Visa moves to allow payment settlements using cryptocurrency | Hacker News Reader

Visa moves to allow payment settlements using cryptocurrency

reuters.com

251 pointspseudolus250 comments

What we really need is for the Fed to enable micro transactions. Make transferring money so easy and cheap that Visa et al can be disrupted. Facebook/Google would also be disrupted—people would be willing to pay $.03 to watch a video or read an article instead of handing over their data.

People paid $$$ to politicians to not have that happen.

> people would be willing to pay $.03 to watch a video or read an article

Nope. Maybe for 1% of the price I'd be willing to do microtransactions.

This has been said before. Everyone who is invested in the advertisement model will then start to hate on the idea, for obvious reasons. In particular, media, including journalists who cover these ideas.

However, the advertisement model truly sucks. It severely dilutes the interest of the actual consumer and actual fans, in favor of big companies who buy the advertisements.

EDIT: As I mention below, this isn't theory. This debate happened between Penny Arcade and Scott McCloud nearly two decades ago.

>In particular, media, including journalists who cover these ideas.

Why would they care? They still get paid in the end.

They sometimes get more than just payment. If a publication promises to show an ad for a specific company, before a visitor can read a specific article, that company try to help drive visitors to that article to drive more ad views.

This is why (using Twitter as an example) you sometimes see news articles for seemingly unrelated content show up as promoted Tweets straight from the journalist with "Sponsored by T-Mobile" at the bottom. Chances are, clicking through to the article will also lead to a T-Mobile advertisement.

Modulo some huge disruption. Most people are naturally reactionary, especially when it comes to fundamental changes in their livelihood.

I'm not talking in theory. This is history. This debate literally already happened almost two decades ago. Scott McCloud and Penny Arcade!

I work in the “traditional” media—software not journalism. Ad sales are only celebrated for the money they bring in. Any optimizations around that are only there because they serve to increase as revenues, like any readership analytics.

In my experience, and I can’t speak for them, but it appears to me the journalists, at least any of the ones I’ve worked with, do not care where that money comes from. I think they’d prefer if it all could come directly from readership. I think it would serve to be more validating in more than one way.

To that end I think proposing that journalists (as a single entity, no less) would decry the diminishing need for advertising in their industry without actually losing revenues is a bit of a loaded take.

I hope that can happen. I'm not sure if enough journalists are that far-seeing.

Actually news media would be lucky to get $.03 from a single pageview. Their RPM is quite low due to the lack of targeted audience.

You think micropayments will somehow get rid of ads?

There are a multitude of noteworthy examples where you pay for a product and still get ads (Cable, Hulu, unskippable DVD sections, etc).

What will really curb the online ad industry is the ability for consumers to control their privacy, and make personal info a liability.

You think micropayments will somehow get rid of ads?

No. However, it would theoretically give content creators who don't want to serve the interests of advertisers an alternative source of income that allows this.

Basically, do what Patreon does, but with even less friction, and far more flexibly.

It already exists and it's called Web Monetization.

I recently wrote an article on it:

https://atodorov.me/2021/03/07/please-support-web-monetizati...

You should be able to get a report from publishing platforms on how much people paid for your cookie (per month?) just to better understand how much it would cost to not see ads. I've toyed with the idea of a "no ad" ad network that only bids on their own customers and replaces ads with either nothing or content of your choice. You end up paying a small premium on the amount they had to pay to remove ads.

EDIT: Something like this but for consumer viewing rather than for the content publisher: https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/10/21319938/youtube-monetiza...

The Fed does not prevent banks from enabling microtransactions.

It simply isn't profitable for banks to provide microtransaction services, especially considering that all microtransaction services to date have failed. (Contrast to P2P payment services like Venmo, which have flourished over the same time period.)

This is possible literally now, but barely anyone actually wants it.

- Full time content creators just want discoverability and traffic to their content, they have a thousand ways to monetize with ad revenue just being icing for many

- Content consumers just want to watch their content, ads aren't annoying enough for most people to pay $11.99 to unlock all of YouTube ad-free (~13 videos / day @ $0.03 / video)

None of the current draw to the currently dominant platforms would be moved an inch by some other platform existing with microtransactions.

> - Content consumers just want to watch their content, ads aren't annoying enough for most people to pay $11.99 to unlock all of YouTube ad-free (~13 videos / day @ $0.03 / video)

Bigger problem for youtube, imo, is that ad-block works on desktop, and also they don't have any content most of us couldn't live without.

Those problems might not be as big as you think.

>More than 70% of YouTube watch time comes from mobile devices.

>Over 2 billion logged-in users visit YouTube each month, and every day people watch over a billion hours of video and generate billions of views.

from https://www.youtube.com/intl/en-GB/about/press/

obligatory plug for firefox for android, which allows adblock on mobile. it's not as slick as the youtube app, but it's handy if you don't want to deal with the ads

I recently started playing with the Breez wallet (https://breez.technology) and they introduced a podcast player directly in the app, and small payments are sent to the author every few seconds, while you listen to the podcast episode. It's pretty nifty and I like it. If there would be widespread support in browsers for this kind of technology, I could see it get to mainstream adoption.

Interesting, why is this app under /apps/testing/com.breez.client ? I also note that, searching for "breez" on the google play store yields no results. Is the app not really launched yet?

You’re right, I installed it using TestFlight on my iPhone. I guess they don’t have a proper release yet.

I really don't want a centralized organization to have visibility of all transactions along with the power to cut them off.

Micropayments are a bad idea that feels like a good idea. They're bad for a fundamental human reason - each decision carries with it emotional and psychological burden. Make a few in a day and you land in decision fatigue [1]. Weighing the value of a purchase no matter how small over and over again makes the whole experience an utter chore.

  There is a paradox in that "people who lack choices seem to want them and often will fight for them", yet at the same time, "people find that making many choices can be [psychologically] aversive." [1]

There's no technical reason why any wallet operator today, like PayPal can't do micropayments except people don't want them. They think they do, but they don't.

Concrete example: For most people, it's always been cheaper to just buy the content you want to watch from iTunes one at a time - and own it forever! But everyone uses Netflix instead. They continue to use Netflix even as it has less and less of what they actually wanted to watch in the first place! In the battle of more expensive vs more decision making, more expensive always wins.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue

> Concrete example: It's always been cheaper to just buy the content you want to watch from iTunes, but everyone uses Netflix instead. They continue to use Netflix even as it has less and less of what they actually wanted to watch in the first place! In the battle of more expensive vs more decision making, more expensive always wins.

No way is that true.

A single season of a TV show varies from $10 to $20 on iTunes[1]. Movies are $10-$15 [2].

For anything beyond light viewing, Netflix is a clear win. Watch 2 movies a month on it and you are well over break even!

Now if you buy from iTunes, it is only pay once. But for people like me who almost never rewatch a movie, ownership is irrelevant. Streaming is a hands down winner!

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/robot-chicken-season-1... https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/archer-danger-island-s... https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/the-office-season-3/id...

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/back-to-the-future-part-ii... https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-divergent-series-alleg...

How much TV do you watch a day? Buying a couple of seasons of TV a month is going to be about the same price as a couple of subscriptions to streaming TV. And theoretically it gets you exactly the TV you want, something which you need 5 subscriptions or so to do right now.

I think consumers would be better off with the Season Pass model than having to subscribe to a bunch of services, but what really kills it is that it doesn't have all TV, or anywhere close. Season Pass isn't horrendously expensive if that's all you have, but it does get expensive on top of Netflix and/or cable.

As for movies, you can rent them from $1 - $5, so a couple of movies per week can also be cheaper than a couple of streaming services.

People watch A LOT of TV. Americans watch 4 hours per day, still ahead of the amount of time they spend on smartphones, approximately 3.5.

https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...

That's a nice 7.5 hour workday right there.

> How much TV do you watch a day?

Just a side comment, 'watching TV' today when TVs and monitors are common and cheap is different from 'watching TV' 20-30+ years ago, when TVs were more of a luxury good (I know displays still aren't free but they're much more accessible than they used to be). It's common for people to have netflix on in the background while doing things (e.g. studying, netflix and chill), to have netflix on a secondary monitor while gaming, to fall asleep to, etc. People probably don't 'watch' TV in the sense of sitting down and just staring at the screen like they used to, but they still 'watch' a lot of TV in the sense of having it on. From that perspective, it's easy to imagine someone watching 8+ hours of netflix a day: auto-playing sitcoms in the background during chores or studying, switching to a favorite show to watch during meals, binging multiple episodes or seasons of a new show on weekends, etc. That would rack up the cost quick using your pay-per-show model

> 'watching TV' today when TVs and monitors are common and cheap is different from 'watching TV' 20-30+ years ago, when TVs were more of a luxury good [..]

Source?

Today, people seem to spend a significant amount of money on purchasing an expensive (large) TV. They then spend even more money on subscription services for content to watch on their TV.

Rewind 30+ years (when I was young): TVs were small, and the number of channels was too. No-one paid per month for access to channels. You watched what was being broadcast live, or you drove to Blockbuster and rented a tape. I don't recall that being considered "luxury".

Maybe it wasn't a luxury for you, but for me and the people where I lived growing up TVs were much more of a luxury than they are today. People practically give away monitors and TVs, especially if they're old or small. Add in laptop and phone screens, and you have even more displays for 'watching TV'. If a poor family has an old phone per person and one TV, that's easily more than most families would've had when I was growing up, which was often 0-1 TVs for the whole household.

To tie it back to my original point, people can afford more screens than the equivalent people could've afforded 20-30 years ago. This makes it easier to have netflix on in the background, whereas back in the day it would've been more of an active activity

> How much TV do you watch a day?

