This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc
The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.
Can’t change the wind, have to adjust your sails.
Otherwise, you have to note the current price of coin in USD each time you use coin to pay for something, because you owe capital gains or losses on whatever currency you liquidated to make the purchase.
Bitcoin needs to be stable before it can be used widespread for transactions.
Visa doing this increases its adoption, increased adoption, even if used in this way will stabilise the currency.
That is huge. It's just a required stepping stone.
It will be huge if it stays. But who wants to pay a 20$ transaction fee ( when it's a bit busy)
It's meant to serve as a stopgap so that accepting bitcoin for a purchase doesn't require the friction/risk of only being able to use that bitcoin at other places that accept bitcoin.
[1]: https://lightning.network/
Edit: added link
10k transactions per second ETH2 layer 1 + zk roll-ups providing throughout multiplication threatens VISA.
Do you care to elaborate?
Roughly, e.g.: 1:Fiber, 2:Ethernet, 3:Routing, 4:TCP/IP, and 7:HTTP.
The usual criticism of the OSI model is that there are grey areas and dependencies, where a lower layers bleed into higher layers (e.g. L2 switching which can work a lot like routing in modern hardware), and higher layers that are tightly bound to lower layers, making the distinctions unclear.
The purist in me wants to agree, but I think the model is too useful to disregard casually.
The value comes from the abstraction, and like Newtonian physics, it is a great model -- until it isn't.
4 and 7 are ceasing to be real - HTTP2 is both a session protocol and an application protocol, and that's before we even get into things like DoH.
The model is still solid, even if the most common implementation has melted a bit.
I do think it is useful as an architectural device or a conceptual design goal -- i.e. a model to model your models on. :)
But I also concede that part of its teaching value is that it is a failure in practice.
It was a formalization of the ad hoc (successful!) design strategies of early networking. I see echoes of it everywhere, most obviously in the Linux kernel, and I think it's valuable for that.
The problem with Bitcoin is that it's not technically sophisticated enough to support proper L2s which results in poorly engineered solutions like Lightning and centralized solutions like Liquid.
With Bitcoin more work needs to be done on L1 for the ecosystem to support layers above it while Ethereum could freeze development forever and still support flexible, fast, and decentralized layers on top.
no it doesn't
What central bank has been disrupted by Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is not a disruption. But blockchain is a useful tech.
Bitcoin is just an implementation of blockchain.
(just saying that you can't really trust their numbers, growing "big" or growing "normal". Who knows :) )
I guess that's a little unfair as I suppose Bitcoin can help disrupt the central banks of places like Venezuela, giving the elite an easier means of fleeing a collapsing country without losing their wealth. Sort of defeats the purpose of economic collapse if it no longer even serves as a great leveler, but oh well, I guess. As long as the rich can never lose.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-11-11/zelle-has...
"I lived in Venezuela. Almost no one uses crypto or cares about crypto. The fees to send bitcoin alone represent a sizeable chunk of money to most Venezuelans."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/jsw96e/zelle_has...
Who cares if criminals use it? It doesn't matter at all. Technology doesn't choose its users. Governments wants to catch criminals? They need to send people out there to do real investigative and police work. We're not obligated to make it easy for them by making everything we do part of some public record.
It's a deflationary currency. If it has a future as a store of value, and I think it very well may, it would have a net effect of concentrating wealth. And with wealth comes power. Whether that power is exercised through how the blockchain processes transactions or via some other vector seems something of a side show to me.
The wealthy never wanted to abandon the gold standard. It was the populists and the bankers. The poor and the middlemen.
It's not a currency, that's a misnomer to a great degree.
Which nations are supporting it as a currency? Essentially none. If something doesn't have the currency status backing of a single major economy, it plainly can't be considered a currency. It's a store of value.
Sure, we could be pretend about it (any medium of exchange), be idealistic, and say that you don't need nations to back something for it to be considered a currency, however that's repudiated by every possible aspect of how things actually work (and will continue to) both locally within an economy and internationally in trade.
Gold also is not a currency today, it's a store of value. I don't think anyone confuses gold for being a currency and there's no reason to confuse Bitcoin as being such.
I agree with you. The comment was made within the context of (a) Visa treating it like a currency and (b) OP referencing the original dream of Bitcoin supporting a decentralized financial system.
