Walmart says it intends to allow shoppers to make payments with Litecoin | Hacker News Reader

Walmart says it intends to allow shoppers to make payments with Litecoin

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16 pointsmonkeydust27 comments

This appears to be fake; the press release uses a domain that isn’t used by Wal-Mart. The price of LTC has already gone down quite a bit reflecting this.

https://twitter.com/dogetoshi/status/1437411599074070528?s=2...

https://twitter.com/fintwit_news/status/1437416214863745025?...

Even Reuters was duped:

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/walmart-acc...

Not surprised. Was wondering how this was supposed to be a boon to Walmart customers, most of which would not benefit from doing downgrading their currency for daily transactions to one with developing-world (or worse, really) stability

Now we speculate: is the OP extremely gullible, or in on the pump-and-dump? Same question to the Litecoin news account.

> (update: This might have been on of the all-time great cons)

Litecoin tweeted a fake press release, claiming "Walmart signs major agreement with Litecoin". You would think the people running their Twitter would know whether or not Walmart actually got in touch with them.

Why Litecoin? The bitcoin fork that added nothing and who's creator cashed out at the 2017/2018 peak?

Source code is still up, nothing has really happened there in a long time:

> This branch is 227 commits ahead, 10838 commits behind bitcoin:master.

Maybe they have some Litecoins knocking around they want to pump.

If I had to guess, it's absolutely, 100% this. Litecoin has an immense potential to rally right now, and I frankly wouldn't be surprised if some investing firms were starting to recommend buying the dip on 'pedigree' coins like Litecoin or Ether. As long as you sell at the right time, it's effectively a money printer.

Litecoin is fast and cost efficient compared to BTC. I used to use LTC to send funds between exchanges before USDCoin was supported. I never trusted Tether. There are other coins that are faster and more efficient but they don't have the universal support and large market cap like LTC.

Lots of altcoins are fast and cost efficient. The reason they are, though, is because no one uses them, so none of the blocks are full and thus there's no competition to make your transaction in via fees/tips. It's the same way that tons of altcoins claim they scale 10x better than Ethereum because they only have 1/100th the volume.

Probably for the same reasons why Litecoin was designed over Bitcoin. Transactions are posted faster and it has more transaction capacity per second.

Bitcoin is inherently transaction-limited (as is Litecoin and all currencies designed in Bitcoin's image). One megabyte per block. Six blocks per hour. Approximately. That works out to about 1 - 2 transactions per second in practice, on average. For about four years it has almost constantly been maxed out for transactions-per-second. The surplus are shed by making them too expensive via the transaction pricing mechanism.

Generally, transaction fees to send Bitcoin remain reasonable for large purchases (typically 0.10 - 1 USD) but during times of congestion the fee pricing mechanism can lead to prices as high as $50 to get a transaction in the next few blocks reliably. While such periods are generally very temporary at a day or two long, it does tend to scandalize and upset newcomers, understandably.

Litecoin's design has more inherent TPS capacity, it isn't already at its TPS limit as it isn't as popular, and it confirms blocks faster. It's generally more suitable for lots of small, low-value transactions in a retail setting. It also has the most infrastructure around it for any cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin and Ethereum.

It's worth noting that Walmart's marketing team makes lots of announcements like this that never go anywhere. This is completely meaningless until it's deployed.

A lot of companies these days seem to have some sort of "Head of Blockchain" job title with no engineering reports and no ability to do anything within the organization except put out occasional press releases.

The recent news "VISA buys an NFT" seemed to be of similar origin.

How do they handle volatility? Is Walmart able to sell the coins immediately, or they (essentially) gamble?

I expect them to hire an intermediary company for handling the litecoin wallets, and converting it instantly into USD on walmarts bank accounts.

Pretty irrelevant. They could hire one trader to manage the inventory in real time and have effectively no market risk.

How so? I'm not going to look up the price of Litecoin so let's use Bitcoin. Say they received those coins on Sunday, Sept 5th. How is the trader managing the ~14% drop the next day?

Edit: Looked up the Litecoin price because it was bugging me - that same timeframe was a 22% drop which it has yet to recover from.

No, there's no market risk because the inventory is closed almost immediately. As the inventory comes in they hedge using liquid LTC futures which are available on a number of exchanges. Or they just sell the LTC spot straight away. Either way, it is a trivial task that one person can do manually after a few days of training.

Either they hire that one person themselves or outsource it.

So they would just automatically sell the coins, as pizza234 suggested. Seems like you don't want a human trader and instead want an automated process automatically selling, considering that Wal-Mart is global and operates 24/7.

Yeah, actually I misread their second sentence initially, but that's exactly what I imagine they would do.

why would consumers want every toothpaste purchase to create a taxable event

Toothpaste doesn't pay tax?

Not sure if you’re being obtuse, but it’s common knowledge that transacting in crypto in the USA creates taxable events.

source: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

why tho? there are credit cards that give you 2% cash back. might as well just use a credit card, get your cash back, liquidate your litecoin and pay off your bill.

You also get built in dispute resolution and delayed payment

i wonder how much they profit on this announcement alone... probably enough to make it worth to (or pretend to) try anyhow.

Apparently a pump and dump

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