None.

Using my family as an example and guestimating some numbers...

1. One 24 minute episode of a show during dinner with the family. That's not strictly accurate, but it averages out around there. That's 30 episodes per month, at 13 episodes per volume and $20 per volume (on itunes), that's ~ $46 / month.

2. One 47 minute episode of a show with my wife, each weeknight. That's 20 episodes per month, at $30 for 26 episodes on iTunes, that's $23 per month.

3. Two movies per month with the family (one per two weekends.. I'm guessing here), at lets say $12 per movie, is $24 per month.

4. Some nights I watch TV alone, as does my wife. Lets call it one show per 1 between the two of us. So 30 shows per month at an average of something like 20 shows per season and $20 per season on iTunes, is $30 / month.

So with that, we have

46 + 23 + 24 + 30 = $123 / month.

Everything we watch is one of two services we pay for, for a total of something like $30 per month. Streaming wins by a LARGE margin.

And that doesn't even count the mental cost of binging. If I binge and each episode costs me additional money, I have t justify it to myself. When I'm paying monthly for all you can watch, that isn't a problem.

Movies often drop to $4 or $5 (and you can almost always rent them for $4 and sometimes less) and complete tv series often go for $20-50.

I don’t currently have Netflix, but when I did have it there were rarely two movies per month that I wanted to watch that they had. Seemed like they mostly switched to niche tvlike series.

That seems like an overgeneralization. People are perfectly happy to buy low price things on Amazon or eBay.

IMHO, transaction fatigue swamps the effect of decision fatigue. Where transaction = the energy required to realize a decision, once made. See: PayPal's valuation.

You can get the best of both worlds with a plug-in that allocates a fixed amount each month for whatever media you choose. Microbuy to your heart’s content until the amount runs out, then decide if you’ve had enough for the month or top it up. The plug-in would roll your allotment over if you don’t finish it.

IMO each time is still a purchasing decision. People are about as weary of deferring the making of the purchasing decision to an app as they are tired of making the decisions.

Just reduce the price until it isn't.

0 dollars?

You're describing coil.com and Web Payments, sounds like.

This seems like a reasonable argument, however I must say that buying content from iTunes is usually not cheaper than an Netflix subscription, unless you don't actually watch TV regularly.

With the highest level premium subscription of $17.99 a month you could only watch 4.5 movies a month, or 5 - 6 episodes of a TV show. I don't watch TV regularly, but if an average user watchtime of greater than 2 hours is accurate, as I'm getting from a quick search, that's more like 90 episodes a month.

But how many people actually watch 4.5 new (to them) movies or 5-6 new episodes a month? I suspect that’s pretty rare.

you think that's high? I usually binge at least 2-3 seasons of a new-to-me show a month on netflix, prime, hulu, if I'm really busy -- my wife makes up for the time I miss watching new-to-her shows, or the kids watch new-to-them shows or disney launches a new movie... I mean.. Wandavision, Falcon+Winter Soldier, Mandalorian, New Mighty Ducks are top notch and that's just disney...

Netflix has the Witcher which I still need to watch, just finished two different ones on figure skating Zero Chill (Hockey+Figure skating) and Spinning out. Both really good shows that weren't on my radar. Recently finished Queen's gambit too--also great and not on radar...

Lots of back-burner shows too (waiting for the next season).

7-11pm is usually dinner, tv with family put kids to bed, watch 1-2 shows with wife, then go to bed. Sometimes I watch old movies that are new to me just cause I heard they're good but haven't seen them yet. Grew up in 80's and just recently finished Fast Times at Ridgemont High for example.

120 hours of screen time's easy... weekends are probably a lot more.. maybe 8 hour sessions, definitely enough to watch 1 whole new-to-us series... esp. with lockdowns and covid.

> you think that's high?

I don't really know. I'm sure plenty of people consume a lot of new stuff, but I just had a gut reaction to seeing "4 movies or 6 new TV episodes a month" mentioned as a low bar. To me that's a very busy month! But of course I have no data and no reason to believe myself and my family/friends/peers to be representative.

Families with children are an obvious case that probably pushes up the average. But I also get the impression, based anecdotally on myself and my friends and peers, that there's also plenty of people who routinely find themselves considering whether they should even keep paying. There's definitely a common sentiment like "it seems like I browse around on Netflix for several minutes and see the same couple of dozen things that I've been seeing for months, I swear I remember hearing about some recent must-watch movies and shows, but I sure can't find them right now, and I just end up watching YouTube videos." I personally am definitely way over-subscribed to streaming services, and my YouTube Premium subscription is delivering tons more value than all the others combined.

That's a good point. I know a lot of people who buy an unlimited Metrocard even when they don't get their money's worth out of it just so they don't need to think about paying for their subway fare.

The real reason to do a monthly unlimited is to not have to reload, especially when you are pressed for time.

Going forward, in NYC, I'm just going to use OMNY, since it's not in all stations.

I'm one of these people. I have a BahnCard 100, an unlimited-access pass from the German national railway company that works on about 95% of all public transit across the country (all railway except for some lines that are only tourist attractions; and all subways/trams/busses/ferries in 120 large cities).

It costs me around 170€ per month, which is way more than I would spend if I bought just a subscription for my city's public transit plus train tickets as needed. But even if I pay a few bucks more, it's totally worth it because it changes how I approach travel. I can wake up in the morning and decide on a whim to do a day trip to a city 200 kilometers away for no extra charge. I can decide on Thursday evening to take Friday off and visit my parents (who live 500 km away from me) for the weekend.

(Side-note: Obviously a lot of this is not possible right now because of the plague, but at some point, all parties involved will be vaccinated and I can resume my travels.)

It's the same idea round buying a season ski pass vs pay each day. Or owning a car vs renting it for each need. It's not that its more cost effective it's the idea of having to do a mental hurdle every time you want to do something. The sunk cost is an enabler to go do something vs having to pay each time and get value out of that trip.

I've had this debate many times with friends. Am I hyper efficient with my spend? No, am I happy about my decision making process and/or less decisions to make? Absolutely.

If I see micro transactions for reading articles SMH. Conceptually I see where you are going but it would have really bad ripple effects IMHO.

Eh I think both the example you've provided aren't the best. A season pass breaks even at most places in 4-6 days if you're going at peak rates. A car rental is much more variable (parking, distance limits etc) but does have a higher mental load than a ski pass. Both would be pretty easy things to hit break even if you're going to be doing/using it. A metro pass is often a much higher break even point. Iirc, when I did the calculations for the NYC metro card, you broke even using your pass to and from 1 place if you left your place every day. Obviously that calculation is much different for each city, but they require a high number uses vs your examples.

Also supporting a system you appreciate has an added value, less hassle etc.

Your concrete example substantially detracts from your argument because it is just not true.

I'll accept that I was projecting my own calculus.

I can see some utility though. I'd love to be paid a penny at a time, and pay for things a penny at a time. I'd love for my income and regular bills to all be made into rates (pennies/second) rather than lump sums on some weekly or monthly schedule.

Heck, make them functions, so there's no ongoing communication that needs to happen to represent value transferred between parties, until the function changes or the sending account runs out of money.

There's so much I can imagine happening if value transfers could defined as functions instead of individual transactions.

The idea would be that people transact without consciously thinking about it.

Ex. I pay per byte stored in my cloud backup, but I don't fret about which individual bytes I'm going to store, it's all captured in a high level strategy of which directories I want backed up. If I start spending more than I want, the solution isn't to individually comb through what files I want to back up, it's to tweak my high level strategy.

That’s a valid point, but you don’t seem to be comparing it to the “fundamental human reasons” that dominant Internet media oligopolies supported almost entirely by advertising might impose emotional and psychological burden.

I believe the stuff about decision fatigue, I just don’t think you can immediately conclude “therefore paying for online content is a non-starter because of fundamental human psychology.” I mean, people do still decide to buy things, including online content!

The parent comment was railing against micropayments in particular, not buying things online in general.

Concrete counterexample: The cloud. You can spin up and down servers whenever and you make micropayments for keeping the servers you have around.

I think you are wrong and you are confusing your opinion with "absolute truth". It is a limited form of is/ought fallacy. Just because things are one way today doesn't mean they ought to be that way.

I recall reading a16z blog post "Outgrowing Advertising: Multimodal Business Models as a Product Strategy" [1] and they mention many innovative business models coming out of China.

For example, from the "Books" section of that blog post:

> Books are also sold as bite-sized snacks. Readers pay per 1,000 words, for often-serialized works. Below is a screenshot of one of the most popular books from 2014, 一世倾城. It has over 10,000 chapters and is still being updated — now more than 46 times the length of the entire Harry Potter series. Because authors can publish chapters piecemeal, they are also able to incorporate reader feedback to quickly change plots or even kill off characters.

> Some authors offer free books and illustrations, gain a loyal user base, and then collect money through tips. At the end of each chapter, an overlay button for tipping authors allows readers to tip from $0.15 and up.

This kind of thing is built into WeChat and WeChat has significant penetration in the Chinese market. Twitch is also experimenting with a form of micropayments called "bits" [2]

Right now in the West we don't have an equivalent of WeChat so we don't see the same things happening. Twitch is a very limited scope (live streams and mostly focused on gaming content). However, just because it isn't happening widely in the West yet doesn't mean that emerging economies aren't going to jump on this. And it also doesn't mean it won't make it's way here eventually.

Our systems are preventing us from experimenting with these new business models. If we completely remove the friction that currently exists - let's see if clever entrepreneurs can make it work. The alternative is to fall behind the experimentation that is currently happening outside of our bubble.

1. https://a16z.com/2018/12/07/when-advertising-isnt-enough-mul...