Many of the current crop "populists" don't really have a program that would actually help the people whose support they've gained through emotional appeals. They're mainly just trying to harness dissatisfaction with the current order to fuel personal ambition.
IIRC, the original populists actually opposed the gold standard, when it was still actually a thing, and supported silver because it was more inflationary. They understood deflationary money helps the people who already have money, and inflationary money helps the people who are in debt to them.
"Decentralization"? Bank of America Global Research just released a report today that said:
> 1. Concentrated Ownership: About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts. By comparison, the latest Fed data suggests that the top 1% of Americans control about 30.4% of all household wealth in the US.
* Francisco Blanch, with Savita Subramanian, Philip Middleton, et. al. "Bitcoin’s dirty little secrets". BofA Global Research, 17 March 2021.
Probably not even Russian oligarchs have that much control.
With banks I can trust that I can actually get my money bank. BTC isn't decentralised, and the central actors controlling the system are far less reputable (which is saying a lot, when they're being compared to bankers).
Since Bitcoin is somewhat anonymous it's hard to actually estimate its GINI coefficient. I agree that it's probably not great, but I'm not convinced it's this bad.
This seems obvious to me. Many people have bitcoin wallets with only a little invested. In my case, I have a few wallets just to play around with. I assume all of those wallets count as "accounts" in the above, which would really drive down the amount of money the average account controls. However few people actually have wallets with large amounts of money. I could easily move far more money into my wallets, but I choose not to.
On the other hand, when we're talking about non-bitcoin wealth the numerator is much larger (everything you and me have as assets could count as wealth, not just what we've invested in a specific thing) and the denominator would be much smaller (every one of us only counts as one person, while bitcoin wallets could be created on the fly)
In other words, the above is quite the apples to oranges comparison.
I've got no interest in digging into their methodology, but feel pretty comfortable assuming that they've grossly misrepresented all of the above as "accounts".
Satoshi's accounts alone supposedly contain nearly 6% of all bitcoin.
Bitcoin doesn't have accounts. It was txouts, which have addresses attached. AFAICT they're counting this by address, which is silly: most wallets use each address once. So in practice, this means an average person who uses Bitcoin regularly will have lots of small value txouts as coins get split up. There is no reliable way to associate addresses to individual people.
On top of that, there have been spam attacks in the past that created large numbers of very small value txouts.
That may be true in general, however in the US there are several large companies that manage Bitcoin wallets for consumers that are public or trying to get public. So the US regulators will likely have been able to get aggregate statistics like this for some time.
The more nexus crypto has with the traditional regulated finance system, the more ability of regulators to get opaque data from the network.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-m...
> by the book:
> strictly according to the rules.
Bitcoin has been extremely resistant to any L1 scaling, so that's just the state of things.
People aren't willing to say "this load of bread costs .00004534 BTC" because tomorrow it could be significantly less or more. And conversely, that reinforces the volatility, as there's no anchoring of BTC to real-world purchasing power.
So for the foreseeable future, we're looking at a conversion model and that requires someone to backstop.
So how do we create products priced in BTC? We can't even get, for comparison, shops pricing their goods in grams of gold or silver, a more stable alternative.
That's an accounting detail most people won't care about. Perception matters more than technicalities.
It will be game changer - one button in my bank online profile to hold bitcoins/other wallets all branded and protected by Visa. Coinbase needs to IPO yesterday to offload stock to the last person to turn the lights off.
Disclaimer: I am long V holder since $48/share.
"If the fair market value of property received in exchange for virtual currency exceeds the taxpayer’s adjusted basis of the virtual currency, the taxpayer has taxable gain. The taxpayer has a loss if the fair market value of the property received is less than the adjusted basis of the virtual currency."
The other way it might work is if the merchants price things in BTC. Like any other foreign currency, they take the USD from your account and pay the merchant in BTC at the current exchange rate.
Now it's the same exact routine through Coinbase. Upload my ID, wait for them to allow me to actually move amounts more than a kid's lunch money, wait for days on end to withdraw, etc etc.
And in the end some of these payments in both flows are handled by Visa. I'm missing the "wow" part of this deal.
converting btc to fiat to pay your visa card bill at the end of the month would be one transaction per month.
that's a huge difference.
Given BTC volatility paying monthly could add a bunch of risk (or benefit) to purchases. I imagine most people would want something more stable for their purchasing.
No. A transaction can be denominated in BTC without touching the blockchain. And settled at the end of the month through the blockchain.