Please don't start yet another instance of the same old generic flamewar on HN. The issue isn't whether you're right or wrong, it's that we've had this flamewar hundreds of times already and nothing new comes of it. That makes if off topic for this site, which is supposed to be for curiosity. Curiosity withers under repetition and fries under indignation.
Happy to see you’re taking this approach now Dang. It’s really killed a lot of threads and I hope conversations can now go up a level to the technical uses rather than generic ‘ponzi scheme’ claims.
I've left the field of crypto/blockchain but worked on a few projects such as the Cardano blockchain. Now I'm focusing on effective altruism and food security. Anyway, I've been aware or involved with the crypto space since 2014 when I used to play a drinking game involving the Bitcoin ATM at Google Campus in London (guessing if the price would go up or down when it updated every minute or so, around the $300 mark if I remember correctly). In that time I've worked for several different startups in the space and not once have I worked with anyone who's trying to scam people. Yes scams exist. No, most projects are not scams. Bad ideas? Sure, maybe! Bad execution? Yep, that happens! Quickly obsolete tech? It's a fast moving scene! But when a startup is trying to build a product such as a financial account for developing countries without banking infrastructure to allow people to build a credit score, or trying to reduce international banking fees impact on remittence payments in countries like Nepal, or trying to allow people to have options in countries where their own national currency is going down the drain, I find it offensive that people on HackerNews who on the whole are smart well-experienced people default to this idea that it's all one big scam. This is in fact one of the reasons I left Crypto - because of relentless attacks on peoples character and how toxic it can be. I'm very happy if this style of conversation disappears from HN forever because 1) saying it's a scam doesn't change anyones opinions 2) the arguments have been repeated literally for years 3) it goes against HN T&Cs anyway.
I hope we're at the point where we can focus on individual projects (which may well be absolutely useless products) than judging the entire space as a whole.
> I hope conversations can now go up a level to the technical uses
Most if not all of the "technical uses" rely on rent extraction so it's really hard to talk about the technical uses without focusing on that major sticking point. Cryptocurrencies/dApps et al only work because of a network of miners on top of existing Internet infrastructure. They all add some extra cost onto every transaction. This in addition to the fantastic number of hucksters and scammers that need suckers to buy into the system so they can cash out.
The whole subject of crytocurrencies cannot be separated from the implementation details. Talking about "technical uses" as if the economic considerations didn't exist is pointless.
Yes I understand how blockchains work. Having that extra layer allows for these projects so, as an end user, we should shift the focus on things like the costs of using an app rather than the implementation (except maybe for PoS v PoW for environmental reasons). Instead of technical uses maybe I should have said projects and products.
Just last year Stripe wouldn't even allow any crypto business to be their customers. You could not use Stripe if you business was crypto related. A client of mine had to switch implementation to checkout.com because of that. I wonder what changed...
What changed is, someone very powerful said this: "One of my incredibly big misses over the last decade was not buying enough Bitcoin. At $60k per Bitcoin, I'm still not sure if one should aggressively buy it, but surely it is telling us that we are at a crisis moment for the Fed."
Thanks for the link. I didn't find that quote in the article, but maybe it was in there. If it's not in there then it's crazy that you linked that article saying "Peter Thiel" - another commenter said the same thing. If it's in there then it's weird that my quoted Google Search didn't yield at least that article.
> Thiel used $10 million of his proceeds to create Clarium Capital Management…
> 57.1% return … 7.8% loss … 40.3% return
> …By 2011, after missing out on the economic rebound, many key investors pulled out, reducing the value of Clarium's assets to $350 million, two thirds of which was Thiel's money.
Yep. Until very recently, we weren't able to support businesses selling crypto. (The regulatory details are complex.) We're now rolling out support and this page is basically about that change.
To be honest, I thought your refusal was probably well justified considering the disproportionate levels of credit card fraud involved in anything to do with crypto. I'd love to see your end of year statistics now...
There are always scams of different flavours around - that doesn't stop anyone from picking one or another. The appearance of easy money attracts those who seek easy money.
My personal observation. A large proportion of credit card payment were fraud, or flagged as such. It was such a huge number (% wise) that I (thought I) understood why stripe pulled the rug out. And in another project I observed a very large and sudden increase at attempted fraud right after elements of crypto were introduced (including attempts at impersonating me, and someone else involved).
But honestly, when it comes to the crypto world, I'm that guy who laughed at that other guy for buying bitcoin at 20 cents. There was a lesson there somewhere.
I mean that's different from the kind of fraud the parent post was talking about. If a user used their credit card to buy an NFT that quickly went to zero, that's not a fraudulent credit card transaction still - the user authorized that transaction. CC fraud would be if someone stole your credentials and bought something before the card was revoked.
How would this bank even know stripe is accepting a new currency? Why would it matter. Money will flow into your account from stripe. Stripe is not a cryto service provider defined by banking regulations.
That's like saying a bank won't accept a transfer from another bank because that bank allows you to pay them in cryto.
> Stripe is not a cryto service provider defined by banking regulations.
But it's now a payment provider that allows businesses in the UK to engage in what surely must be considered high-risk crypto business by the bank (NFT marketplaces).
This is the sort of thing that gets businesses denied banking service.
> That's like saying a bank won't accept a transfer from another bank because that bank allows you to pay them in cryto.
Or a bank won't accept a transfer from your bank because your bank might be taking deposits from entities subject to strict sanctions, and the plausible deniability is very thin.
I think banks are working on that as we speak. Cold days in Cypress soon, etc. The reputation risk of "doing crypto" might be decreasing, but the legal risk of violating sanctions seems to be increasing.
Well, regulatory details have been complex for years and capable companies with smaller compliance/legal teams found a way to do it.
My sense is it's more about the window shifting enough that it's palatable enough for a Stripe product team to stake their professional rep on now. "If Twitter and Square are doing it..."
To an extent, I wonder what the impact of the SEC ruling for BlockFi (crypto exchange) did to clarify the regs for larger companies like Stripe.
Did anything necessarily change? I imagine there can be a different answer between the two questions "are crypto businesses bad risks as a payment provider?" and "is cryptocurrency a bad risk as a payment mechanism?"
while the crypto community wants to avoid as much regulation as possible, it's important to realize that sensible regulation is a boon to the industry as it clears a path to allow institutions and traditional FinTech companies to hop onboard.
Just recently moved from Stripe to Paddle after realizing their new tax collection stuff locked out a bunch of my customers--it only supports credit card transactions, not Apple Pay or Google or any of the EU payment options, and Stripe has no ETA on fixing this. With the tax bits, I still have to file and worry about thresholds too, so I switched to Paddle. On top of completely eliminating the tax remittance crap, I also have PayPal support now (highly requested by customers, especially international).
I mean something non-Software. I quite like their overall model and integrated experience. Along with Paypal support, while not getting any mention much in tech cycle it is surprisingly popular.
Well, yeah, but I need it so I'm not sure what you're getting at? I didn't just turn it on for funsies, tax remittance sucks. There are APIs you can use, but they're more expensive/complicated than stripe's tax solution that they acquired. Paddle (or some other merchant of record) makes it even easier.
By choosing to only have an EC card you’re making a deliberate choice to make your life difficult by using an incredibly obscure method of payment, no?
You can hardly expect those to work even in other EU countries, much less with an US based online business.
Almost everybody else in the world has a visa or a mastercard (or unionpay)
That was the standard normal card, I had ever since with that account - which is what all the people around me have - but it does work all across europe, in every shop I went.
Paypal is fine with it, so is coinbase. And every other online service I used.
(while backpacking international, I indeed had a credit card at that time)
So I recently only got a credit card(again), to be able to use Stripe. But most won't bother to do this, unless they have to.
"That’s because deep inside it’s secretly something like a mastercard maestro, no?"
Maybe? There is a maestro sign on it, but it is not a debit card.
But my point was, that I do not know, nor want to know all the details of banking communication. I want it to work.
It is a normal card around here and it does work in europe. So I never had the need to change, until now. So now I have a credit card, too and that is fine for me. But most other people here still don't, as most do not do international transactions.
So if Stripe wants to get into that market, they likely will have to adopt. No one here would offer stripe on their webshop - with only a few being able to use it.
Apparently I do have an debit card and apparently something at Stripe had changed, since when I tried it some months ago, because now it all worked(without me changing anything) and I did not even needed my credit card. Who knows.
This doesn't come as surprising since they have timed this with Biden's executive order on regulating cryptocurrencies, so this is probably why you are seeing Stripe pushing Crypto right now.
Also, all smaller cryptocurrency on ramp businesses are doomed.
My respect for Stripe plummeted when I reached out about a closed API and got a passive aggressive answer from support.