2. https://www.twitch.tv/bits

Indeed, it's almost certainly my own opinion. The fundamental technology or platform to implement a micropayments system very much exists though, it's something PayPal could implement in a heartbeat.

While I take your point that "micropayments" are that thing people are have been consistently wrong about for 25 years now... I'd be careful leaning to heavily on psychology in making prediction.

There definitely needs to be a breakthrough UI, cultural shift or something... but people have the ability to background stuff given the right circumstances.

> buy the content you want to watch from iTunes one at a time - and own it forever!

Can I actually download it? Or is it "as long as it is not removed from iTunes and you can log in"?

The mere fact that their people demanding these things means that they are wanted.

Micro transactions would open up new business opportunities. And I don't find it very taxing when for example going to the grocery store where you make a lot of small purchase decisions. One concern though is book-keeping and tax rules if you run an international small business - but I guess that can be automated too ... So that the state automatically get their VAT from every transaction and in turn provides a payment system completely free from transfer fees.

> They're bad for a fundamental human reason - each decision carries with it emotional and psychological burden. Make a few in a day and you land in decision fatigue

So, introduce a "content-plan" which is just like the data-plan of your smartphone. I.e. a quota on the total payments per month for content.

By the way each advertisement also carries with it an emotional and psychological burden.

I tried switching ting as my mobile service provider a few years ago when it was something along the lines of 10 dollars per gigabyte and every time I wanted to watch a youtube video I had to ask myself "is it really worth 4 dollars to watch this?" "would I really spend 2 dollars to download this podcast when I could just download it for free at home?" . I eventually wound up switching to another provider that actually wound up costing me more money per month but a flat cost and a flat allotment of bandwidth. Even though the flat rate service was more expensive it was still preferable to me because I didn't need to spend mental energy justifying the cost of every action I made.

There's two issues to deconflate:

1. Reducing fees associated with smaller payments - it would be nice to be able to buy a candy bar or give a street performer a tip without costing anyone an arm and a leg to put a transaction through.

2. More choices - too many choices are bad, unless you're framing a poster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

There is no need to decide you start watching the money starts streaming you stop the money stops. If you only watched a few seconds its only fractions of a cent it doesn't matter. If at all it makes people less likely to watch crap and more likely to stop if it isn't what they hoped it to be.

And BTW the standard already exists https://interledger.org/rfcs/0029-stream/

It should also be noted that placing prices on things changes peoples decision processes dramatically. There's the famous experiment where a school tried to combat parents picking up children late (which caused teachers to stay late) by charging them a small fee. That caused the number of late parents to increase because it shifted the issue from guilt to capital. Zach Star used this example in a recent video along with others[0]. These types of decisions are extremely complicated because we're changing the entire incentive structure in a non-obvious way. This often creates "contradictory" results because we have bad priors in our model. What is "obvious" usually isn't (which is often why problems haven't been solved).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGuwXSe6tAw

Never mind the question of why you think the Fed would be well-suited to provide micro-transactions, they've been possible via centralized systems for years. The issue seems to be there is no market for them. See this PDF for a theory: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...

Finally, something Nick and I actually agree on lol. That's a great write-up, too - thanks for sharing.

> instead of handing over their data.

If every article and every video you watch has to be paid for they'll have as much if not more data about you...

This is it. Any payment will connect a person more directly than the random targeting we get now connecting using sites visited, words you share with siri and what you put in your facebook profile.

Amazon attempted to do this with Amazon Flexible Payments Service [1]. It didn't get much adoption.

[1] https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/08/the_amazon_flex...

I don’t know why Visa/MC even exist in 2021. Literal financial leeches.

I think this is a little too optimistic regarding what consumers are willing to pay for. The Original Sin of the Internet was subsidizing everything via advertising revenue, allowing businesses to present services as "free" to end users (in reality, you're paying with your personal privacy). This culture has taken root very deep inside mainstream culture to the point that the average person would think it ridiculous to pay money for something they've been able to do for "free" for decades now.

Lightning...

Otherwise Stellar XLM, Bitcoin LN

Funny that the article talks about Bitcoin jumping on the news. While the chain on which this settlement takes place is Ethereum.

Bitcoin will likely stay the dominate singular cryptocurrency for a long while, but Etherum has already surpassed it in terms of network effect, and will likely have more value held on it's blockchain than bitcoin in a matter of years.

Bitcoin has shown it is uninterested in being anything but digital gold.

Which is exactly what everyone who has it wants it to be. :/

In retrospect, it was pretty much designed to become that!

It was designed to be digital cash. That's the title of the whitepaper. It is very bad at that.

I hold Bitcoin and the day that I sell the vast majority of it and move to something on the ETH chain grows closer every day.

Etherium has already surpassed it in terms of network effect, and will likely have more value held on it's blockchain than bitcoin in a matter of years.

Etherium is more oriented towards transactions than Bitcoin.

In the longer term, the value of Blockchain will be in facilitating transactions. In this, it's 100% analogous to the Internet. The current crop of blockchain is dot.com, where we're still figuring things out. People will look back on it and think it quaint for analogous reasons. I think Harry Dent has a section in a book about this idea.

An even bigger explosion of value will be created with the next wave analogous to "Web 2.0." No more multi-day dead tree transactions for settling checks, equities, real estate transactions, etc...

Etherium is more oriented towards transactions than Bitcoin.

Maybe Bitcoin is so much horrendously worse that makes what you said true but Ethereum is pretty terrible. Unless I’m missing something?

If I want to send .001 ETH (i.e. $1.81) from my MEW wallet to my Coinbase wallet, I am charged $7.388 in fees if I want it confirmed in three minutes. If I’m not in a hurry and pick the slowest option that goes down to the low low price of $6.133. To send $1.81 from me to myself. These are network fees, not Coinbase (who will then charges me fees again to either sell or transfer the money).

I love that there’s a link right on the transfer page of MEW that says, “Why are the fees so high?” that basically tells you it might get better someday but for now it’s how it is.

I’ve been using Crypto since you could mine BTC with a GPU but I still don’t get what the use case is outside of illicit purchases and “buy it because it goes up.” Maybe I’m stupid.

Etherum gas fees are horrendous right now, totally agree. In my opinion the work that is being done on scaling is much better on Etherum than on Bitcoin, and bitcoin really has a very limited capacity for smart contracts compred to bitcoin.

In my opinion bitcoin, by not taking scaling seriously, has declared it's self as only good for store of value, L1 bitcoin seems like it won't really become any more efficient and essentially all L2 systems require 2 tx on L1. Etherum will scale L1 a bit more with allows overfull blocks and then much more when PoS rolls out.

> essentially all L2 systems require 2 tx on L1.

True. But once an L2 channel is anchored on L1 using those 2 L1 transactions it can support an unlimited number of L2 transactions, they take milliseconds to do, and an unlimited number can happen in parallel - all without any more L1 transactions.

L1's main use is to become the place L2 channels are created. Creating 7 entire channels per second sounds like it should be more than enough.

> No more multi-day dead tree transactions for settling checks, equities, real estate transactions, etc...

Those things don't really exist right now, though.

The US is moving from ACH to RTP for instant settlements, so the multi-day thing is gone.

Checks aren't processed in paper terms, they're scanned and converted to ACH transactions - and soon RTP.

Equities are instant and electronic.

Real estate transactions are legal transactions, and for the once every 5 years you need to get a title company to record the deed is that really a big deal? The real burden isn't the title recording.

There's absolutely no reason any of these things have to be achieved with a blockchain. There's absolutely no reason to think any of these things would even be better achieved with a blockchain. It's not analogous to the internet because the internet was fundamentally more efficient than what came before it, not less.

Equities are instant and electronic.

You can agree on a transaction instantly on a web page. But the actual confirmed trade comes the day after.

Real estate transactions are legal transactions, and for the once every 5 years you need to get a title company to record the deed is that really a big deal?

My wife works in banking, and yes, the cumbersome and primitive nature of this stuff introduces delays and opportunities for miscommunication that make it kinda a big deal.

There's absolutely no reason any of these things have to be achieved with a blockchain. There's absolutely no reason to think any of these things would even be better achieved with a blockchain. It's not analogous to the internet because the internet was fundamentally more efficient than what came before it, not less.

Dude, you clearly don't have any clue about how primitive lots of transactions still are. I'm glad that progress has been made in checking, but it seems like you only know about that, and have no clue what happens with title companies, and what banks have to go through to deal with them.

Blockchain could clearly be better for that.

> You can agree on a transaction instantly on a web page. But the actual confirmed trade comes the day after.

Does that matter? That's why we have loans.

> My wife works in banking, and yes, the cumbersome and primitive nature of this stuff introduces delays and opportunities for miscommunication that make it kinda a big deal.

Lucky thanks to trust and centralization it can be resolved instead of lost forever.

> Blockchain could clearly be better for that.

Lots of non-blockchain things could clearly be better for that, too. Since centralization and trust represents a massive optimization, a non-blockchain solution by definition can be more efficient.

Does that matter?

Tremendously. Just as the Robinhood CEO and watch videos on the mechanics of why they did what they did. Then come back here and hang your head in shame.

Lucky thanks to trust and centralization it can be resolved instead of lost forever.

It's the centralized systems of disparate parties which causes this. You clearly don't know what you're talking about here.

> Tremendously. Just as the Robinhood CEO and watch videos on the mechanics of why they did what they did. Then come back here and hang your head in shame.

I'm very familiar with that situation, lol, no need to get hyperbolic. A small tweak to liquidity requirements is all that's needed to rectify that. Not burning the whole system down.

This reads a lot like the engineering preoccupation with rewriting instead of refactoring because reading code is hard and writing it is easy.

