failed to do, despite hundreds of years and legislative support).
I've not even got anything against LN per se, what I'm pushing back on is the marketing that it's some sort of panacea, that it makes BTC a viable payment mechanism, or even that its particularly interesting.
At this point it looks like a bait and switch. We were promised a decentralized currency and we just got a get rich quick scheme.
Meanwhile buttcoins have ridiculous spikes in miner fees. New bullshit "distributed app" like the next cryptokitties is clogging Ethereum again? Now moving $10 costs $40! Money of the future!
Current stablecoins are fraudulent wildcat banks. Research Tether.
Unfortunately, they built the currency to be deflationary, so it’s only used for speculation.
The governments are unable to rebase it to fund their wars and propaganda though, so naturally they don't like it.
> While this view of Bitcoin might sound like it is a betrayal of Bitcoin's original vision of fully peer‐to‐peer cash, it is not a new vision. Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto, wrote this on the Bitcoin forum in 2010: Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin‐backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases. Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others. George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and self‐regulating.
That sounds good, then? Hope you are not implying that it's a negative thing.
Short term this is good PR, long term it’s about positioning the brand. If blockchain hype continues to grow, it will be powerful to have a brand closely associated with it.
Dozens of dollars! Seriously, that is the going rate for boosting an article to the HN front page (not to say it will stay on the front page, flagging and dang are quite effective).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3sg8b5iXO4
1. https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...
I guess every company that rebrands has a specific reason to do so. Apple hasn't done anything to soil their name too badly, so they don't have to.
See Filecoin: approximately 1/100th data stored as Backblaze, approx 100x the fully diluted market cap of Backblaze, for a 10000x $ per byte stored.
That left their well known company name as an umbrella brand, whereas Google, Facebook et al came up with some obscure umbrella brand way late.
I'm not an Apple fanboy at all, but I think this shows they had more vision than most. Most tech giants had one very focused, ridiculously successful product and tried to find meaning beyond that later. From everything I've heard around the early Apple decades, they always had this mentality of focusing on new product (lines) as their way forward. Probably to some degree because their focus is/was hardware, not software, but I don't believe that's all there is to it. They literally create new products that have the potential of making their established, more expensive products obsolete: For example the iPad.
Sure, "Meta" _means_ something, but Apple (now) does, too, by association.
That said, Apple has some terrible branding in some areas. Is AppleTV the hardware, the subscription service, or Apple's TV app?