I don't think I've ever gotten that kind of rude sarcasm/passive aggression from a simple support inquiry, and I vowed never to use their services again.
Their competitors to this specific API were much nicer to work with and onboarded us after some basic introductions, so part of me wonders what other fronts Stripe has better but less well known competitors on.
Sure, I inquired about the API, and got a templated reply that simply repeated the API's landing page
I replied saying I'd be interested in knowing what they're looking for in potential beta partners:
> That is good to hear. All you need to do is follow the instructions listed in my previous email and wait on contact from the Treasury team. I am happy I was able to assist you.
> Thank you for choosing Stripe!
Keep in mind the "instructions" are to fill out the form that got me into this email chain in the first place: in other words there's nothing about what I asked there.
There's the whole "That's good to hear" reply to a question I asked...
And I was especially taken aback by the whole facetious "happy I was able to assist you" bit after completely ignoring my question.
-
The entire interaction felt like "why are you bothering us", which is honestly would be a fair position if they're looking for established players for example... but why not be direct?
We had other companies flat out say their partners want X million in funding before they'll work with you, and that was fine.
It'd actually take less work than writing out a non-answer like that
Oh please. Long time Stripe fan and customer here - this makes me sad from the inside. They even mention NFT marketplaces - scams all over the places. Why would they want to support use cases like that?
I just spent 12 months investigating crypto. I bought come coins, got lucky on that ENS airdrop, made a smart contract, bought an NFT, learned some Solidity, joined some Discords, listen to some podcasts, set up a miner and generally tried to learn about this area.
2 weeks ago I left all but one discord, unfollowed all Web3 specific accounts on Twitter and stopped looking at Binance etc.
My life has improved considerably. I’m sure someone is getting rich in there but I can’t work out who or how amongst the hype, pumps, grifters, scams and outright criminals.
I’m ok missing the boat if it turns out to be any more than a raft. My sanity and concentration is worth far more than whatever rubbish they are all peddling.
people have been saying this since 2011. thats not to say that the speculation that is taking place in crypto isnt ridiculous and destructive, but your claim is completely unfounded
The risk reward ratio is just not there anymore. We may see $100K bitcoin, sure, but that's just 3x, you can get that buying and holding TSLA starting today. But IMHO the risk of bitcoin crashing to, say, $10K is pretty significant, especially when Russia sanctions could be used as pretext to regulate crypto to death.
Sure, but that's only looking at BTC. There's a lot of other coins still jumping a 100-1000x in this bull run, even if BTC only went up a few times. The point about it all crashing is true though, high risk-high reward (and that risk likely outweighs the reward for BTC in my opinion).
this is how you prove that you just learned about crypto last week. if you think that bitcoin was more of a sure thing and less risky relative to reward in 2011 then you have no idea what you are talking about. first of all if bitcoin crashed from 65k to 10k that wouldn't even be the worst drop bitcoin has ever seen. thats like an 85 percent drop. bitcoin has seen MULTIPLE 95+ percent drops over the course of it's life. it's harder to regulate bitcoin today than it has ever been because there are multiple fortune 500 companies and s&p companies that would be massively negatively effected by this change. bitcoin is in a less risky political position than it has ever been in before.
Very bullish for you to think TSLA is going to be a $3T company in the near future! I'm sure it will happen at some point. Maybe it will due to inflation hah.
But on average the market takes very roughly 7 years (probably more) to double your money. So you are talking about a ~10 year time frame.
we haven't build economies on crypto yet. I think we are in buy-and-wait-for-price-up phase. Once we use crypto for utility, we will be in different phase.
Went through this same cycle back in 2017-2018 and I realized that I didn't have enough energy to keep up with all the news popping up and some seemingly spiking the price of a crypto while other news just as juicy/valuable/hype-worthy didn't seem to do the same.
I know some friends who made good money from NFTs and some crypto pumps but most have either stayed flat or lost money.
So, I'm in the same place as you, I'll put my money on less "cool" investments and continue to watch the space.
Yeah you missed this bull run if you’ve only been in for 12 months. The run up in 2020 was the time to be in it. For example you could have bought SOL at sub $1 and made millions. I know so many people (literally dozens) that made that one trade and they’re now set for life.
So much of crypto is about being early to the bull run, finding the few coins that are going to outpace everything else, and just putting a few thousand into each.
Once the first big pump happens there are maybe a few other 5-10x opportunities, but certainly 2 years in everything is dried up. Exit pumps have already started and most major CT personalities are selling, regardless of what they’re saying publicly.
The good news is that you’ll have another opportunity in another 2-3 years.
Thanks, I made a legit concerted effort and just could make it stick. Maybe I’ll look stupid in the future but from where I am now with the information I have I’m ok with that.
I find the sheer volume of anger and hatred surrounding this and other related announcements completely unhinged. Why are so many people threatened by services that give their users options?
Because if Bitcoin specifically takes off it will force governments to balanced budgets, exposing a lot of hidden corruption. Detractors cherry-pick concerns about energy usage, but never show the energy usage of the existing system for comparison.
Crypto right now, while being used by under 1% of population use, uses 40% of the energy of the global banking system[1].
In other words, if it were to increase to even 10% of the population using it, it would use over 4x the energy of the global banking system. If that increased to 50%, it would be 20x.
This would be somewhat mitigated in the case of Proof of Stake, but would simultaneously give major players in the market complete control of said market. Y'know, like a government.
I feel like I am engaging with a bad faith critique for the purposes of good faith discussion, which is a mistake, but OK, here goes:
Some businesses in the UK have banks that say they will close their accounts if they accept cryptocurrency payments. Mine does! I would without hesitation lose my business bank account if I did, because I am a trifling small customer.
Stripe was safe and reputable, but now it is a place where you can accept cryptocurrencies.
Edit: see note below.
I'm not currently clearing payments via Stripe for my own business, but the way I understand it, it's now likely to mean increased scrutiny from my bank about those payments when I do.
I'm not sure if it has rolled out in the UK yet. But if it has, will my bank be clearly informed when a payout was *not* the result of a cryptocurrency transaction? I've not read that far yet.
Either way it's reputational damage hassle people do not need.
And before you ask: I am of course comfortable with that bank policy. Because cryptocurrency is consistently crime-adjacent and fraud-adjacent. And it's not like banks are that well-equipped at dealing with old-fashioned frauds that have been around a century, let alone new frauds that have been around mere days.
--
Edit to add: apparently this document is not meant to communicate that cryptocurrency payments can be accepted. Which is not what the screenshots in the page do, IMO.
Though the fact that Stripe will allow NFT exchanges is more than enough to create reputational risk.
I still expect to have more difficulty when I add Stripe payments.
> While I largely share your feelings about NFTs, I think the general population outside of HN sphere does not.
I don't know. I know a fair number of artists/musicians/photographers and I can tell you that among those artists, the impression of NFTs is almost universally negative.
I would bet that more people think NFT is close to a "giant, planet-killing scam", which is hyperbole but on the side of caution.
I think the “planet-killing scam” is very HN-sphere thinking. Most people have no idea. Most non-technical artists I interact with seem very excited about NFTs, often asking me to help them create their own (unfortunately I’m not interested).
And what about when ETH2 goes live in some months and the main NFT chain moves to proof-of-stake? The “planet-killing” problem is already solved, that tech is going live this year. Seems like a fairly fragile criticism.
> I think the “planet-killing scam” is very HN-sphere thinking
It's not, at all. I've heard that phrasing or similar (that it's a pyramid scheme, that cryptocurrencies are wasteful) from people who don't even know how to find HN.
In the photography world in particular, mentioning your NFT is likely to get you laughed out of any forum in which you bring it up.
IMO if you encounter any non-technical artist "excited" about NFTs, tell them to stay the hell away, or risk being seen a bad friend. I tell people I will not help them, that I am very happily uninterested, and urge them not to do it at all.
>IMO if you encounter any non-technical artist "excited" about NFTs, tell them to stay the hell away, or risk being seen a bad friend.
Fuck that, despite me being incredibly skeptical of NFTs I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge the fact that some of my non-technical artist friends have earned 6-7 figure amounts selling NFTs.
6-7 figure amounts selling something of no worth to people who on average do not have any comprehension of it and which opens them up to fraud and scams. Great.
If an artist friend of mine sells an NFT I am going to struggle with continuing to see them as a friend, because it's morally bankrupt.
If a non-technical artist comes to you and asks for help selling an entirely phantom product to their presumably only-averagely-technically-aware fans, why would you get involved?
Anything that introduces non-technical users to crypto -- which is really the main function of NFT exchanges at this point -- is a moral hazard.