> It's the centralized systems of disparate parties which causes this. You clearly don't know what you're talking about here.

No, I'm saying that decentralized systems leave no recourse to correct errors. SFYL. Centralized systems do.

When you speak with such hyperbole and unbridled, untempered enthusiasm it raises questions about your answers. Especially when the system you espouse has had no end of issues, of bigger magnitude, constantly. Robinhood just taking that opportunity to exit scam or shut down would have been "just another day" in crypto. At least Vlad didn't fly off to India to open an orphanage, fake his own death and tell everyone to get stuffed. The entire space is one step from collapse at all times haha.

None of that changes what I said: a non-blockchain solution that's new, clean and modern would do just as much good as a new blockchain solution. Possibly more. And definitely more efficiently. Why approach this from the solution domain instead of the problem domain?

"Bitcoin has shown it is uninterested in being anything but digital gold."

That still makes it very relevant here. Bitcoin is the reserve, while Eth is the settlement layer.

Except that bitcoin has a settlement layer, arguably the most well protected one.

Etherum is so much more than a settlement layer. In my opinion the biggest potential for bitcoin is to displace gold. It's only ~6x away from eclipsing gold's market cap. After that I think the growth story of it growing faster than index funds starts to get kind of tenuous.

> Bitcoin is the reserve, while Eth is the settlement layer.

I think that's a Bitcoin holder's fantasy. If you're already using one chain for settlements, why use an entirely separate and unrelated one as well? Ethereum can be both. Actually, almost any other cryptocurrency can be both. It's only (original, core) Bitcoin that is so badly crippled.

But doesn't Bitcoin have an advantage in the "value protection"/digital gold use case because it uses proof of work and has a finite number of coins?

It does, but its insistence on tiny blocks means all transactions are extremely expensive. Bitcoin Cash adheres to the original Bitcoin design, has moved to larger blocks, but still retains all the other advantages. And it's not the only one, few cryptocurrencies are as expensive as Bitcoin to transact.

I'm not convinced that PoW with prohibitive hardware costs and hashrate concentrated in a single totalitarian dictatorship is better than other consensus mechanisms.

Many other things than Bitcoin also have finite supply.

Nothing as ubiquitous though...?

Yes perhaps, but the fact is that it's the bitcoin network that secures the majority of the money tied into crypto. It's going to play this role regardless of the technical drawbacks unfortunately. I'm not a bitcoin "maximalist" - I don't even hold any, but it's hard to deny the role it plays in propping up all of crypto.

I think that both will be made shorter lived by their fee structures. A colleague of mine today moved STORJ and it cost him 15 US dollars to move his crypto into a sell position.

Bitcoin's fees are currently worse than eth and their development direction is ... toxic ...

Bitcoin cash is currently what I expect to take the lead....though that could be quite a long time. 25-140 years....give or take.

Bitcoin is the most secure store of value and settlement layer. It is digital gold, a maximally secure asset with minimal risk. Other functions such as microtransactions, ft/nft-assets and smart contracts can be built on top of Bitcoin, with different L2 solutions. For example, see https://rgb-org.github.io. This architecture separates the base layer from all the risks of experimental technology and speculative utility of smart contracts.

This differs from other blockchains such as Ethereum, that try to build everything on L1. This is a problem, because it introduces a lot of risk and uncertainty on the base layer. Even on Ethereum, the most promising solutions seem to arrive on L2, making the premise of Ethereum rather pointless.

As much as I like Ethereum, it is not as "sticky" of a brand name as Bitcoin is.

A lot of us that are deep into this space already see all the nuances, but there's a fat tail of people out there who are only just warming up to the idea that Bitcoin is not a scam. They're not quite ready to make the jump to Ethereum and smart contracts. Admittedly, most of these folks are the older generation that are not "digitally native" (i.e. millennials and younger).

"Bitcoin" conjures a physical, visual image. That golden coin image with the "B" logo. Ethereum has chosen, for better or worse, a more ethereal representation for itself that I think is tougher for people to grasp.

Remember when the internet was such a new concept that no one knew how to describe it? What did they call it? An information superhighway. Bitcoin achieves this in its brand name. At any rate, that's my theory for why it sticks so much better than Ethereum, and it's harder for people to remember ETH the first time they hear it than Bitcoin.

You’re not wrong, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s use is widespread enough to become common.

If you want to help it stick, just abbreviate it as "ETH" and pronounce it "eeth". Ethereum can be a challenging word for non-native speakers, and shortening your words will help you save time when you talk about it. Bitcoin is a better name because it combines a new concept with an old concept. "Bit" + "Coin".

Or maybe the new answer is to call ETH "Eeth-coin". What do you think?

I personally would go with ETH and Ethereum because everything else is some flavor of the week “coin”. Adding coin to anything but Bitcoin comes off as just another money printing scheme.

I like the convention of calling the currency "Ether" (pronounced ee-ther).

YEah i like eeth. that B that bitcoin uses really does have a good parallel to fiat currencies. needs a symbol too. an E with a line like $1,800USD per Ɇ1

Ξ is the symbol most folks use for ETH. Some use: ♦

As an older millennial it is alarming to me that the generation that invented and built the internet (boomers) are dismissed as not understanding it.

> Remember when the internet was such a new concept that no one knew how to describe it? What did they call it? An information superhighway.

This is exactly the thought I have had recently. In my humble opinion in 20 years we may consider a phrase like “crypto” to be antiquated. This time is exciting because we don’t know what happens next.

Or said another way, blockchain is to Millennials what the internet was to Boomers.

Haha, certainly there were some brilliant boomers that built the internet, but the vast majority of boomers missed on the biggest applications of the internet. I used to sell cell phones to boomers back in the early 00's. It was difficult to sell them on more than an emergency plan and then to get them to make the leap further that they needed a wireless internet plan? They thought it was a toy that they didn't need. Now, of course, they all have iPhones, but in the early days it was a tough sell. I would say my generation never even questioned the value of having a cell phone or an internet connection or texting.

Ok but was that unreasonable at the time?

My dad is a boomer and eagerly adopted technology into his business at that time. I can think of many examples of this. How many boomer parents of millennials provided us with computers and Internet access?

Maybe I’m just sensitive to the ageism but I don’t buy in to these generational stereotypes.

It's not an insult. But there is fundamentally different worldviews that form based on the time you were brought up in, and these worldviews persist as "memes" across the population. Of course there were savvy boomers that understood some or most of the implications of the internet, and will readily purchase the latest game console and are interacting with DeFi already...but my experience as a former computer technician and cell phone salesperson is that broadly speaking, that generation learns and experiments with technology at a slower rate.

For boomers, network television and radio were the primary forms of entertainment in their formulative years. Because PCs either didn't exist or were so expensive and hard to use, very few boomers grew up with this stuff. It's like being a native speaker of a language. You master the language in a way that is very difficult for non-native speakers to achieve. That's nothing on "non-native" speakers of a language, but it's just that your earliest years shape how you think and use these tools and that's hard to overcome.

@mulmen - can't reply to your thread below, but understand that these generational differences are broadly recognized and apparent in consumer behavior and well-documented. I'm not making up the generation gap with regards to digital technology. The fact that people close to you happened to be savvy with tech (were they mining BTC in 2011? were they crowdfunding Oculus in 2012? were they on Instagram in 2010? did they do a startup during the mobile boom?) doesn't discount broad demographic trends.

Like the example I used above, the existence of non-native speakers that speak perfect English does not discount that fact that vast majority of people that learn a language past childhood struggle to develop that mastery. PCs did not reach mainstream adoption until the 90s. For boomers, they were already in their late 30s to 50s by the time this happened. You can even see this example in the cryptocurrency space. How many bloggers, podcasters, developers, etc in the blockchain space are boomers? Relatively few compared to their representation of the world population. This space has been largely driven by younger generations. That's a fair statement.

Honestly it sounds like your worldview is the one skewed by experience. Having worked retail sales and tech support I don’t think there’s such a difference in the generations. I have millennial friends who are worse at troubleshooting tech problems than my parents. Some people “get it” and some don’t. I don’t think the year you were born has much to do with it.

My entire family eagerly and reasonably adopted technology. The first computer I owned was an old model given to me by one of my dad’s coworkers when he upgraded. He demanded I use it to learn something. He completely understood the benefit.

All of our family friends adopted technology in their own ways. All my classmates had access to technology on par with my own. It was widespread. Millennials were not in a financial position to bankroll the internet revolution. Boomers did that just because they were the right age at the right time.

there are always exceptions. my parents aren't stupid. they can do all the basic things with a computer that are necessary to do a non-technical job these days. but they really haven't internalized a lot of stuff that's second nature to most younger people. just this weekend I helped my mom troubleshoot an issue with severely degraded zoom calls. I ran a speed test and determined they were barely getting 5% of the plan speed. I ran another test and discovered the connection had >20% packet loss. the solution was to turn the modem off and turn it back on. I asked my mom how long this had been going on. she and my dad had been living with severe packet loss for weeks and just assumed there was nothing they could do about it.

btw, my work has nothing to do with networking. this is just my workflow for diagnosing connection problems for counterstrike.

I don’t see how this has anything to do with age. I know boomers who can do this kind of troubleshooting and millennials that can’t.

I'm a late boomer, and I bought my first cell phone in 2000. The thing that finally pulled me in was that the price came down. Way down. I was able to get basic cellphone service for 7 bucks a month. The younger crowd do a lot more on their phones, granted, but they're also comfortable paying more. A lot more.

