Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support | Hacker News Reader

Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support

coindesk.com

86 pointsfelixbraun39 comments

The cryptocurrency space looks a lot different than it did 3 years ago... I hope they focus on supporting stablecoins. All the benefits of cryptocurrency (censorship resistance, etc) without having to hold on to a volatile asset.

I hope that too but for stable coins to work you need atm machines and multiple exchanges otherwise you end-up with another paypal thing.

They should issue their own stable coin. There is too much fraud with Tether to support it and another reputable stable coin in the industry will only help things.

I don't assume intent but this comment is disinformation - stable coins are some of the riskiest major assets in the space, since their backing is questionable at best[1], and even those that are "backed" are inescapably custodial with all that entails (lack of censorship resistance being one unavoidable property so long as coins retain any sign of fungibility). I hope they "concentrate on" Bitcoin - which under close examination seems the first time hard money has ever been created.

1. AAVE Risks per Asset https://docs.aave.com/risk/asset-risk/risks-per-asset

What about DAI though?

Same overall risk rating as USDC/USDT for example but for varying reasons. The link which was provided breaks it down.

Presuming they are truly equally risky, DAI wins by default imo.

Not the same (or even similar) per your own link actually (which i think you added in an edit after I replied? Either way it’s a decent breakdown).

I’m not saying DAI is risk-free or even objectively less risky (though it could be argued); it has a different kind of risk-profile and all-together due to how it’s constructed.

Stablecoins are indeed immature. But volatile assets don't make for good money. Have you heard of Gresham's Law? "Bad money drives out the good"- that is, people will hoard the lucrative asset (bitcoin) and actually use the boring one (stablecoins).

AAVE appears hard to trust that since they offer their own tokens.

If you're a wall street investor, you want a bank to have an accounting firm that is completely independent from the bank it's auditing -- no side deals, no consulting services in either direction.

> stable coins are some of the riskiest major assets in the space, since their backing is questionable at best

Have you heard of diem/libra, USDC, or celo? Not every project is tether

I cringe everytime when people talk about censorship resistance of a glorified key value store. All it needs is a govt approved fork, with all tracking and blocking features and outlawing other forks. Which I’m sure govts will do. No sane govt would want its currency in control by random meme lords dictating its price.

They should've stuck with Stellar, for any realistic money transferring between people (merchants, p2p, cross-border), Stellar is one of the best options as the fees are insanely low compared to any other large cryptocurrencies.

"The nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was created in collaboration with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and the project officially launched that July. Stellar received $3 million in seed funding from Stripe.[6][7]"[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_(payment_network)#Hist...

[0][6] http://fortune.com/2014/07/31/stripe-launches-bitcoin-challe...

[0][7] http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/stripe-takes-o...

I've been seeing two sides of this:

- Our own payments: Some remote contractors ask to be paid in crypto: haven't figured out clean way how wrt rest of our back-office SaaS stack, so not yet. To a much more negligible extent, our online customers want to pay that way: we do get a lot of proton etc. email users, so I can imagine more of this in the future, esp. as we add more privacy features. I bet other startups are seeing the same!

- Our power users: Crypto product & investigation teams often want to embed/use our GPU graph viz tech, and our inquiries have grown up from early VC/ICO-dependent startups to ones with $B+ assets under management. At this rate, seems like only a matter of 1-2 years for banks and big consulting co's for the same thing. So a big yet modern payment processor like Stripe seems quite sensible right now! (And I think Square was trying on and off for awhile as well.)

It's just FOMO, i think, since PayPal did something similar.

No doubt they had an analysis about it. But the potential cost of being wrong is much bigger than financing 5 employees.

I don't think it is. It's just about accepting other means of payments, which is Stripe's business. I'm more interested in what a company like Wise would do with stablecoins.

It's all about how many transactions there are.

I don't think there are enough, just like in the past

It’s up to stripe to decide if there is enough transaction now to make it worth it, or if they want to be one of the first to support the market.

If you're in the payments business in 2021 and don't have crypto product offerings then you are limiting your customer base. Imo a good decision for stripe, and even better to let others chart the course for a few years first.

Is it really that limiting though? I know lots of people in and out of tech who have heard the word bitcoin or cryptocurrency and at most 2 people who have ever made or been interested in making a transaction. Obviously anecdata, but it doesnt seem to me like the amount of engineering effort vs actual users doesnt seem like an actually good tradeoff to me.

It also limits their exposure to scams and customers trying to do chargebacks using non-reversible payment methods.

That's not a plus for the consumer and won't do much to enhance customer adoption and preference for the payment method.

This is of course because in 2021 an overwhelming number of consumers are finally pushing for crypto currency payments.... /s

Seriously though, if speculative assets are your thing then crypto is great. It's still not great for the average consumer to use for payments.

There is hope that the move to Proof Of Stake and the arrival of various scaling solutions for Ethereum will finally make crypto payments simpler (2022 - 2023 implementation time frame).

Here is a short blog post that discusses this tech: https://polynya.medium.com/argent-zksync-a-peer-to-peer-elec...

I think the other big issue is that current wallet apps are very buggy and their UX sucks in general, so your point still stands

Experimenting with my money is not something I'd appreciate.

Then again, perhaps it's just me.

Change happens quick. We all started relying on smartphones seemingly overnight.

Bitcoin is 13 years old.

Last time people said this ( 2017), there weren't much payments in practice.

I don't think anything changed. They added support for crypto in the past and removed later on too, similar to a couple of years ago ( eg. Steam, Amazon, ... ).

I had a stripe account terminated for violating their terms (spoiler alert, I hadn't) but any crypto offering by them will be subject to the same terms.

It's absolutely toxic that companies like this think they can move into the crypto space, it was set up explicitly to get away from companies like this.

wait so your alternative is blocking some people from using crypto when it was set up explicitly to get away from people being allowed to arbitrarily block users?

An advantage of crypto is that you can accept it directly. If you choose a centralized option, you're intentionally moving away from what you're suggesting the crypto space was set up for.

As for "companies like this", pretty much every company in the crypto space has terms and conditions. There's no reason why a "crypto native" company will have a more generous interpretation than a company like Stripe.

https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/other/doe...

https://www.gemini.com/legal/user-agreement#section-account-...

Fortunately, blockchain is permission less and this move will mainly help to introduce companies processing payments with Stripe to the reality of crypto payments.

I expect that most power users and big players will opt for a Stripe-free crypto payment method.

I work at Stripe—could you email at me at edwin@stripe.com and I can look into what happened?

"[crypto] was set up explicitly to get away from companies like this."

I think that's a misleading statement since there are dozens of different currencies out there with different objectives. The original premise of Bitcoin as an alternative decentralized currency has been an abject failure since it has since morphed into an investment asset with no measurable fundamentals. Others exist to make currency transfers easier and they do that pretty well. Some likely exist as money laundering. Doge exists as a joke that got out of hand.

The use of the word "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" in this article is irritating because in the context of tech, "crypto" can also mean "cryptography" and I'm pretty sure Stripe already has lots of cryptography specialists on staff.

Or maybe Stripe is hiring a team of cryptozoologists?

In the context of an article titled "... Bitcoin" the meaning is clear.

I hope you have read at least beyond the headline, as it clearly mentions the word 'Bitcoin' which from there, the context of what 'crypto' means is clear from the start:

> Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support

Nothing 'irritating' about that.

It might not be irritating to you but it is irritating to me.

The article is discussing the Stripe job offers, which explicitly use the full term "cryptocurrency" at the beginning

https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/staff-engineer-crypto/349540...

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