This is why I am so shocked to see Stripe involved with it.
Would you consider an artist who sells a series of limited edition prints to be morally bankrupt? How is doing this via the blockchain any different (besides catering to a customer base who prefers a digital format)?
I don’t get it. How are my friends morally bankrupt for selling NFTs to people like Will Smith or Dubai royalty? Same people who are buying their art to hang on their walls.
It’s not like NFTs brought them a whole new audience, it’s just that their existing audience wanted NFTs.
You might think NFTs are worthless, but the exact same argument goes for easily reproduced physical works of art.
Just want to say that I had the POV of the grandparent comment, but your answer was a very useful and real description of a particular problem of accepting crypto-currency. So thanks for sharing!
Am very glad to see this - was considering adding Coinbase's Commerce product due to quite a few requests to accept BTC payments for our hardware at https://kubesail.com - I suppose we have an extremely privacy focused user-base currently. Since we already use Stripe, I would be very glad to simply "enable bitcoin" as a payment method and leave it at that.
Somewhat sadly, I was quite involved in web3 several years ago when the web3.js project was very young - so I have mixed feelings about being glad "someone else is gonna handle it for me". I suppose in the last 5 years I've gone from "Not your keys, not your coins!" to "I just don't want to spend a ton of time on this". Does that mean crypto has failed to live up to the dream or does that mean it's finally boring enough for old-business-owner-me to make use of it? I can't quite decide!
I am a former Stripe employee, so I am quite biased, but I'll just say: In my experience, if the Collison brothers do anything - you'd be a fool to think it's not extremely well thought out. If I hear a rhyme I assume there is a damn good reason.
I suppose it is inevitable but it could even present problems for businesses in the UK where their banks are allergic to payment platforms that accept cryptocurrency.
It is bonkers to be downvoted for this, but I explained my reasoning in more detail in another comment if credulous people care to reflexively downvote me there too:
For businesses in times of gold-based commerce, reliable bank notes were greatly welcome. Gold was heavy and hard to validate, whereas crypto is easy to validate but also so light that without proper key management it will float away :). I don't blame you for not also wanting to perform high stakes private key keeping on top of a business
Really? The OP link does not make this at all clear.
If the text says one thing, the opposite is suggested by the screenshots in the page.
I do not expect it to be clear to the people reviewing transactions at crypto-phobic banks.
I would prefer a payments provider that will have absolutely nothing to do with these businesses, but either way, the way this is being communicated looks like an attempt to split a hair too finely.
Not to be negative, but when evaluating financial services CryptAPI are failing most checks:
- Three employees on LinkedIn, none with a background in finance, security, accounting, etc.
- No audited security certifications (PCI DSS doesn't directly apply, but there should be _something_ that shows that _someone_ checked their processes/code/infrastructure for reasonable best practices)
- No fraud protection or anything like that.
This could be nice for a crypto-only side-business that someone is running, but it can't be used by a serious company that needs to supplement their non-crypto payments with a crypto payments option.
Not saying I don’t agree with you, but a lot of fiat measures or security certs are based off the weaknesses of tradfi. I am guessing that crypto payment processor requires a much thinner layer of trust and leverages a lot of the underlying blockchain technology without having to build more glue around it.
Slight tangent: Maybe it’s just me, but I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the label “crypto” being co-opted as official shorthand for cryptocurrencies. I see how it’s a natural truncation of a long term, but to many of us the word crypto can mean many other things. When I saw the headline, I wondered if they had released their own cryptographic library or something else to that effect.
Why isn’t this new Stripe thing then about being able to use Bitcoin when buying things?
Or how do I use Coinbase for buying things? Try go to the coinbase website and look for how to buy things with your Bitcoin. What I read from the site is that it’s all about investing in the value going up, not about making payments to other people or businesses for services or purchases.
It is not just you. ‘Crypto’ is an odd shorthand for digital currencies.
Looking back at the initial whitepaper, Satoshi actually uses the word just once: “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” [1] The remainder of the paper uses terms like ‘hash’ and ‘digital signature’.
This battle has been fought and lost and the language has changed.
I've learned to just accept the new meaning and imo it's better that way (otherwise you'll end up being the person correcting everyone who writes linux to write gnu/linux for the rest of your life).
Crypto implies cryptocurrency now (especially in public facing writing), cryptography is the less common usage.
The problem is, words mean what most people think they mean. This means that sometimes, meanings change. I'm totally with you but you gotta admit that the people who think "crypto" means "cryptography" are a tiny, tiny minority right now.
Crypto means internet money. Cryptography is how it's built.
* Using "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" is valid as a synecdoche
So basically I use it both ways. That also makes more sense to me because "currency" feels like an overly narrow description of the current crypto ecosystem.
I just want to say that the extraordinary unseriousness of this (and the NFT twitter icon, really!?) has convinced me that Stripe is through the looking glass, now.
More and more I am convinced that the weasel that crawled into the LHC and got itself killed only died _inside_ the collapsing time bubble it somehow created through an unspecified accident and in which we are now all living.
Outside the time bubble, it scampered away and Brexit, Trump's victory, the Ukraine war and the Tiger King series never happened.
well, most cryptos are scams. that's extremely obvious.
the 0.1% that are not are going to be the foundation for the next generation of web and finance -- this is also obvious.
but it's silly to pretend like most cryptos aren't just cash grabs. but just like 99.9% of websites on the internet are scams/ads/useless, doesn't take away from the importance of the legitimately useful websites.
The main point of crypto these days appears to be to replace the current middlemen with different middlemen who can make more profit while offering the consumer much less legal protection.
How to participate in crypto? Just head to a privately owned exchange that might be traded at a stock exchange! Alternatively use a startup service that in turn relies on a privately owned backend that might as well go public at any point.
or more protection, depending on your perspective. I'd think russians wanting to interface with US services right now would find crypto offers more protection than fiat.
Further, I know a few small businesses that have had large sums of money locked up by services like paypal without any communication. Crypto also provides far more protection from issues like that.
I don't know how this applies to their crypto offering, but:
> Stripe currently does not support users located in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. While users with direct or indirect activities involving Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are not broadly considered prohibited by Stripe at this time, all major credit card networks have announced that they are ceasing services to Russian financial institutions. Additionally, Stripe will not process transactions involving sanctioned Russian financial institutions and does not support Mir. This means transactions involving Russian-issued cards are likely to be unsuccessful. We encourage you to ensure compliance with relevant sanctions regulations in your jurisdiction.
or the limited partners of the private equity firms that invested in them are Russian oligarchs telling them what to do lol
This is pretty common (simply by the size of the investments), and Yuri Milner's DST Global was in some funding rounds so they probably have a big stake.
Yuri Milner is exhibit A of how the offshore feeders fund a bunch of US tech startups, mostly for the alpha, but that also comes with influence
I don't know but for some context, see the end of [1]. (It's not about Stripe specifically, but about why banks do this.) The whole article is useful background.
It's just bizarre. You end up paying your cut twice: once to convert it into crypto (paying the exact same card fees you'd pay for a direct card payment), and then once again to pay someone like Stripe for this. For either a business owner or a customer, that's a loss - increased infrastructure fees just to do business.
It's the opposite of the crypto dream. But that's not Stripe's fault; it's Bitcoin's, for not creating a product which is actually capable of living up to its goals, and instead requiring all this 'glue business' to make it work. I hope someone else creates a new radically-different cryptocurrency which can be truly new, and not just a novelty stuck on top of Visa/Mastercard.
I think this is exactly right. The implementation of the technology has necessitated all of these different layers, each of which create new opportunities to take a cut.
Many of the crypto businesses in the ecosystem talk about removing financial friction and control, but it seems they are only interested in introducing their own versions of them, and building their own little Wall Street while they can still get in on the ground floor.
Here's a great example: how are you going to "reach the unbanked" in the third world if you have transaction fees, paid by the user, inherent in your architecture? That's just nonsense. It's a step down from cash in every way. Cryptos which aren't feeless but talk about the "unbanked" are full of hot air. And this pattern of false promises is all over this space.
A feeless public ledger already exists, is transacting around the world, and has overcome spam attacks multiple times at this point: Nano, from one of the original developers of Bitcoin.
thanks, hadn’t heard of Nano before, it looks interesting.
I should correct to say a decentralized public ledger “free of transaction costs” is hard if not impossible. Nano seems to remove fees by having users engage in PoW (ie: cost of energy expenditure), so it is feeless but not free.
there are many many more ways to acquire crypto, which many many people have done already
it sounds like you have only attempted to acquire it by a combination of
1) Purchasing it
2) with a credit or debit card
All it comes down to is that its a $2 trillion market with an extremely high volume of transactions, at all and when compared to the capitalization of the market
so service providers cater to that, and fortunately for the end users, a very large portion of that $2 trillion did not require people to pay once to convert their existing cash into crypto.