But still, germane to the parent post, at my workplace almost everybody has heard of things like the blockchain, machine learning, and so forth. And people talk at lunch about the wonders of the blockchain, and the wonders of machine learning, as if those things are magic. The colleagues who dug into how those things actually work, beyond superficial explanations in blogs, are all older than 55. We are also the ones who deeply understand how our own products work. Maybe this is good or bad. Needing to understand how something works in order to believe it may be a mental block in some situations.

At home, I'm still the only person who can diagnose IT problems, the only fluent programmer, and can fix a toilet. The young generation is more comfortable as users of technology, but haven't experienced having to dig deep into the innards of something to make it work. This is something that can't be forced. There has to be an interest.

Naturally these are generalizations, and not everybody in my generation was a techie, but I don't know if a larger percentage are techies today.

Yeah, I agree with this, because if you were an early user of tech in the 80s and even 90s to some extent, you had to be somewhat savvy. In the 90s, being a user of tech implied being a "nerd". There was still some level of stigma with spending much of your time engrossed in tech. I found it common for people to even brag about their ignorance about technology. It was common in popular culture, like movies and shows, even.

But surely the folks that learned tech before it was as user friendly as it is today have an advantage over even younger people who aren't curious enough to learn.

It might be OK. Hopefully the kids are still curious, but maybe about different things. I'm happy to keep their infrastructure running if they're willing to do great things with it.

I think the trick is that the internet revolution started from a very small group of people, at least relative to the whole population. It takes a very long time for things to go mainstream. Adoption time seems to be getting shorter with each new wave of tech, but these big conceptual jumps are still hard.

Yes it takes time to go mainstream but I disagree that it happens along generational lines.

Bitcoin has gotten the biggest free ride ever from Ethereum. 2 bull cycles now have been driven by increasing usage on Ethereum (icos in 2017, and now DeFi and NFTs), while Bitcoin absorbs most of the dumb money who hears about “blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin” in the news.

Bitcoin is the reason we have Ethereum in the first place, so I'm not sure if your statement is fair. ICOs were a pump-and-dump fad. DeFi is proving to be useful and there are already DeFi projects coming up on Bitcoin (rsk, sovryn) and the jury is still out on NFTs.

That’s kinda what we heard about Lightning and payments, but we can currently see that there’s more BTC on Ethereum, than there is BTC on Lightning according to http://btconethereum.com.

I doubt there’ll be any significant value locked in RSK/Sovyrn, when most of the liquidity is on Ethereum. Plus, it’ll take time for BTC developers to learn Solidity, and most of the DeFi network effect will be on Ethereum and other EVM compatible chains.

I agree with you on the network effects of eth having most developer mindshare, but one thing to keep in mind about lightning is that a lot of end-user channels are private, so if you're just counting the number of channels or liquidity locked up on lightning as growth, you won't see the full-picture.

Check out STX - Stacks on bitcoin as well

The Bitcoin smart contract landscape is impoverished. Rsk is a custodial service which has somehow convinced people it is "on Bitcoin". When you use Rsk, your Bitcoins are held by these 11 companies: https://www.rsk.co/powpeg/ (their private keys are held in a special "tamper-proof" box).

Icos, DeFi, and NFT are just new ways to gamble. Bitcoin competes with gold as the best store of value. Most people aren't interested in gambling, but storing their wealth.

They are new ways to gamble, but not everyone is in it to gamble.

ICO is just a way for startups to raise money (though lately, it seems to be more about governance tokens once they have their project up), DeFi is a way for people to lend and get loans, trade margin, synthetic stocks, and NFTs empower creatives to make money off of their work and people buy them because they enjoy it and also see them as long term investments just like in the traditional art world.

Are the prices ridiculous? Sure, but so is Bitcoin during bull runs. Things will settle during the next bear run and tokens will likely reflect more realistic prices.

My point is that rises in the Bitcoin price seem to be driven by news about applications on Ethereum. That holds regardless of whether or not you think Bitcoin somehow isn't gambling.

It's the other way around. Bitcoin is rising because it's being accepted by treasuries and institutions as an investment, and it is also following the price appreciation cycle from the last halving event. Everything in crypto is following bitcoin. NFTs were invented a long time ago, but they're popular now because of the bull cycle.

Crypto.com who issues CRO is the first to use this with Visa. Bitcoin isnt really in the picture here. It will be interesting to learn how this will work between ETH/USDC/CRO.

Crypto.com had Visa debit cards where you get CRO "cashback" for quite a while.

Ethereum gas prices are so enormously high that doing any transaction at all on it seems pretty cost prohibitive at the moment IMHO

It’s actually less than Bitcoin’s when doing a simple transfer. It’s only bad when you’re interacting with smart contracts. Layer 2 solutions like Loopring and zkSync also exist, with Optimism in July.

For settlements it's fine, like with Bitcoin lightning network. Since this uses crypto.com only now I'd imagine transactions are in CRO for now, then settled via Ethereum over time.

I mean, it's roughly $20-$40 to send an ERC20 token, which yes, is high for retailers and has to get fixed (with zkRollups, see: https://zksync.io/, it is fractions of a penny per trade)...but VISA and Crypto.com are going to be settling millions of dollars, and that fee does not waiver based on the transaction amount. So, it's not an issue for the aforementioned parties.

At that point why wouldn't they just wire the money. This seems like Visa trying to act hip.

You need to interact with some of these Decentralized Financial applications to get an idea of the utility of stable coins like USDC and DAI vs an ordinary dollar. They're completely programmable. You can lock them into smart contracts that are completely auditable, open source, and verifiable on chain. You can earn yield lending out your USDC on protocols like Compound (https://compound.finance/) or Aave (https://aave.com/). You can provide liquidity for other crypto pairs such as ETH-USDC, or WBTC-USDC on Uniswap (https://uniswap.org/) or SushiSwap (https://sushi.com/). You can join a lossless lottery on PoolTogether (https://pooltogether.com/). You can remit payments in USDC worldwide, instantly, with no intermediaries by conducting a transaction on the ETH blockchain. There's high, high demand for crypto dollars, both within the crypto ecosystem as well as international folks who are unbanked and don't have access to USD. But besides this, after using DeFi, I can't stand the archaic nature of our existing financial system. It really is going to go the way of Blockbuster this decade. This is a smart move by Visa to stay ahead of the trends, to get involved, to earn fees, to stay relevant in this new, developing world.

Ok but Visa doesn't need any of that. That's my point. I re-read the article like 4 times looking for an answer to my question, and there isn't one. There's no reason Visa would do this - there's nothing in it for them - other than to look hip.

Of course they do. There's a $1.8 trillion dollar market out there (and rapidly growing). There's over $40B of value floating on DeFi (up from less than $1 billion a year ago!). Not only does it behoove Visa to offer onramps and offramps for crypto services, because they collect fees from such activity, but it helps build their expertise in the fastest growing financial sector on the planet.

That money is "floating around DeFi" has no bearing on Visa opting to settle transactions in USDC. They're not getting into DeFi lol, unless you have some unreleased memo. Do you have data to back your claim that it's the "fastest growing financial sector"? By what measure? What metric? Your replies are hyperbolic at best, and read a bit like like zealotry at worst.

There is no other sector in finance that saw a 40X (!!!) gain in the past year. See for yourself: https://defipulse.com/

Yes, USDC is by definition DeFi. This is VISA plugging into it, providing ON-RAMPS and OFF-RAMPS into the whole DeFi and Ethereum ecosystem.

Take it from Circle's CEO Jeremy Allaire (the organization behind USDC):

"Major USDC news today - @Visa has become the first major payments network to support USDC as a native currency and settlement system on its network. This is massive news, and marks a major turning point in mainstream adoption of crypto.

With USDC being the fastest growing dollar digital currency in the world, connecting its use to existing global networks will accelerate its adoption as both a store of value and medium of exchange. Crypto dollars FTW!

What does this really mean? A customer who has USDC in a wallet, and a card attached to their wallet (there are now dozens of these) can spend at any Visa accepting merchant, and the USDC is used to settle the transaction with Visa instead of the legacy banking system.

For Visa, this means they get the money as fast as a blockchain moves funds, without reversal risk, without the time delays and costs of SWIFT, ACH, etc. Huge!

This is "Over-the-Top" (OTT) money, and a major step in our mission to build a new global economic system on a more open, global, safe and inclusive foundation built on crypto and blockchain tech.

Huge congrats to @cuysheffield and the team at @Visa for really putting your money where your mouth is and embracing the future, we welcome you with open arms in the movement towards an open internet of value!"

https://twitter.com/jerallaire/status/1376493343476187138

> There is no other sector in finance that saw a 40X (!!!) gain in the past year. See for yourself: https://defipulse.com/

I didn't ask how much DeFi has grown, you said 1 to 40B I can divide 40 by 1. Im curious why you think no other sector has grown by $39B.

For instance the S&P 500 is $33.4T in market cap and it's up 75% year over year, or an increase of 20T. That's a substantially larger sector growth. Or are you measuring it by percentages? It's really easy to grow peanuts into 40 peanuts, and I'm sure I can find you another sector. Point is you haven't provided any explanation or citations for your claim.

USDC isn't the definition of DeFi, it's a stablecoin. It's a literal pile of tokenized money. That's a centralized system. It's not like Visa is allowing settlement via DAI.

> With USDC being the fastest growing dollar digital currency in the world, connecting its use to existing global networks will accelerate its adoption as both a store of value and medium of exchange. Crypto dollars FTW!

Paolo would obviously disagree with that lol.

> What does this really mean? A customer who has USDC in a wallet, and a card attached to their wallet (there are now dozens of these) can spend at any Visa accepting merchant, and the USDC is used to settle the transaction with Visa instead of the legacy banking system.

