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Comment by noxToken | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't the volatility of cryptocurrency be a reason that companies wouldn't want this as a primary method?

Don't get me wrong, the value of USD, GBP, or YEN can rise and fall relatively quickly. The conversion rate of GBP to USD dropped from about 1.40 GBP/USD to 1.20 GBP/USD in the span of a year. But cryptocurrencies can cause devastating losses. BTC dropped nearly 30% from Dec 2017 to late Jan 2018, and it has been on the decline ever since. It seems that the only way for a business to confidently convert BTC into the 0.25 USD would be to do nightly-ish transactions.

I'm familiar but not well versed in BTC operations. I don't know how much overhead (fees) would go into nightly transactions, and how much the fees would rise with the volume of each transaction.

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>Wouldn't the volatility of cryptocurrency be a reason that companies wouldn't want this as a primary method?

Correct. There are so many cryptocurrencies out there, and scams are so widely perpetrated that it's absolutely insane to keep any significant amount of money in it.

In the case of MTGOX it's like the world's largest bank just blinked out of existence. A company could be insolvent overnight. At least most major governments have incentive to keep their shit together for fear of a societal collapse.

Mt. Gox was a Magic: The Gathering trading platform that accidentally ended up being "the largest bank in crypto". So Mt. Gox shares more in common with early, early banks, of which many did fail.

At any rate, the current dominant examples like Coinbase do not seem to share the same problems as Mt. Gox and having watched a security presentation by one of their executives, I believe they have great practices to prevent hacks.

Sure, but are they backed by the FDIC or anything equivalent? (no) What happens if they are compromised? (your money is gone forever).

Actually yeah Coinbase is an FDIC insured bank. Any USD you have on there is insured.

Somehow Overstock.com has been accepting BTC as payment for several years and they've been more than enthusiastic about it.

https://help.overstock.com/help/s/article/Bitcoin https://www.overstock.com/blockchain

Not sure whether they are instantly selling the coin or keeping part of it or what. I suppose it would depend on a company's risk tolerance. In the case of digital content, I might be willing to accept the volatility risk in exchange for access to a relatively untapped market and supporting a censorship-resistant monetization platform.

Stable coins, like DAI and USDC also offer many of the benefits of crypto ecosystem with nearly zero volatility relative to the dollar.

I read it as news sites using cryptocurrency as a primary method to avoid high transaction fees.

When it's a secondary method, it can be used as a way to invest in a growing market. You can potentially react to volatile changes in a currency if it's part of an investing strategy without worrying if your company will fold overnight. If it's your primary means of accepting payment, then your income is essentially tied to the volatility unless you cash out immediately.

Stable coins would be the obvious solution, but then I wonder what's the drop rate of someone who is only familiar with BTC and not other coins?

Part of why the overhead doesn't matter here is because bitcoin wouldn't be used: It'd be some other crypto, like BAT (which is what Brave uses).

The goal would be to make this a ubiquitous system (which is what Brave is trying) where users would have a wallet of BAT where each "coin" represents a small easy to exchange tip.

Users can buy BAT wherever, recharge their wallet and tip micro amounts to websites.

Brave currently just has a BAT wallet with recharging that doles out a percentage of each token to whatever websites you visited based on amount of time spent there.

If the system is ubiquitous enough, the volatility will go down as more people are seeking to purchase the coins.

The coins will have a limited supply which is subject to a minimal amount of inflation as defined by the group which works on it.

In this case, would the only use of BAT (or something similar) be avoiding transaction fees as a high percentage of small transctions? For example, Visa charges 1.5% of the transaction + $0.10. The transaction fee on a $0.25 micropayment would be $0.10375 - a hair above 40% of the transaction. Otherwise, what is the value add of BAT compared to storing payment information with a vendor or someone like Stripe?

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