So liquid, in fact, that it needs a host of very opaque and questionable stable coins to maintain some semblance of liquidity.
A $2T market cap doesn't mean a whole lot. It's unclear how much money actually changes hands in this system. You and I could make a $2T market cap system today, right now. I'll start an excel spreadsheet and sell you a cell for ~$40. BAM! $2T market cap excel spreadsheet, even though only $40 has changed hands! Neat, eh?
I've argued with crypto enthusiasts long enough to anticipate the requisite "WHAT ABOUT STOCKS" retort. Yes. Stock market caps are also a sloppy measure, though significantly less so in magnitude. Businesses are regularly purchased outright at their market caps. There are, of course, exceptions, like Gamestop, Tesla, AMC, and many other meme stocks. But these are the exception to the rule.
The questionable stable coins are 10% of the total market capitalization ($180bn) and even the worst, most fear addled estimates are that 90% of that is paid up capital, where dollars were exchanged directly to create an equivalent stablecoin, and a large portion of it is overcollateralized. The people just wish that was 100%, in the case of Tether.
Strawman arguments are interesting, because usually it involves creating an argument nobody had offered just to discredit that argument, hoping to discredit the thing people actually were talking about. But in your case, your argument isn't a problem? The crypto ecosystem doesn't need to host stablecoins, it just does because people launched them and others found utility in that. They contribute to the market capitalization, and the liquidity, bolstering my observation. Is there a term for that? Reverse strawman?
Hmm. I'm not sure I follow. My point was two-fold:
1. Market capitalization is fairly meaningless, especially when you don't know how much money is changing hands (wash trading, for example, is rampant in the crypto world). I'm confused why you're citing market caps, again, to try to suggest stable coins don't play a significant role in crypto's liquidity. That doesn't make any sense.
2. Liquidity is very much lacking in the crypto world. Bitcoin's order books are extremely thin, which is one reason volatility is so high. Stable coins were developed not in a vacuum, but precisely because liquidity was so lacking.
I agree with that. Marketcap + Volume can still be compared to other assets. Determining how much is wash trading versus something else is unfalsifiable in crypto, the nature of transactions cannot be determined with only a limited analysis available on centralized and decentralized exchanges. But not the unlit markets, or the nature of transactional demand.
Compared to currencies, crypto assets function similarly with M0 and M1 being the tiny liquid cash thats actually moving and M2 and M3 being the illiquid much larger aspect of the currency. It requires a completely new standard to criticize crypto assets based on the exact same observation.
Compared to securities and commodities, crypto's much lower marketcap and high volume (see my first paragraph for why I don't mind the volume) is a great proportion. So, in your two-fold point, there still must be some standard for relative comparison, what would your alternative be? I choose market capitalization, understanding that a significant portion of it is relevant to value transferred from other financial ecosystems directly for exchange of the crypto asset, supporting its valuation much better than a low float asset we make in a spreadsheet.
> Liquidity is very much lacking in the crypto world
Its pretty decent. The unlit markets are bigger than the lit ones. Any OTC desk can corroborate that. Someone trying to swap in and out can use both the lit markets and the darkpools. For the size of the market, crypto's liquidity again relatively great. Of course, I see how paradoxical it is to mention "size" of the market, again, but you're not leaving me with much in the English language to work with for relative comparison. Although its totally fine for me. The market works for me.
> Stable coins were developed not in a vacuum, but precisely because liquidity was so lacking.
Although I disagree with the liquidity issue, I don't ... care about this distinction? I consider stablecoins to fulfill a market need and are crypto assets, the market noticed and used them, some of the biggest ones are currently surrogates of fiat assets. Liquidity begets liquidity, so anything that attracts liquidity is a net good to me. I don't consider the crypto space to "need" them, I consider the market to have chosen the thing that fulfilled a need, and that grows/grew the market.
> The main point of crypto these days appears to be...
Maybe you can ask people who get their funds randomly blocked and restricted by PayPal and seized for months/years while an "investigation" takes place if there's any use-case for crypto.
Maybe you can ask ordinary Russian citizens what their legal protections are worth once they've been un-personed by the world.
Or perhaps you can ask Canadian mandate protesters what their legal protections in their currency are worth at their bank middlemen.
I can hypothesize those...and then also hypothesize a counter as to why it won't help, for long at least. Maybe you'd like to counter with an actual example of how it's enabled them, and why increased regulation of the crypto space won't prevent that (i.e., "I was able to buy a Domino's pizza with donated crypto" - additional regulation that would prevent you from traditional banking could also make such crypto, with its traceable history, be unspendable. They can't take it from you, but they can levy the same threats they do for people who ignore sanctions, which would mean crypto you've touched is now effectively untradeable amongst regulated businesses).
The capability of self-custody is the thing to pay attention to.
Nothing else has this capability to the same extent.
Today we store most of our wealth in assets (market index funds, stocks, real estate, etc.) and some (typically very little, and rarely outside of a bank account) in cash.
Most of this is not actually controlled by you.
With BTC (and cryptocurrency more generally) you have the capability of having your private key in a hardware wallet under your control and retain the capability to transact independently of other institutions.
If you keep some percentage of your wealth here you retain certain advantages that you can't get elsewhere. The closest alternative would be having cash (in cash form), but it's hard to have that much, hard to travel with it (you can memorize your wallet seed words and recreate your wallet on the other side of a border), and cash is vulnerable to government stupidity (see: Russia).
I'm not sympathetic to the Canadian truck protests, but whether or not you care about what they're protesting - it's the capability wielded by the Canadian government over their private finances that's alarming.
All this is to say the focus on middleman and paying with crypto in the general case is kind of missing the forest for the trees.
The capability of a global self-custody capable store of value that can be trivially moved anywhere is a big deal and puts power back in the hands of individuals.
It's funny because some Bitcoin evangelists point to the US govt's 1933 confiscation of a gold as a reason to use Bitcoin instead.
... How is nabbing a gold ingot and different than nabbing a storage device? If anything, the threat surface of a digital wallet is much greater (you could steal it remotely if the user doesn't have good cybersecurity practices, unlike a gold ingot).
The storage device doesn't matter - it's the seed words that generate the wallet that matter. If you memorize them you're good (short of someone beating it out of you or legally compelling you - even then they'd have to be able to prove it existed in the first place).
You can trivially prove your gold ingot exists because you can just find it. It's also way harder to move your gold ingot out of your war-torn country, harder to transact with it, etc. The storage device does not hold the actual coins, just a private key that lets you update the public ledger that determines ownership (thinking the storage device holds the coins is a common misunderstanding).
I'm an open-minded skeptic, but there are real technology advantages to blockchain and cryptocurrency, there are a lot of scams too for sure - but that's not the interesting part. The HN median opinion on this is wrong as it often is (it was wrong about EVs and Tesla too).
How does that protect you from someone who can seize your device? If they can seize your device they can also seize any physical assets that you possess. So your wealth exists only nominally, you can't really spend it.
The device holds a private key that can be regenerated from 12 seed words.
The device itself doesn't really matter if you know these 12 words.
The key is what lets you update ownership information on the public block chain. The wallet doesn't hold any coins on the device, just a key that let's you update the chain of public ownership.
For example:
- You live in Russia and see the writing on the wall for invasion and currency collapse
- Prior to the invasion you move 90% of your wealth into a BTC wallet.
- The invasion happens and the currency collapses.
- You want to escape the country, but the border exits are guarded by corrupt guards that will steal any money/valuables you try to cross with.
- You memorize the 12 seed words of your wallet and cross the border with nothing.
- On the other side you recreate your wallet and restore access to your wealth in a safe country.
You're right that if you have access to foreign bank accounts or currency that can be an option (can be hard to get if you're in a country with a hostile government). Often BTC is the most accessible option available.
Crypto is the only option where you have the (practical) capability of true custodial ownership (as opposed to trusting a third party to hold it for you). Practical meaning you can actually take it with you in a low risk way (you're probably not escaping your hostile government with gold bars if you're even able to buy them in the first place).
First of all, if you have to liquidate 90% of your wealth in the middle of a market crash you're going to lose most of it before you even get it out of the country. This, of course, assuming you can get out of the country, which for many people is not a realistic option. And finally, movements of capital across borders are highly regulated. You can't simply cross the border and "recreate" your wealth on the other side, because all you will have re-created is a pile of dirty money that now will have to be laundered at a great expense. All this is illegal, by the way.
> "if you have to liquidate 90% of your wealth in the middle of a market crash"
That's why I said before the invasion, if the market already crashed probably too late to matter, but you'd still want to get whatever you have out.