I didn't see that in the article. Given that it's on Ethereum, and gas prices are staggering, it's very unlikely that's what's happening, so exactly what is? And why? Merchant's don't want USDC they want dollars, who's on the other end of the settlements? Ok they'll accept digital currency to net up once a month but then what? Will they be the ones to liquidate it?

> For Visa, this means they get the money as fast as a blockchain moves funds, without reversal risk, without the time delays and costs of SWIFT, ACH, etc. Huge!

Uh... buddy?

The blockchain is slow, you know that right? Visa can move money way, way faster through a network known as Visa. And they can do it far less expensively. And yeah, they're the ones who get to dictate reversal risk because they're Visa. If people didn't want reversal risk Visa wouldn't have it. But they do want it. And for them ACHs cost about 1/10th of a penny each, and wires are roughly free, too. RTP is going to be free and instant - rollout is going well in the US.

Visa is also way cheaper, they take a few basis points on Visanet transfers.

> This is "Over-the-Top" (OTT) money, and a major step in our mission to build a new global economic system on a more open, global, safe and inclusive foundation built on crypto and blockchain tech.

Why does one centralized organization moving a centralized representation of a centralized currency (the USD dollar in a big ol' bank account at Circle HQ) -- roughly speaking company scrip -- fit that definition at all?

> Huge congrats to @cuysheffield and the team at @Visa for really putting your money where your mouth is and embracing the future, we welcome you with open arms in the movement towards an open internet of value!"

At this point I'm actually not sure if you're a bot. Say potato!

> I didn't ask how much DeFi has grown, you said 1 to 40B I can divide 40 by 1. Im curious why you think no other sector has grown by $39B.

Hey, fastest growing, means RATE OF GROWTH. 40x is how life-changing gains are made. That's the number that VCs are hoping to hit when they poor several million into a startup. Right, the finance world works off of ROR, it's called Rate of Return. Look up that up sometime.

> The blockchain is slow, you know that right?

No, it's not. It has 100% uptime and you can execute ANY transaction within 15 seconds on Ethereum layer 1. Depending on congestion, you may have to pay a higher fee ($20-$40 as mentioned above). Paying $20 to settle millions of dollars in 15 seconds is a no-brainer for a company like VISA. It's trivial compared to what they currently pay to interact with the legacy system.

Anyways, you're obviously close-minded and anti-crypto, and you're going to get left in the stone age. Your ignorance is my alpha. Stay curious!

> Hey, fastest growing, means RATE OF GROWTH.

Fastest relative to? Do you have a chart or some numbers? Or are you just saying that because the number seems big? You know a 40X increase in locked-up value doesn't translate to 40X returns for anyone right?

> No, it's not. It has 100% uptime and you can execute ANY transaction within 15 seconds on Ethereum layer 1.

I believe Visa settles in 15 milliseconds lol.

> Anyways, you're obviously close-minded and anti-crypto, and you're going to get left in the stone age. Your ignorance is my alpha. Stay curious!

That's a very Crypto position to take, i.e. a zero-sum position. My "ignorance" (in spite of the fact I understand the space very well, I just haven't drank nearly as much koolaid as you have) has nothing to do with your "alpha." Trust me, I spend a lot of time researching this space. There's just nothing there.

The actual press release has more information:

https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

It links to a blog post:

https://usa.visa.com/visa-everywhere/blog/bdp/2021/03/26/dig...

Insanely wordy and very non-specific, but hopefully getting it straight from the horse's mouth is less confusing than reading someone else's misunderstandings.

"Visa is piloting the capability with Crypto.com, a Visa partner and one of the world’s largest crypto platforms, and plans to offer the USDC settlement capability to additional partners later this year."

The way I read this: They plan to later this year allow some Visa customers (via some bank partners to Visa) to pay their credit card bills using the USDC stablecoin, presumably via crypto.com.

Am I really understanding this correctly?

No, this wouldn't let consumers pay their bills in USDC, but rather allow banks and merchants to be paid in USDC.

Settlement is the process in which an acquirer "settles" up with Visa, which happens after a transaction is authorized[0]. The acquirer sends Visa a list of transactions and monetary amounts, Visa accepts this and forwards along money for the transactions to the acquiring bank.

Visa is saying that they are now sending USDC (over the blockchain? unclear.) instead of fiat currency over traditional banking rails.

Later this year, Visa will expand these capabilities to more acquirers/merchants.

[0]: This page explains more. https://financetrain.com/how-credit-card-transaction-process...

Ah. That makes more sense! Thanks.

Ok, but. Why.

> No, this wouldn't let consumers pay their bills in USDC, but rather allow banks and merchants to be paid in USDC.

I’m not sure, from the first link of the parent:

> Visa has launched a pilot that allows Crypto.com to send USDC to Visa to settle a portion of its obligations for the Crypto.com Visa card program.

Crypto.com is a Visa issuer, so if they can now settle with Visa by sending USDC, it logically means Crypto.com Visa card holder will be able directly use the USDC from their account (without converting them to fiat first).

So do I pay like $30 tx fees to buy a coffee with it?

Exactly, the gas prices on ETH make any transaction at all on it cost prohibitive.

It's a settlement layer. CRO (which seems to be the partner via crypto.com) based transactions are cheap.

Bitcoin transaction fees are pretty high as well

I think the hope is that Visa would process these transactions in bulk, not individually.

Would lol so hard if they promote Bitcoin Cash the peer to peer electronic cash as settlement layer. The Bitcoin chain would halt because the difficulty can't adjust fast enough.

The BCH chain almost halted when the split first happened. They changed the difficulty adjustment algorithm to get through that period.

Also currently 1 BCH = 0.00898083 BTC.

Visa is desperately trying to figure out where they can fit in before they are made irrelevant. Why pay visa fees when you can handle the transaction directly? It won't be bitcoin but another crypto surely will be fast and cheap and usable as easily as a debit card.

The Fed recently released an update that they’re ahead of schedule with their Instant Payments implementation (2023 GA vs 2024). The reaper is coming for bloated payments businesses.

Why use crypto, Visa/MC, or any traditional payment incumbent when you can move funds instantly for about a nickel per transaction? If a lending component is required, that can be done independent of payment rails.

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/fed-more-bullish-on-laun...

Because you see risk in holding your assets in that ecosystem.

Is that internal to US only?

What are the fraud protection and chargeback policies on that? Those might be reasons to continue using credit cards.

True, but then businesses will pass the processing fee to the customer if they want chargeback protection. They could even incentivize and say: "pay directly and save 3%". For small purchases, are you really doing a chargeback anyways?

Debit card fees are only pennies right now, basically free compared to credit cards, yet very few businesses offer a discount for debit cards.

The reason is that people are willing to spend more using credit cards such that it more than offsets credit card processing fees. And I assume businesses as big and low margin as Target and Walmart and grocery stores have the expertise to figure that out.

There are rules in place that forbid charging the customer additional fees if a merchant chooses to accept the major credit cards. Small merchants sometimes get away with breaking these rules, but major firms like the ones you mentioned never would.

So the choice becomes whether to accept the major credit cards at all or whether to only accept cash and debit cards and thus alienate many of their customers.

> There are rules in place that forbid charging the customer additional fees if a merchant chooses to accept the major credit cards.

This might have been true more than 10 years ago. I believe “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010” invalidated card network agreements that prevented differential pricing between credit card and other payment forms, and the below ruling by Supreme Court stated the merchant can advertise the price difference however they want.

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/new...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressions_Hair_Design_v._Sch...

> Discounts to Customers A PCN cannot stop you from offering your customers a discount or another incentive for using a certain method of payment, as long as you offer it to all your customers and disclose the offer clearly and conspicuously. For example, you can offer your customers a discount or a coupon if they pay with cash or a debit card rather than a credit card.

Interesting. I know Target in particular offers a 5% discount to users of their in-house debit card.

Even if it’s within the rules, presenting customers with surcharges for using credit cards (as opposed to discounts for other payment methods) would probably still alienate many of them.

Some gas stations show a cash price right on the price board. Doesn't seem to alienate customers since it's just a convenience fee in the end.

I was unaware that Target offered a Debit Redcard that gave people 5% off. It seems that this is effectively a 5% discount for using any debit card, since the Target Debit Redcard is simply linking your existing bank account and doing an ACH transfer from your regular checking account.

The only caveat seems to be a $40 fee Target charges if you try to buy something with insufficient funds in your bank account, whereas purchasing directly with a bank's debit card, you can tell the bank to simply deny any transactions for more than your available balance and it wouldn't cost you anything.

But if you always have sufficient cash in your bank account, the Target Redcard debit card with a 5% discount seems like a no brainer if you're not getting at least 5% cash back with a credit card.

Perhaps Target does not simply offer this to all debit card users that don't sign up for the Debit Redcard per an agreement with card networks where Target gets a concession on their processing fees in exchange for not advertising a 5% discount to all debit cards uses?

Does it scare anyone else to give the US government direct access to every single transaction we all make (plus the ability to reject / approve them at will)?

Eh, they already own the currency itself.

Of course. The Constitution of the US provides a right for privacy for all natural born or naturalized Citizens.

I do not know enough about the crypto space to feel confident that this will end well, but we do need a faster, more distributed financial system, and part of keeping the world order will to be to help establish a truly global financial system, with all countries at the table so that that the natural interests of people that have heritage to a specific location can balance against each other.

https://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec10.html

> Article 1, Section 10 - No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts;

regarding the financial system, IMO the GOVT stopped caring about the constitution when they got rid of the gold standard.

These are limitations on State governments. Meaning only the Federal Government can do any of those things.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S10-C1-2...

