Seeing bitcoin reinvent the banking system they set themselves to destroy has a very Animal Farm-y feeling to it.
Step 1: Claim you're disrupting an existing industry (or creating a new industry that didn't previously exist because it was unviable - eg, electric scooters).
Step 2: Claim that this is going to make you far more profitable than that industry has traditionally been. Get Angel Investment.
Step 3: Raise money at a ridiculous valuation due to step 2. Series A.
Step 4: Use that money to undercut competitors in the existing market and gain marketshare whilst taking huge losses. Series B, C.
Step 5: Realise that you've just built another company that's exactly the same as all the existing companies in that industry with no real way of making a profit. IPO.
Step 6: Having thrown so much money at the problem that you've now got enormous market share (and driven the traditional companies out of business because they can't operate at a loss), pivot to using your monopolistic position to drive down costs and inflate prices.
Step 7: Slowly melt-down as investors realise Step 2 was all bullshit and regulators start catching up with step 6.
Legacy taxi services in particular are extremely shitty and widely hated because of scammers.
Edit: Suddenly unsure whether my comment here is sufficiently on-topic/relevant to fit with the community norms here. My apologies if it is not.
Disclaimer: I think marketing is a parasitic industry that gets way too much money for the value they provide. But marketing is important because it works.
The scooters, again, I'm not sure are actually economically viable, and are also very clearly a regulatory issue - being banned by multiple cities and essentially working on a model of littering an entire city with cheap scooters.
Bitcoin is being used by a centralized party (Coinbase) to offer banking services. Instead of lending fiat they can lend a digital asset (Bitcoin).
Coinbase is centralized and highly regulated. Their mission is not in line with the original mission for bitcoin to be a global currency. Bitcoin has a volatile value that makes it a poor store of value and/or currency.
I’ll probably get downvoted for this but que sera sera.
Bitcoin is at best a speculative investment akin to trading baseball cards. At worst it’s a decentralized Ponzi scheme.
Bitcoin supports variety of transactions like "Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc."[1] Satoshi made Bitcoin Script language so people can make smart contracts and if they want even give loans.
[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611
There's quite a lot going on in this space because of the obvious benefits, but HN seems very detached from the enterprise world. If you ran a database of land ownership records or patient healt data for a whole country, would you really be at ease with only PostgreSQL?
You asked for an example, here's one: https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2020-02-20-Lockheed-Martin-a...
> If you ran a database of land ownership records or patient healt data for a whole country, would you really be at ease with only PostgreSQL?
With proper access controls, backup system and proper maintenance, definitely. While the DB engine itself can vary (PostgreSQL, Oracle, whatever Microsoft produces etc.), SQL based database engines are widely used in such scenarios already.
My impression is, that this is a pretty contentious statement ;)
This is obvious.
Coinbase's business model has been, from day one, to shoehorn the traditional banking business model into the Bitcoin ecosystem, knowing fully well that for the vast majority of people, being exposed to the raw Bitcoin stuff was damn near impossible, both psychologically (being the custodian of your own money) and skill-wise (operating and properly managing a Bitcoin wallet).
This is just another application of the same principle.
This somehow assumes that bitcoin was somehow ideologically opposed to finance, banking or capitalism. At most it was opposed to government-backed fiat currency.
Reimplementing all banking services on top of blockchain instead of a "trusted" database makes a lot of sense.
What's the result of this? For the loaner and borrower, less loans and more careful allocation of resources. For society as a whole, a smaller but more robust banking system not dependent on bogus money.
Imagine the scenario such as this pandemic, where a gov't (or really, any entity) needed to borrow to weather the storm, but is unable to as nobody wants to lend. The world would be worse off than today.
Maybe this change ends up being worse, but given that central banks are a century's long experiment, I say we should give a new system a chance. It looks like more power would be given to the individual and this is a good thing in my opinion.
Coinbase is not using fractional bitcoin reserves to lend out to anyone. It’s a collateralized loan similar to a HELOC (the equity in your home is collateral) or a margin loan from a broker (your equities are collateral).
They want 3x the loan amount because BTC is a volatile asset, and mass margin calls on your customers if the price drops precipitously is bad for business.