> "And finally, movements of capital across borders are highly regulated. You can't simply cross the border and "recreate" your wealth on the other side, because all you will have re-created is a pile of dirty money that now will have to be laundered at a great expense. All this is illegal, by the way."
We're talking about escaping an autocratic authoritarian government. With BTC you can simply cross the border and recreate your wealth in a way that protects you from that government accessing it - that's my point.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith so this is the last reply from me.
Indeed... to me it seems clear that you have little experience escaping autocratic authoritarian governments, and that you don't know much about international finance either (or finance for that matter), yet you somehow feel qualified to talk about these topics and give foolish advice. Don't do that. You're not helping anyone, or any cause.
You can currently take physical possession of commodities including all the precious medals, one doesn't have to allow their stock certs to be help by others, cash and other such methods still work but most people chose to let middlemen do it for them, just like most people do for Crypto judging by the market valuations of some of those companies.
You're right of course, but it's way riskier to take physical possession of commodities and it's harder to move them. These are things crypto is better at.
For cash, the advantage is that crypto is independent of government action and global. The crash of the Russian currency is an example of why this is important. Crypto is obviously more volatile than USD, so there's a tradeoff depending on the government backed currency's stability.
It's also harder to move similar amounts of wealth in cash or commodities (you could have self custody of a wallet with a billion dollars in it, can't really move a billion dollars in cash or gold).
As are the disadvantages as evidenced by all the ransoms paid in crypto, these ransoms are also evidence that the security required to keep your crypto secure isn't exactly all that common in some of the market segments the crytpo companies are trying to reach.
I don't disagree with you and I don't pretend there are no risks with cryptocurrency. The security requirements are obviously harder, the UX is bad and even technical users fuck it up.
Some of this will be improved by tooling, some of it is just what's required for self-custody.
Still, the capability it provides is new and gives individuals more power even with these tradeoffs. That capability is valuable and shouldn't be dismissed imo. It's a lever against authoritarian control and increasing centralization of power.
Like seemingly everything these days, crypto has a grifter problem.
It's becoming a predictable story - something with potential arises, with a community of mostly true believers. The true believers make money, but they're not optimizing for profit, they're optimizing for making the ecosystem better. The grifters, optimizing only for profit, not only start to take the lion's share of the profit, but also attract more grifters. The grifters eventually outnumber the true believers, because:
1. true believers are hard to make; grifters already exist
2. grifting as a skill can be applied anywhere; true believers need relevant skills
3. lower profits and higher burnout leads to attrition among the true believers; some of them even convert to grifters
So the grifters completely dominate the market. They then siphon the market dry, offering essentially nothing in return, and then move onto the next grift, flush with the proceeds from the last one.
This is an obvious but very powerful move by Stripe. Stripe is attempting to allow any business to become a place you can buy crypto, which will be really important to remove Coinbase and other CEXs as the only consumer-facing platforms where you can get into the ecosystem.
Of course, that just means replacing those CEXs with Stripe as the fully centralized service on the backend, and you can bet they'll be taking their cut! But anything that moves more money into crypto is good for the Web3 ecosystem. Which would, of course, only be a good thing if you considered growth of the Web3 ecosystem a good thing :)
I'm sure this will go very differently from the last cryptocurrency bubble, where a whole bunch of merchants started accepting them, just to realize half a year later that beneath the hype, nobody was really interested in using these so-called currencies as an actual currency and quietly shelved it.
Used to be a big Bitcoin advocate, we accepted it on our website but removed it due to it just not being worth it for the odd sale with the extra accounting required.
Bitcoins original goal was to be an online currency, this has not transpired nor do I think it ever will which is why I (unfortunately!) got out. Talking to random people on the street the main feeling I'm getting now is as some sort of gold analogue, which I also think is doomed to fail. I just don't see Bitcoin growing out of it's main use which is criminality and unregulated gambling.
I think you're not correct, your timescale is just too short. Monetization happens in three phases, roughly.
First, it is the store-of-value phase. Anticipation of future value, based on past and present value, will cause people to hoard a good as a savings technique. Bitcoin is still in this phase. Usually when you say this on the internet, someone will come in and say "Oh, but Bitcoin's volatility makes it a poor store-of-value!" But again, it's short-sighted. Looking at the 200 WMA will easily demonstrate the store-of-value aspect of Bitcoin.
Second phase is "medium of exchange". This is the thing people always point to and say that Bitcoin has failed. But it hasn't failed, it just hasn't reached it yet. This phase is started when a good becomes valuable enough that merchants begin to demand or incentivize payments in the good. As you mentioned, there are accounting, tax and technological impediments currently that make it less convenient to accept Bitcoin payments. These will be overcome with time, however, as the impediments are eliminated, or the value of Bitcoin makes it economically worthwhile to transact anyway.
The final phase will be "unit of account". Once a Bitcoin circular economy starts, people will begin to think of prices in Bitcoin, instead of dollars, euros, etc.
This may sound far-fetched to skeptics, but I consider this to be a near guarantee to happen eventually. Bitcoin's network effects and unique balance of incentives more or less ensures that it can't be killed, that everyone is better off participating in the network or they will be worse off in the long run.
Indeed this is by design. Cryptocurrencies are deflationary, which means that it is always better to hold your coins than to spend them. They must be deflationary as there is no reason to mine them or buy in early other than the promise of future gains. Working well as an investment is antithetical to working well as a currency.
Important to note that Stripe has NOT announced any crypto/blockchain/NFT products or tech of its own.
The only news here is that Stripe is letting crypto companies use their various fiat processing services, now that they feel comfortable that they can legally do so. Confirmed by pc's comment [1]
Yes, the Stripe Crypto team started six months ago and the first step was to tune our fiat payment APIs to work with exchanges, on-ramps, and NFT marketplaces. Working on lots more, so stay tuned for more announcements very soon!
"Fiat" does not mean "real-world money" as any money you consider "real" is "real". "Fiat" refers to money not backed by something physical, and it is not a new term that appeared from the cryptocurrency space (as many believe).
Uhh... Popular on Reddit maybe. The term 'fiat' has been standard among traders, economists, and other professionals for a very long time. Other options were common until quite recently.
I've heard it used often in the past (like 10 - 15 years ago) by some of my Ron Paul loving anti-Fed libertarian friends that were always talking about how we need to move back to the gold standard. I think Bitcoin certainly exposed the term to even more folks with different backgrounds outside of those who study or work in economists and finance.
I don't think this is true, and I also provided a link to Google Trends proving this is not true (at least in terms of "Google Popularity"). Do you have any evidence that Bitcoin made that term popular?
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadhttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are you going to flag them too?
And this announcement is an endorsement of the entire space which is full of scams, is this what you are also endorsing?
I hope we're at the point where we can focus on individual projects (which may well be absolutely useless products) than judging the entire space as a whole.
oh it is already, does Stripe gets an exception because it is "backed by YC"?
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stripe
It should be tagged as such
More transparency dang, please
Neither Stripe nor any other YC startup. It's the other way around actually: we moderate less, not more, when a YC startup is the story. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... for many years' worth of explanations.
Most if not all of the "technical uses" rely on rent extraction so it's really hard to talk about the technical uses without focusing on that major sticking point. Cryptocurrencies/dApps et al only work because of a network of miners on top of existing Internet infrastructure. They all add some extra cost onto every transaction. This in addition to the fantastic number of hucksters and scammers that need suckers to buy into the system so they can cash out.
The whole subject of crytocurrencies cannot be separated from the implementation details. Talking about "technical uses" as if the economic considerations didn't exist is pointless.
By labeling the criticisms as a "flamewar" you/HN are tacitly endorsing it.
https://sports.yahoo.com/tech-billionaire-peter-thiel-says-1...
> 57.1% return … 7.8% loss … 40.3% return
> …By 2011, after missing out on the economic rebound, many key investors pulled out, reducing the value of Clarium's assets to $350 million, two thirds of which was Thiel's money.
Sounds like it was overall somewhat profitable?
Source?
I'm really curious what your source is for this. Anyone legit in crypto who's taking fiat is doing way more KYC than your average ecommerce store.
But honestly, when it comes to the crypto world, I'm that guy who laughed at that other guy for buying bitcoin at 20 cents. There was a lesson there somewhere.
Essentially, how are existing Stripe users protected from Stripe's reputational self-harm here?
That's like saying a bank won't accept a transfer from another bank because that bank allows you to pay them in cryto.
But it's now a payment provider that allows businesses in the UK to engage in what surely must be considered high-risk crypto business by the bank (NFT marketplaces).