If the system were truly distributed and the source code available then the government would not have direct access to every tx. They can already subpoena financial institutions anyways.

There are other benefits to crypto beyond simply facilitating payments. For instance, smart contracts allow for instantaneous atomic settlement between parties given arbitrary conditions, via the application of transparent and verifiable logic with (near) zero risk in the execution.

The fed's new payment system will not (cannot) offer that capability.

I have to admit I have a very poor understanding of how FedNow and FedCoin are expected to operate or if they are expected to be tied together, with this article being one of the few I've found despite it's negative overall tone.

https://cei.org/sites/default/files/John_Berlau_-_Government...

The key question for FedCoin will be how the supply is managed.

If it's only an electronic USD, ok, useful but added value is rather little.

If, on the other hand there is a pre-defined supply curve/schedule that is out of the hands of the people who open the spigot wide at every hint of an economic downturn, it would really be a competitor to BTC.

I assume the Fed is not interested in relinquishing their control of the monetary supply simply because how the rows in the database are stored evolves.

Thereby making the whole Fedcoin proposition a rather boring affair:

    - already exists in other forms

    - brings little added value (a little less friction)

    - brings huge downside (USistan now can see every cent moving and potentially freeze it).

I disagree. I think digital USD would be far more valuable than any blockchain tech I’ve seen so far.

Why on earth would you want the supply not to be actively managed to help temper a downturn? That's a feature. People don't like losing the entire value of their investments due to transient mass panic.

USD has lost more than 90% value in just 50 years. Savings is a prerequisite for investment.

The whole point is that it's supposed to lose 90% of its value in 50 years, Alex. It says so right on the tin. The fed targets a 2% rate of inflation. (0.955**50 = 0.1). The minute you invest it in anything inflation no longer applies - instead inflation-adjusted ROI is your marker. That's part of why we have inflation - the productive allocation of capital. Money only has value when it moves, it has no value stuffed under your mattress. Inflation is part of the pressure that ensures money doesn't spend time in your mattress.

Repeat after me the ECON-101 mantra: Nobody is supposed to save dollars. Nobody. It's an intentionally lossy, temporary store of value and medium of exchange. You're supposed to save value. And you do that through investment. USD is not an investment. Currencies aren't an asset class! Rainy day fund? Sure. Otherwise? NO!

Savings is a prerequisite to investment in a very limited sense, but at 2% per annum if it takes you 1 year to scrape together the cash to buy an SPY share you still have ninety eight percent of that value. If it takes you 50 years, ok, yeah, less. But it doesn't take most people 50 years to scrape together checks notes $395 dollars - 2021 dollars! 50 years ago that would be $39.50. And that of course avoids the use of fractional shares.

It's so frustrating seeing this lack of basic understanding of economics here on HN from a group trying to overhaul it at the same time! At least understand before you tear up.

Wages kept pace with inflation, real estate kept pace with inflation (or exceeded in major metros), stocks vastly outperformed inflation. Interest rates fell. Just who do you think missed out in the last 50 years exactly?

> Wages kept pace with inflation

Yeah, well ... not so sure about this one.

Most of the folks around me would also disagree, based on personal experience (their purchasing power took a serious nosedive in the last 20 years or so).

I'll grant you this is circumstantial, so I ask: source for the claim?

[EDIT]: and there are folks who strongly disagree with you:

https://dailyreckoning.com/revealing-real-rate-inflation-cra...

Also:

>It says so right on the tin.

I'd also disagree with this.

Many folks I know who are essentially either clueless or simply uninterested in finance are entirely oblivious to the fact that they're being slowly but surely being bled dry via inflation.

You can claim they should pay attention and if they don't too bad, but I'd retort that the system is being disingenuous, especially towards the lower strata of the economic system who are the less likely to understand these things.

> Most of the folks around me would also disagree, based on personal experience (their purchasing power took a serious nosedive in the last 20 years or so).

Anecdotes are not evidence - a lot has changed in 20 years. Your friends work may no longer be valued as highly by the market, or other social policies like not tying minimum wage to inflation, may have taken a toll.

The BLS tracks this. [1] The fact they haven’t gone up more, however, is a social issue and not a monetary policy issue.

> Many folks I know who are essentially either clueless or simply uninterested in finance are entirely oblivious to the fact that they're being slowly but surely being bled dry via inflation.

You claim ... the fed isn’t telling people inflation is designed to track a 2% target?

I’m sorry that folks are ignorant of how something so important works, but it does so for a reason. When I hop into a car and smash it against a wall, I don’t get to claim “many people are ignorant of how the accelerator works.” Tons of people go to prison for crimes they're ignorant of - that doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws.

This is just an argument for high school home-ec and econ 101 to be mandatory.

The lower strata is the least affected because as I’ve shown wages kept pace with inflation and they’re not saving so there’s nothing to inflate away except their debts. Between the record low interest and debts denominated in dollars of the year of issue, in aggregate they likely stand to gain.

> ... and there are folks who strongly disagree with you:

There are folks who disagree with the curvature of the earth, the efficacy of vaccinations and the existence of birds.

The article you linked suggests based on a taco truck the rate of inflation is 30%, and has trivially sensationalized quotes like:

  Between 2010 and now, the Burrito Index has logged a 30% increase, more than *triple* the officially registered 10% drop in purchasing power over the same time.

Well, without bothering to check anything about this claim, the article was written in 2016 so to obtain a 30% drop in the 7 years the inflation rate would be 2.5% (1.025**7). That's not triple, thats 25%, and the 2% target is a long-term rough goal. 2.5% is within that range. The man's burrito calculator doesn't take into account changes in taxes, in minimum wage, and other trivially recognizable things like how popular the burrito truck is. Zero inflation doesn't mean the price of a burrito will never change. Sheesh.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

Theoretically, all else being equal, money should not lose or even gain purchasing power as technology advancements increase productivity. I (and many others) have to stick my wealth in scarce assets or investments to avoid inflationary monetary policy. Bitcoin serves this purpose well, in ways that real estate, gold, and equities don’t. Everything but cryptocurrency is highly regulated, taxed, and custodial.

Bitcoin is just the beginning. With private transactions (ring signatures, stealth addresses, shielded amounts), and proof of stake or voting consensus, there will soon be no way for governments to know who is transacting what, who owns what, or restrict the movement of capital.

I’ll give you an example. I moved overseas, and all major brokers (Ameritrade, Vangaurd, Schwab, etc.) refused to serve me because of regulatory burdens. So what should I do? Everything but Bitcoin is illiquid or custodial. The future of cryptocurrency is my capital not being beholden to the whim of custodians and governments.

> Theoretically, all else being equal, money should not lose or even gain purchasing power as technology advancements increase productivity.

It, first of all, really doesn't matter so long as it's slow and predictable. I would argue that it should decrease in purchasing power to incentivize investing, and also to account for addition or removal of market participants (population changes) and also to react to shocks.

> Bitcoin serves this purpose well, in ways that real estate, gold, and equities don’t.

Respectfully disagree. 20% daily swings are normal. That's not serving the purpose well. That's utterly un-investable. Is it good for gambling? Totally. Investing? Absolutely not.

> Everything but cryptocurrency is highly regulated, taxed, and custodial.

Yes, this is a bad thing that Bitcoin isn't. It leads to scams, schemes and all sorts of shady garbage that completely distort the market. You've actually no idea whether the price is going up because of demand or because Tethers are being printed. I don't either. Nobody does - well, nobody not named Paolo. Every time printing stops the price goes down dramatically. I believe the DOJ is following up on the scathing NYAG indictment. That's bad, and it shouldn't be contentious to say that.

> Bitcoin is just the beginning. With private transactions (ring signatures, stealth addresses, shielded amounts), and proof of stake or voting consensus, there will soon be no way for governments to know who is transacting what, who owns what, or restrict the movement of capital.

Also bad because terrorism and crime.

> I’ll give you an example. I moved overseas, and all major brokers (Ameritrade, Vangaurd, Schwab, etc.) refused to serve me because of regulatory burdens. So what should I do? Everything but Bitcoin is illiquid or custodial. The future of cryptocurrency is my capital not being beholden to the whim of custodians and governments.

I'm not sure why American SEC regulated brokers would refuse to do business with an American citizen wherever located - after all they're the only ones permitted to. If you're not a US citizen and and now live abroad, there's plenty of other options, like IBKR.

> Everything but Bitcoin is illiquid or custodial.

I'm not sure why you think that's true.

> The future of cryptocurrency is my capital not being beholden to the whim of custodians and governments.

Again, I don't think that's a good thing.

You do realize that Bitcoin transaction fees are like 100x higher that those charged by Visa?

Also, most cryptocurrencies have scalability problems, it won't be easy for them to replace traditional payments, because they cannot handle billions of transactions per day.

According to the article, Visa is looking at using "the cryptocurrency USD Coin" (whatever that is)

So this has nothing to do with bitcoin (except inasmuch as any news article with the word "crypto" in the headline will trigger a bunch of FOMO buyers and drive up the price)

It's a stable coin (it's pegged to the dollar) which runs on Ethereum

https://www.circle.com/en/usdc

Not on lightning network

Lightning is a competitor to Visa...

There’s hardly been growth in the value of transactions on Lightning, compared to the 20x growth on various L2 solutions on Ethereum like Loopring, zkSync, etc. Lightning’s UX is poor as well, where both parties need to be online at the same time.

And all the solutions to this are to create a supplementary payment processing network that uses Bitcoin for settlement... ya know like Visa.

Monero is > 1600 transactions per second and it's set to scale with CPU power and network bandwidth along with further improvements to the underlying implementation.

Proof of Stake is much greater still. Cardano and Polkadot for example.

