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Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

And people still wonder what problem cryptocurrencies tries to solve.

No, people are wondering why cryptocurrencies haven't actually solved anything yet.

I always assumed that cryptocurrencies is exactly how SubscribeStar has solved it for their audience (if you mean "people" in general, them most of them aren't wondering about anything because they don't consider it a problem to begin with, at least until something they care about gets consistently censored).

So I went and looked up their payment options. And sure enough, they have a page on that. Which has the following notice:

"In order to stay compliant with our strategic credit card processing partners' policies and due to recently tightened regulations on the cryptocurrency circulation for the US-based companies, we are going to halt all support for cryptocurrency payments on this site for the time being."

What is this all about? Are they saying that payment processors will refuse to work with organizations that accept cryptocurrency? But then how e.g. Coinbase works with credit cards?

It is quite a complex topic. For example there are credit card processing companies for cryptocurrency related companies, but they have very stricter customer onboarding processes and also higher fees. For many banks who target mainstream customers it is just easier to block all customers who deal with cryptocurrencies than to create specialized producst/risk management/compliance processes for them.

Cryptocurreny processing is expensive as hell. Not to mention very frustrating when the client finds that the crypto bought with 1000$ values $800 on the merchant /processor payment page.

I understand why banks don't want their credit cards used to buy cryptocurrency, and then deal with all the chargebacks. But in this case they're seemingly saying that they can't accept cryptocurrency for some service, because doing so prevents them from also accepting credit cards for that same service, where the service itself has nothing to do with either.

How so cryptocurrencies haven't solved anything? If someone has done a transaction with cryptocurrencies that brings value to him, isn't that solving something? Your claim is just very probably totally untrue - I think Bitcoin etc have been very useful for some small group of people for quite a long time already. However the adoption just isn't that big. Somehow people seem to think that cryptocurrencies have to replace the existing financial system to be useful. Meanwhile they can be just be used by 100 people worldwide and still be useful.

Ok, so what problem has actually been solved?

Cryptocurrencies accomplish nothing that wasn't already possible before, usually faster, cheaper and safer. Just because someone uses an alternative doesn't mean it's solving a problem, and in this case it's just creating more issues.

I have used Bitcoin to buy various things and used it as a savings instrument, I see that it has solved problems for me. Of course I could use other tools for that, but if you think Linux is superior that doesn't invalidate someones experience who is using Windows.

Generally there seems to be lots of people who don't use cryptocurrencies and think that they don't solve any problems - OK whatever, don't use them, but there are loads of people using cryptocurrencies for whatever and your opinions are not objective measure on their value.

Bitcoin allowed to accept donation for Wikileaks since 2011 when Visa and MC blocked them. (Nowadays they accept also more privacy preserving currencies like Monero or ZCash)

Bitcoin allows people in Venezuela to avoid wealth confiscation on the borders, either when they are running away or when they are sending money back home to family.

Bitcoin allows people in Iran to transact with outer world.

Bitcoin allows people in India to keep their wealth in face of demonetization.

There are many problems that Bitcoin solves for real people and real companies every day.

Just because you aren't one of them, doesn't mean they don't exists.

KYC/AML is your answer

KYC = Know Your Customer

AML = Anti-Money Laundering

(for those that are not in the industry :-))

I think most of us are clear on the general idea of the "what", it's the "how" that's a bit fuzzy.

I don’t think people are wondering what problems crypto currencies are trying to solve, more whether they are a good way to solve them.

the underutilization of modern cpus?

Underutilised? Modern CPUs are designed to be underutilised. Or more accurately, designed to be bursty. It isn't like they are executing NOPs at full speed. The heat they generate isn't free.

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