This is the sort of thing that gets businesses denied banking service.
Or a bank won't accept a transfer from your bank because your bank might be taking deposits from entities subject to strict sanctions, and the plausible deniability is very thin.
I think banks are working on that as we speak. Cold days in Cypress soon, etc. The reputation risk of "doing crypto" might be decreasing, but the legal risk of violating sanctions seems to be increasing.
My sense is it's more about the window shifting enough that it's palatable enough for a Stripe product team to stake their professional rep on now. "If Twitter and Square are doing it..."
To an extent, I wonder what the impact of the SEC ruling for BlockFi (crypto exchange) did to clarify the regs for larger companies like Stripe.
So, the timing of this Stripe announcement could be related to the Biden EO: https://apnews.com/article/biden-cryptocurrency-executive-or...
Last time I check they won’t even accept any other business.
Couldn't you turn that off ?
(but here you prefer Paddle to remit EUR VAT taxes for you instead)
(all those different standards are a bit annoying)
You can hardly expect those to work even in other EU countries, much less with an US based online business.
Almost everybody else in the world has a visa or a mastercard (or unionpay)
That was the standard normal card, I had ever since with that account - which is what all the people around me have - but it does work all across europe, in every shop I went.
Paypal is fine with it, so is coinbase. And every other online service I used.
(while backpacking international, I indeed had a credit card at that time)
So I recently only got a credit card(again), to be able to use Stripe. But most won't bother to do this, unless they have to.
That’s because deep inside it’s secretly something like a mastercard maestro, no?
Why don’t you just get a “normal” card from N26 or similar?
I used to have one of these weird not-visa not-mastercard debit cards, trying to use it internationally was just asking for trouble.
Maybe? There is a maestro sign on it, but it is not a debit card.
But my point was, that I do not know, nor want to know all the details of banking communication. I want it to work.
It is a normal card around here and it does work in europe. So I never had the need to change, until now. So now I have a credit card, too and that is fine for me. But most other people here still don't, as most do not do international transactions.
So if Stripe wants to get into that market, they likely will have to adopt. No one here would offer stripe on their webshop - with only a few being able to use it.
Apparently I do have an debit card and apparently something at Stripe had changed, since when I tried it some months ago, because now it all worked(without me changing anything) and I did not even needed my credit card. Who knows.
Also, all smaller cryptocurrency on ramp businesses are doomed.
I don't think I've ever gotten that kind of rude sarcasm/passive aggression from a simple support inquiry, and I vowed never to use their services again.
Their competitors to this specific API were much nicer to work with and onboarded us after some basic introductions, so part of me wonders what other fronts Stripe has better but less well known competitors on.
All companies that actually spoke to us and assisted when Stripe Treasury essentially said "why are you bothering us?"
I replied saying I'd be interested in knowing what they're looking for in potential beta partners:
> That is good to hear. All you need to do is follow the instructions listed in my previous email and wait on contact from the Treasury team. I am happy I was able to assist you.
> Thank you for choosing Stripe!
Keep in mind the "instructions" are to fill out the form that got me into this email chain in the first place: in other words there's nothing about what I asked there.
There's the whole "That's good to hear" reply to a question I asked...
And I was especially taken aback by the whole facetious "happy I was able to assist you" bit after completely ignoring my question.
-
The entire interaction felt like "why are you bothering us", which is honestly would be a fair position if they're looking for established players for example... but why not be direct?
We had other companies flat out say their partners want X million in funding before they'll work with you, and that was fine.
It'd actually take less work than writing out a non-answer like that
Money? They are a business
with poor ethics
2 weeks ago I left all but one discord, unfollowed all Web3 specific accounts on Twitter and stopped looking at Binance etc.
My life has improved considerably. I’m sure someone is getting rich in there but I can’t work out who or how amongst the hype, pumps, grifters, scams and outright criminals.
I’m ok missing the boat if it turns out to be any more than a raft. My sanity and concentration is worth far more than whatever rubbish they are all peddling.
But on average the market takes very roughly 7 years (probably more) to double your money. So you are talking about a ~10 year time frame.
This is what I did 2-4 years ago... then it started going down by a lot so I cashed out. I actually did lose. Not THAT much, thankfully.
Because if it can, then crypto market cap is 5-10x undervalued.
I think you figured out exactly who is profiting from it.
I know some friends who made good money from NFTs and some crypto pumps but most have either stayed flat or lost money.
So, I'm in the same place as you, I'll put my money on less "cool" investments and continue to watch the space.
So much of crypto is about being early to the bull run, finding the few coins that are going to outpace everything else, and just putting a few thousand into each.
Once the first big pump happens there are maybe a few other 5-10x opportunities, but certainly 2 years in everything is dried up. Exit pumps have already started and most major CT personalities are selling, regardless of what they’re saying publicly.
The good news is that you’ll have another opportunity in another 2-3 years.
Are you serious? Are you joking?
Crypto right now, while being used by under 1% of population use, uses 40% of the energy of the global banking system[1].
In other words, if it were to increase to even 10% of the population using it, it would use over 4x the energy of the global banking system. If that increased to 50%, it would be 20x.
This would be somewhat mitigated in the case of Proof of Stake, but would simultaneously give major players in the market complete control of said market. Y'know, like a government.
1. Research report from Galaxy Digital, a decidedly pro-crypto source, page 8: https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2
Some businesses in the UK have banks that say they will close their accounts if they accept cryptocurrency payments. Mine does! I would without hesitation lose my business bank account if I did, because I am a trifling small customer.
Stripe was safe and reputable, but now it is a place where you can accept cryptocurrencies.
Edit: see note below.
I'm not currently clearing payments via Stripe for my own business, but the way I understand it, it's now likely to mean increased scrutiny from my bank about those payments when I do.
I'm not sure if it has rolled out in the UK yet. But if it has, will my bank be clearly informed when a payout was *not* the result of a cryptocurrency transaction? I've not read that far yet.
Either way it's reputational damage hassle people do not need.
And before you ask: I am of course comfortable with that bank policy. Because cryptocurrency is consistently crime-adjacent and fraud-adjacent. And it's not like banks are that well-equipped at dealing with old-fashioned frauds that have been around a century, let alone new frauds that have been around mere days.
--
Edit to add: apparently this document is not meant to communicate that cryptocurrency payments can be accepted. Which is not what the screenshots in the page do, IMO.
Though the fact that Stripe will allow NFT exchanges is more than enough to create reputational risk.
I still expect to have more difficulty when I add Stripe payments.
So are banks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering#Notable_cases
But I have to deal with my bank, don't I? And there is regulation to protect my business.
I would certainly want to switch banks if I started hearing complaints about me using Stripe.
But today Stripe changed its Twitter icon to an NFT, which is like a Belisha Beacon for idiocy, isn't it?
Why any business that is serious would -- in March 2022 -- produce publicity or support materials that mention being able to sell NFTs, I do not know.
It's very stupid.
I’d hedge my bets on this one, I’ve interacted extensively with the massive art market and NFTs really seem like a natural fit.
I don't know. I know a fair number of artists/musicians/photographers and I can tell you that among those artists, the impression of NFTs is almost universally negative.
I would bet that more people think NFT is close to a "giant, planet-killing scam", which is hyperbole but on the side of caution.
And what about when ETH2 goes live in some months and the main NFT chain moves to proof-of-stake? The “planet-killing” problem is already solved, that tech is going live this year. Seems like a fairly fragile criticism.
It's not, at all. I've heard that phrasing or similar (that it's a pyramid scheme, that cryptocurrencies are wasteful) from people who don't even know how to find HN.
In the photography world in particular, mentioning your NFT is likely to get you laughed out of any forum in which you bring it up.
IMO if you encounter any non-technical artist "excited" about NFTs, tell them to stay the hell away, or risk being seen a bad friend. I tell people I will not help them, that I am very happily uninterested, and urge them not to do it at all.
It would be irresponsible not to.
Fuck that, despite me being incredibly skeptical of NFTs I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge the fact that some of my non-technical artist friends have earned 6-7 figure amounts selling NFTs.
If an artist friend of mine sells an NFT I am going to struggle with continuing to see them as a friend, because it's morally bankrupt.
If a non-technical artist comes to you and asks for help selling an entirely phantom product to their presumably only-averagely-technically-aware fans, why would you get involved?
Anything that introduces non-technical users to crypto -- which is really the main function of NFT exchanges at this point -- is a moral hazard.
This is why I am so shocked to see Stripe involved with it.
It’s not like NFTs brought them a whole new audience, it’s just that their existing audience wanted NFTs.
You might think NFTs are worthless, but the exact same argument goes for easily reproduced physical works of art.