I thought CPU power was great until someone pointed out to me that this just encourages botnets.

While CPU power theft via malware is a real issue, it in no way prevents Monero from working well.

It actually just adds more nodes to the network. And of the many forms of botnet malware, it seems one of the less harmful.

zk-rollups are going to help a lot in that regard. maybe not billions of transactions per day but at least an order of magnitude above what is currently possible, all with the same security as the base layer ethereum

> Visa is desperately trying to figure out where they can fit in before they are made irrelevant

Visa is agnostic to the settlement rails it runs on. Having one more option increases its leverage over its members.

> Why pay visa fees when you can handle the transaction directly?

You're only thinking of cash-like transactions. Add a lender to the mix, where the merchant can seamlessly accept cash the customer doesn't have, and Visa's value add becomes clearer.

Don't forget Visa is in the data mining business too.

I think people like have payment protection. Visa was basically created by the banks and ultimately the credit system goes back to the banks. Let's say you buy something through eBay and pay through the Bitcoin what protection do you have?

Absolutely none just like cash. This is an anti-feature to most but the raison d'etre for people who like BTC.

>the raison d'etre for people who like BTC

Until they lose their money in a scam.

I buy mostly with a card, but even cash has protection.

If my cash money gets stolen, i can call the police. If someone scams me, the chance is pretty big the rl scammer is going to be found and it's not unknown to get a refund of banks off it happens digitally.

Crypto currency, as far as I'm aware, is really a magic trick. It's gone and no one can help you.

( Just in case someone mentions bitcoin has transparent transactions. Please lookup bitcoin mixing services first)

If someone gives you a fake bill (or possibly even an ATM) and you don't notice for a while you are in the same boat. The police won't be able to help you.

That hasn't happened in the 33 years i exist.

+ Shop owners have markers to see if money is valid. Security cameras would have recorded who tried to scam the shop owner.

If something would happen with an atm, I'm sure the banks will refund you. In Belgium, the law says you are only viable to a 150€ loss ( https://www.euromex.be/safety-world/wat-als-ik-het-slachtoff... )

As a contrary POV, i ran an experiment with a magazine online and the most popular article was: "how to recover a bitcoin password" ( not in english though). And guess what, most of them would lose all their funds.

That wouldn't be the case with a bank.

To those who continue to think that cryptocurrencies are a waste of time, or stupid, or a fad, or tulips, or whatever:

What do you know that visa doesn't know? Like if you could sit down with a decision maker and convince them that this is a bad idea, what would you tell them?

That while it may be a good idea financially for them, the resources poured into cryptocurrency mining operations are an amazing waste.

It likely wouldn't convince anyone in that position, but damn is that crap a waste we don't need right now.

USDC is on Ethereum (currently PoW but will be on PoS within this year or so) and other PoS chains. Ethereum PoS will be about 99% more environmentally friendly than Bitcoin.

They might be opening the gates to more onerous reporting requirements per the IRS. People are required to pay capital gains tax on crypto gains, and if people are servicing debts with crypto, then visa will probably need to issue some sort of tax document detailing the price of the currency at time of payment.

I'm sure their lawyers and accountants understand this and are fine with such a system.

From an investors perspective. There is the risk of extreme fluctuation in prices on exchanges. If people are paying their bills at one rate, but Visa is getting a different, lower exchange rate, then that could potentially cost the company dearly.

This is probably something they've also thought about and presumably they are scheming to make additional cash from arbitrage.

One could think that cryptcurrencies are foolish, while simultaneously thinking of ways a business could make money off of crypto or their holders.

Visa settling dollar-denominated accounts with member banks seems like it must be very much a solved problem, that furthermore doesn’t need any kind of decentralized ledger or smart contract processing to accomplish.

So either that’s exactly why it’s a bad idea, or my understanding of how this works today has huge gaps. (Which wouldn’t surprise me a bit.) Can you clarify what’s in this for Visa?

Visa is making an option available to settlement partners, which sounds more like marketing than anything else.

I wouldn't want to convince Visa decision makers of anything; they can market however they like! Settlement partners, on the other hand... I'll be very curious to see if any take them up on this.

Predicting the future is hard. It's not clear that Visa knows anything either; they could just be hedging their bets with a pilot program that could be discontinued.

They do a lot of other currency conversions and charge for it too. Maybe they're hoping to get some good fees for this from some merchants who want it?

I don't expect a lot of demand, but I'll speculate that perhaps there are some merchants who might prefer USDC over other kinds of currency conversion, depending which way has higher fees?

https://www.investopedia.com/foreign-transaction-fee-vs-curr...

If bitcoin replaces the middlemen of transactions, why does Square and Jack Dorsey promote them?

They make money when you buy/sell Bitcoin through their app. (Cash app)

Square is in the payment business. Credit cards are just one method. E.g., Square supports Interact in Canada for a flat fee of $0.10.

It doesn’t. Because on-chain transactions are (or will be) too expensive and slow for most people, creating a big business opportunity for middlemen.

>creating a big business opportunity for middlemen

...or decentralized settlement networks like LN.

Not really decentralized when people have to rely on third party apps like Strike to open channels for them, or they have to open the channels themselves while both users are online. It’s a mess from a usability standpoint.

...which again provides an opportunity for middlemen.

Decentralized =/= middlemen. Relying on a third party isn’t centralization.

> ...or decentralized settlement networks like LN.

Not very, though. Lightning recentralizes the Bitcoin blockchain to improve efficiency.

"10 percent of [Lightning] nodes control 80 percent of funds on the network." — Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Is Growing 'Increasingly Centralized,' Researchers Find[1]

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-lightning-network-is-growi...

Bitcoin is unrelated to this news.

Bitcoin = Father of all coins.

Of course, it's the loudest voices that always get heard and are oft repeated, but I'd say most of us in the industry realize that cryptocurrency will never be a 1:1 replacement of traditional fiat currency--barring some significant breakdown of society and government. It's more of a complementary thing. Something more like internet and radio (i.e. both are still used today, one did not completely replace the other). Not the best example but you get the picture. And then there is 3rd and 2nd world countries where crypto can be used as a sort of stop gap solution until a viable form of government and banking can be situated.

They are leveraging their massive reach to increase the value of private crypto holdings. This isn’t allowed for regular stocks and shares so crypto is an opportunity.

Speculating here, but my observations of Dorsey/Square is that they see more long term value in being an exchange for fiat to cryptocurrency rather than (only) being a settlement house for payments. I see them acting as both exchange and clearing house (and debit and credit provider, and payroll service, and...), which, sure, Visa could too, but Square has/is building the infrastructure for those mutual use cases, and Visa is mostly playing catch-up.

Say it with me.. Ethereum

And CRO!

Go ETH!

I'm sure VISA owns a buttload of ETH and they will just use their own system to settle everything themselves internally. Then they actually buy/sell ethereum when it fits their needs.

How would the gas fee work in this scenario?

It looks to be for settlements which are done at the end of the day between banks, not on a per transaction basis between merchant and buyers.

There is a thread on /r/CryptoCurrency that lays things out

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mfqnfn/what...

I wonder if Visa will enact a wallet blacklist.

Edit: Well, perhaps whether that blacklist will become shared across more than Visa.

> I wonder if Visa will enact a wallet blacklist.

You don't have to wonder: it's a guarantee and it's not like they have a choice.

They're centralized and therefore subject to political pressure.

This is precisely what the Stellar Foundation is trying to do: instant, no/low fees, no mining needed.

Particularly since - per a Clubhouse call I lurked on - it appears ETH is heavily sequestered by a small number of whales, it appears to be increasingly inflationary, and if the call's participants are to be believed there are several difficult technical problems many, many months from being resolved. I lack the expertise to know how much of this is true, but I did think to myself after listening that XLM has none of these issues.

> ETH is heavily sequestered by a small number of whales

And Stellar isn't?

Not a judgement, just a plain old question - it was my understanding that Stellar was an airdrop with large chunks to the founders, but my recollections are TBH vague.

The Stellar Development Foundation holds about half of the unallocated XLM.

They claim they'll use it in the following: https://www.stellar.org/foundation/mandate?locale=en (and they are a nonprofit so I assume they can't just sell it all).

> The Stellar Development Foundation holds about half of the unallocated XLM.

That's half of the answer :)

How much does Jed McCaleb, of MtGox fame, hold?

that is a good question I suppose. I was speaking strictly to the protocol and open ecosystem.

Ethereum will actually be deflationary in July. The people in that room seem pretty removed from what's going on in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Why would ANYONE do this? With the volatility of cryptocurrency, it could easily end up costing 2-3x.

Stablecoins deal with that pretty well, which might be what they're using here.

They are using USDC stablecoin for settling it. That is fixed to the value of 1 USD.

There are a lot of things happening in the space. SOOO many things that it's practically impossible to keep up.

Didn't Tether try that and end up having to devalue?

No. Maybe? Don't know what happened all along history, but Tether still exists and it's still 1 USD. Now it's audited.

I see no reason why it could not be pegged as long for every 1 usd recieved, they mint 1 stablecoin and release it to whoever bought it. Things get iffy only in case they start doing reaaal shady stuff. But now USDT is audited(from the latest info I have) and USDC has always been audited.

Visa is the Ethereum L2 people have been talking about for years.

We. Are. Switching.

Only for the top 1% does a fiat government currency work and we are in the tail end of this cycle.

The US knows this and it's why they are printing the dollar into oblivion. Get you Bitcoin Cash and Monero while you still can.

Are you being downvoted? Bitcoin Cash is the original, period. Longtime Bitcoiner here,transaction fees didn't exist for many years. Envisioned by the creators was money without borders nor barriers to entrance.

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