Somewhat sadly, I was quite involved in web3 several years ago when the web3.js project was very young - so I have mixed feelings about being glad "someone else is gonna handle it for me". I suppose in the last 5 years I've gone from "Not your keys, not your coins!" to "I just don't want to spend a ton of time on this". Does that mean crypto has failed to live up to the dream or does that mean it's finally boring enough for old-business-owner-me to make use of it? I can't quite decide!
I am a former Stripe employee, so I am quite biased, but I'll just say: In my experience, if the Collison brothers do anything - you'd be a fool to think it's not extremely well thought out. If I hear a rhyme I assume there is a damn good reason.
Am very sad to see this.
I suppose it is inevitable but it could even present problems for businesses in the UK where their banks are allergic to payment platforms that accept cryptocurrency.
It is bonkers to be downvoted for this, but I explained my reasoning in more detail in another comment if credulous people care to reflexively downvote me there too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30629808
See: https://support.stripe.com/questions/crypto-supportability-a...
If the text says one thing, the opposite is suggested by the screenshots in the page.
I do not expect it to be clear to the people reviewing transactions at crypto-phobic banks.
I would prefer a payments provider that will have absolutely nothing to do with these businesses, but either way, the way this is being communicated looks like an attempt to split a hair too finely.
- Three employees on LinkedIn, none with a background in finance, security, accounting, etc. - No audited security certifications (PCI DSS doesn't directly apply, but there should be _something_ that shows that _someone_ checked their processes/code/infrastructure for reasonable best practices) - No fraud protection or anything like that.
This could be nice for a crypto-only side-business that someone is running, but it can't be used by a serious company that needs to supplement their non-crypto payments with a crypto payments option.
I like that each transaction is forwarded to my wallet right after the first confirmation on the blockchain, so the money is always on my side.
If you're serious about this, you should strongly consider Monero.
Or how do I use Coinbase for buying things? Try go to the coinbase website and look for how to buy things with your Bitcoin. What I read from the site is that it’s all about investing in the value going up, not about making payments to other people or businesses for services or purchases.
Download TOR, go to dark.fail, go to one of the onion sites, send them crypto from coinbase, purchase products.
Looking back at the initial whitepaper, Satoshi actually uses the word just once: “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” [1] The remainder of the paper uses terms like ‘hash’ and ‘digital signature’.
[1]: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
I've learned to just accept the new meaning and imo it's better that way (otherwise you'll end up being the person correcting everyone who writes linux to write gnu/linux for the rest of your life).
Crypto implies cryptocurrency now (especially in public facing writing), cryptography is the less common usage.
Crypto means internet money. Cryptography is how it's built.
but tbh, some of the most exciting cryptographic problems are being worked on in the cryptocurrency industry (zk tech, for example).
* "Crypto" means "cryptography"
* "Cryptocurrency" is a subset of "cryptography"
* Using "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" is valid as a synecdoche
So basically I use it both ways. That also makes more sense to me because "currency" feels like an overly narrow description of the current crypto ecosystem.
This is such a demoralising turn of events.
More and more I am convinced that the weasel that crawled into the LHC and got itself killed only died _inside_ the collapsing time bubble it somehow created through an unspecified accident and in which we are now all living.
Outside the time bubble, it scampered away and Brexit, Trump's victory, the Ukraine war and the Tiger King series never happened.
Magnitude matters.
How much was it before crypto?
Cryptolocker is estimated to have "only" cost its victims millions. However, cryptocurrency already existed when it was released.
the 0.1% that are not are going to be the foundation for the next generation of web and finance -- this is also obvious.
but it's silly to pretend like most cryptos aren't just cash grabs. but just like 99.9% of websites on the internet are scams/ads/useless, doesn't take away from the importance of the legitimately useful websites.
Really?
Does Amazon, Wikipedia count as one website or do you just deploy an arbitrary definition of the word useless?
It's a bit concerning.
So we simply ~~kill the batman~~ -- er... trade resources for resources, and determine a balance between what I am asking for vs your offer?
Its amazing we need digital fn currency to algorithm this bullshit for us to maintain trust in such NOTES
Further, I know a few small businesses that have had large sums of money locked up by services like paypal without any communication. Crypto also provides far more protection from issues like that.
> Stripe currently does not support users located in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. While users with direct or indirect activities involving Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are not broadly considered prohibited by Stripe at this time, all major credit card networks have announced that they are ceasing services to Russian financial institutions. Additionally, Stripe will not process transactions involving sanctioned Russian financial institutions and does not support Mir. This means transactions involving Russian-issued cards are likely to be unsuccessful. We encourage you to ensure compliance with relevant sanctions regulations in your jurisdiction.
https://support.stripe.com/questions/impact-of-sanctions-on-...
This is pretty common (simply by the size of the investments), and Yuri Milner's DST Global was in some funding rounds so they probably have a big stake.
Yuri Milner is exhibit A of how the offshore feeders fund a bunch of US tech startups, mostly for the alpha, but that also comes with influence
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/yu...
So, sanctions result in cutting off Russia, investors result in cutting off Ukraine ha.
[1] https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/moving-money-international...
It's the opposite of the crypto dream. But that's not Stripe's fault; it's Bitcoin's, for not creating a product which is actually capable of living up to its goals, and instead requiring all this 'glue business' to make it work. I hope someone else creates a new radically-different cryptocurrency which can be truly new, and not just a novelty stuck on top of Visa/Mastercard.
Many of the crypto businesses in the ecosystem talk about removing financial friction and control, but it seems they are only interested in introducing their own versions of them, and building their own little Wall Street while they can still get in on the ground floor.
Here's a great example: how are you going to "reach the unbanked" in the third world if you have transaction fees, paid by the user, inherent in your architecture? That's just nonsense. It's a step down from cash in every way. Cryptos which aren't feeless but talk about the "unbanked" are full of hot air. And this pattern of false promises is all over this space.
a feeless public ledger seems unlikely to ever work at scale; it would immediately be polluted by spam.
I should correct to say a decentralized public ledger “free of transaction costs” is hard if not impossible. Nano seems to remove fees by having users engage in PoW (ie: cost of energy expenditure), so it is feeless but not free.
it sounds like you have only attempted to acquire it by a combination of
1) Purchasing it
2) with a credit or debit card
All it comes down to is that its a $2 trillion market with an extremely high volume of transactions, at all and when compared to the capitalization of the market
so service providers cater to that, and fortunately for the end users, a very large portion of that $2 trillion did not require people to pay once to convert their existing cash into crypto.
A $2T market cap doesn't mean a whole lot. It's unclear how much money actually changes hands in this system. You and I could make a $2T market cap system today, right now. I'll start an excel spreadsheet and sell you a cell for ~$40. BAM! $2T market cap excel spreadsheet, even though only $40 has changed hands! Neat, eh?
I've argued with crypto enthusiasts long enough to anticipate the requisite "WHAT ABOUT STOCKS" retort. Yes. Stock market caps are also a sloppy measure, though significantly less so in magnitude. Businesses are regularly purchased outright at their market caps. There are, of course, exceptions, like Gamestop, Tesla, AMC, and many other meme stocks. But these are the exception to the rule.
Strawman arguments are interesting, because usually it involves creating an argument nobody had offered just to discredit that argument, hoping to discredit the thing people actually were talking about. But in your case, your argument isn't a problem? The crypto ecosystem doesn't need to host stablecoins, it just does because people launched them and others found utility in that. They contribute to the market capitalization, and the liquidity, bolstering my observation. Is there a term for that? Reverse strawman?
1. Market capitalization is fairly meaningless, especially when you don't know how much money is changing hands (wash trading, for example, is rampant in the crypto world). I'm confused why you're citing market caps, again, to try to suggest stable coins don't play a significant role in crypto's liquidity. That doesn't make any sense.
2. Liquidity is very much lacking in the crypto world. Bitcoin's order books are extremely thin, which is one reason volatility is so high. Stable coins were developed not in a vacuum, but precisely because liquidity was so lacking.
I agree with that. Marketcap + Volume can still be compared to other assets. Determining how much is wash trading versus something else is unfalsifiable in crypto, the nature of transactions cannot be determined with only a limited analysis available on centralized and decentralized exchanges. But not the unlit markets, or the nature of transactional demand.
Compared to currencies, crypto assets function similarly with M0 and M1 being the tiny liquid cash thats actually moving and M2 and M3 being the illiquid much larger aspect of the currency. It requires a completely new standard to criticize crypto assets based on the exact same observation.
Compared to securities and commodities, crypto's much lower marketcap and high volume (see my first paragraph for why I don't mind the volume) is a great proportion. So, in your two-fold point, there still must be some standard for relative comparison, what would your alternative be? I choose market capitalization, understanding that a significant portion of it is relevant to value transferred from other financial ecosystems directly for exchange of the crypto asset, supporting its valuation much better than a low float asset we make in a spreadsheet.
> Liquidity is very much lacking in the crypto world
Its pretty decent. The unlit markets are bigger than the lit ones. Any OTC desk can corroborate that. Someone trying to swap in and out can use both the lit markets and the darkpools. For the size of the market, crypto's liquidity again relatively great. Of course, I see how paradoxical it is to mention "size" of the market, again, but you're not leaving me with much in the English language to work with for relative comparison. Although its totally fine for me. The market works for me.
> Stable coins were developed not in a vacuum, but precisely because liquidity was so lacking.
Although I disagree with the liquidity issue, I don't ... care about this distinction? I consider stablecoins to fulfill a market need and are crypto assets, the market noticed and used them, some of the biggest ones are currently surrogates of fiat assets. Liquidity begets liquidity, so anything that attracts liquidity is a net good to me. I don't consider the crypto space to "need" them, I consider the market to have chosen the thing that fulfilled a need, and that grows/grew the market.
Maybe you can ask people who get their funds randomly blocked and restricted by PayPal and seized for months/years while an "investigation" takes place if there's any use-case for crypto.
Maybe you can ask ordinary Russian citizens what their legal protections are worth once they've been un-personed by the world.
Or perhaps you can ask Canadian mandate protesters what their legal protections in their currency are worth at their bank middlemen.
Or the people who will inevitably be fleeced when the main settlement token is an outright fraud which implodes?
Their own government will "un-person" them for converting Rubles into crypto too.
Nothing else has this capability to the same extent.
Today we store most of our wealth in assets (market index funds, stocks, real estate, etc.) and some (typically very little, and rarely outside of a bank account) in cash.
Most of this is not actually controlled by you.
With BTC (and cryptocurrency more generally) you have the capability of having your private key in a hardware wallet under your control and retain the capability to transact independently of other institutions.
If you keep some percentage of your wealth here you retain certain advantages that you can't get elsewhere. The closest alternative would be having cash (in cash form), but it's hard to have that much, hard to travel with it (you can memorize your wallet seed words and recreate your wallet on the other side of a border), and cash is vulnerable to government stupidity (see: Russia).
I'm not sympathetic to the Canadian truck protests, but whether or not you care about what they're protesting - it's the capability wielded by the Canadian government over their private finances that's alarming.
All this is to say the focus on middleman and paying with crypto in the general case is kind of missing the forest for the trees.
The capability of a global self-custody capable store of value that can be trivially moved anywhere is a big deal and puts power back in the hands of individuals.
... How is nabbing a gold ingot and different than nabbing a storage device? If anything, the threat surface of a digital wallet is much greater (you could steal it remotely if the user doesn't have good cybersecurity practices, unlike a gold ingot).
You can trivially prove your gold ingot exists because you can just find it. It's also way harder to move your gold ingot out of your war-torn country, harder to transact with it, etc. The storage device does not hold the actual coins, just a private key that lets you update the public ledger that determines ownership (thinking the storage device holds the coins is a common misunderstanding).
I'm an open-minded skeptic, but there are real technology advantages to blockchain and cryptocurrency, there are a lot of scams too for sure - but that's not the interesting part. The HN median opinion on this is wrong as it often is (it was wrong about EVs and Tesla too).
The device itself doesn't really matter if you know these 12 words.
The key is what lets you update ownership information on the public block chain. The wallet doesn't hold any coins on the device, just a key that let's you update the chain of public ownership.
For example:
- You live in Russia and see the writing on the wall for invasion and currency collapse
- Prior to the invasion you move 90% of your wealth into a BTC wallet.
- The invasion happens and the currency collapses.
- You want to escape the country, but the border exits are guarded by corrupt guards that will steal any money/valuables you try to cross with.
- You memorize the 12 seed words of your wallet and cross the border with nothing.
- On the other side you recreate your wallet and restore access to your wealth in a safe country.
This isn't just a hypothetical, this kind of thing has already happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29518181
Would it be very different if that asset was Euros? Or ownership of gold that's stored in Chile?
If you need any documents you can store them in a secret passworded account.
Crypto is the only option where you have the (practical) capability of true custodial ownership (as opposed to trusting a third party to hold it for you). Practical meaning you can actually take it with you in a low risk way (you're probably not escaping your hostile government with gold bars if you're even able to buy them in the first place).
That's why I said before the invasion, if the market already crashed probably too late to matter, but you'd still want to get whatever you have out.
> "And finally, movements of capital across borders are highly regulated. You can't simply cross the border and "recreate" your wealth on the other side, because all you will have re-created is a pile of dirty money that now will have to be laundered at a great expense. All this is illegal, by the way."
We're talking about escaping an autocratic authoritarian government. With BTC you can simply cross the border and recreate your wealth in a way that protects you from that government accessing it - that's my point.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith so this is the last reply from me.
For cash, the advantage is that crypto is independent of government action and global. The crash of the Russian currency is an example of why this is important. Crypto is obviously more volatile than USD, so there's a tradeoff depending on the government backed currency's stability.
It's also harder to move similar amounts of wealth in cash or commodities (you could have self custody of a wallet with a billion dollars in it, can't really move a billion dollars in cash or gold).
These advantages are real and people are relying on them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29518181
Some of this will be improved by tooling, some of it is just what's required for self-custody.
Still, the capability it provides is new and gives individuals more power even with these tradeoffs. That capability is valuable and shouldn't be dismissed imo. It's a lever against authoritarian control and increasing centralization of power.
It's becoming a predictable story - something with potential arises, with a community of mostly true believers. The true believers make money, but they're not optimizing for profit, they're optimizing for making the ecosystem better. The grifters, optimizing only for profit, not only start to take the lion's share of the profit, but also attract more grifters. The grifters eventually outnumber the true believers, because:
1. true believers are hard to make; grifters already exist
2. grifting as a skill can be applied anywhere; true believers need relevant skills
3. lower profits and higher burnout leads to attrition among the true believers; some of them even convert to grifters
So the grifters completely dominate the market. They then siphon the market dry, offering essentially nothing in return, and then move onto the next grift, flush with the proceeds from the last one.
Of course, that just means replacing those CEXs with Stripe as the fully centralized service on the backend, and you can bet they'll be taking their cut! But anything that moves more money into crypto is good for the Web3 ecosystem. Which would, of course, only be a good thing if you considered growth of the Web3 ecosystem a good thing :)
Basically can sell crypto for KYC backed cash in the US. No credit cards. No paying in crypto?
Bitcoins original goal was to be an online currency, this has not transpired nor do I think it ever will which is why I (unfortunately!) got out. Talking to random people on the street the main feeling I'm getting now is as some sort of gold analogue, which I also think is doomed to fail. I just don't see Bitcoin growing out of it's main use which is criminality and unregulated gambling.
First, it is the store-of-value phase. Anticipation of future value, based on past and present value, will cause people to hoard a good as a savings technique. Bitcoin is still in this phase. Usually when you say this on the internet, someone will come in and say "Oh, but Bitcoin's volatility makes it a poor store-of-value!" But again, it's short-sighted. Looking at the 200 WMA will easily demonstrate the store-of-value aspect of Bitcoin.
Second phase is "medium of exchange". This is the thing people always point to and say that Bitcoin has failed. But it hasn't failed, it just hasn't reached it yet. This phase is started when a good becomes valuable enough that merchants begin to demand or incentivize payments in the good. As you mentioned, there are accounting, tax and technological impediments currently that make it less convenient to accept Bitcoin payments. These will be overcome with time, however, as the impediments are eliminated, or the value of Bitcoin makes it economically worthwhile to transact anyway.
The final phase will be "unit of account". Once a Bitcoin circular economy starts, people will begin to think of prices in Bitcoin, instead of dollars, euros, etc.
This may sound far-fetched to skeptics, but I consider this to be a near guarantee to happen eventually. Bitcoin's network effects and unique balance of incentives more or less ensures that it can't be killed, that everyone is better off participating in the network or they will be worse off in the long run.
The only news here is that Stripe is letting crypto companies use their various fiat processing services, now that they feel comfortable that they can legally do so. Confirmed by pc's comment [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30629169
The search trend, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Fiat%20M..., seems to be relative stable since start of collecting trend data (2004), with slightly increasing volume as we get closer to today, but generally stable.
More information: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.asp
Bitcoin made the term fiat popular.
I don't think this is true, and I also provided a link to Google Trends proving this is not true (at least in terms of "Google Popularity"). Do you have any evidence that Bitcoin made that term popular?