Square is now called Block
twitter.com
twitter.com
Facebook owns Whatsapp, and Instagram and a bunch of smaller stuff as well. But Meta is just not a great brand. It's a vague ambition at best. That's the problem with this rebranding. Google did it because they had a bunch of aimless acquisitions/spinoffs, none of which since managed to rival it's money maker Google, which continues to be the place that is associated with their successful stuff (Android, Youtube, ads, etc.).
Facebook is doing it because their Facebook brand is imploding due to years of mismanagement. It's a dead zone at this pont. I check in once a month and then leave in disgust. Absolutely nothing going on there whatsoever.
Square on the other hand is a successful product. Nice growth. Nice brand. Worth going all in on. The stuff they acquired pales in comparison. Why mess with that brand, create confusion and awkwardness, etc.?
But the worse contender seems to be Transferwise who changed their name to Wise, losing the recognition and the brand specificity.
Oblig. "Yeah that wasn't a very wise choice."
If some brand has built up a bad rep, they shouldn't be allowed to change it just by renaming themselves. Likewise a firm that's built a good rep and wants to try something new in order to protect the brand shouldn't be allowed to either. I don't know whether the law could ever protect us from this, I suppose it's more the job of the media to keep remind us who Altria are, and where Lexus came from.
A lot of brand shenanigans is basically abusing how humans associate history with names. Somehow it's never been an ethical issue to change brands, spawn a new brand, or buy another brand while hollowing out the product.
But Square is a branded platform by Square Inc.
So is Cash App apart of the Seller's platform, named Square, or is it apart of Square Inc?
This is why they separated. Square brand is now just the Square seller's platform.
Not being versed in branding strategy, I must say this just feels odd to me and somewhat lowers ny opinion of Square as a proper tech company (why, I can't fully articulate).
Edit; I now see that this was due to the fact that the square product is just going to be one of many of the parent corp (i.e Alphabet style). In that sense I guess this makes sense. Just hope that crypto connection was never a part of the discussion/decision for the name.
I think from now on that will be the main connotation that will pop up in my mind when seeing their new name around.
I think these new names are silly (even after 6 years of hearing "Alphabet"). It's obvious Meta and Block chose these names to lean into where they want to go. A big reason I think a rename is a good thing is just talking about the company. Does "Facebook" refer to the app, the company, or something that affects Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp? You can use internal code names, but that still is difficult for investors or new hires to discuss the company. I think this is more of the reason for the name changes instead of their brands imploding.
The government could also at any time revert to the much more stringent antitrust regime that was in place before the 1970s/80s, vestiges of which still impact other older industries, which sharply limit how many lines of business or modes of communication/transportation can be used, much less dominated, by a single firm. There are also of course movements towards more internet-specific regulation, although not much has been actually happening.
Stringer Bell: "What are the options when you've got an inferior product in an aggressive marketplace?"
Stringer's Community College Business Professor: "Well, if you have a large share of the market you buy up the competition."
Stringer (shaking his head): "And if you don't?"
Prof: "Reduce price and increase market share."
Stringer: "That assumes low overhead."
Prof: "Of course. Otherwise you operate at a loss. And worse, as your prices drop, your product loses consumer credibility. You know, the new CEO of World Com was faced with this very problem. The company was linked to one of the biggest fraud cases in history. So he proposed . . ."
Stringer: "To change the name."
Prof: "Exactly."Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy? What the fuck is you thinking!?"
What do you base this on?
This is their revenue, operating profit and monthly active users.
I get it, facebook isn't your cup of tea but don't be delusional about them being on the brink of collapse. A lot of people use the product and they're still seeing double digit user growth after nearly 10 years of double digit user growth.
Year Revenue Operating profit MAU
2010 $1.97 billion $1.03 billion 482 million
2011 $3.71 billion $1.75 billion 739 million
2012 $5.08 billion $0.53 billion 955 million
2013 $7.87 billion $2.8 billion 1.15 billion
2014 $12.4 billion $4.99 billion 1.31 billion
2015 $17.9 billion $6.22 billion 1.49 billion
2016 $27.6 billion $12.4 billion 1.71 billion
2017 $40.6 billion $20.2 billion 2 billion
2018 $55.8 billion $24.9 billion 2.23 billion
2019 $70.6 billion $23.9 billion 2.41 billion
2020 $85.9 billion $32.6 billion 2.7 billion
Given that what makes a good brand is subjective perhaps a more objective measure is the value of the domains the companies rebranded to.
By this count Meta.com > ABC.xyz > Block.xyz. I'm basing this on data available via namebio.com, automated appraisal tools such as GoDaddy Appraisal and Estibot and thousands of hours of personal experience researching, buying and selling domains. Meta.com is worth six or more likely seven or even eight figures as a standalone domain. Block and ABC.xyz? Not so much.
https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...
My eyes! My eyes!
1) Alyssa was given all of Square to run, making her the effective CEO of Square. Jack was never going to give up CEO of Square role in any other way than by taking over a top-level entity. I strongly suspect he hasn't had any interest in the core business in years, though. Given Alyssa's general background in AWS, this likely represents continued platformization of Square, and a continued de-emphasis on Square as a product. Instead an emphasis on Square as infrastructure. How this squares (hah) with their small business moat time will tell.
2) Jesse Dorogusker runs Tidal and crypto hardware, which is fascinating - he's ex-Apple, a solid hardware lead, but to my knowledge he has no music background or industry experience. I wonder how that happened?
3) Mike Brock in charge of whatever the fresh hell TBD54566975 is, is honestly the about 10x as puzzling as Jesse in charge of Tidal. I could not understand this less. The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.
To make sure it’s not interpreted that way, I’m not saying a single guy could create Twitter at its scale in a month, but they do basically one thing and have infinite resources. It’s not that hard.
https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/
the best I can understand... you can use your identity as a token? or something?
That's intentional. If you're peddling crypto, you're either a scammer, or a gullible fool. Those people are no fools.
Based on my knowledge of shitcoins, this will do extremely well.
Edit: seems like they are already heavily invested in crypto. There you go.
The whole website is just aggressively bad. The C suite cube faces, ugly color palette, spinny cube complete with a Jay-Z curated soundtrack, the misaligned text & links on the media kit page etc.
It reminds me a lot of aesthetic in the game Cruelty Squad - just an intentional rejection of design norms. Nothing worse than being boring right?
squareup.com is still a normal "boring" website.
Would love to work for a company with full Cruelty Squad world branding, but I guess Consumer Softproducts isn't hiring.
> Who thought designing this page and actually publishing it was a good idea?
Usually it is a sign that the greater spotted MBA is insufficient on its own to produce effective business strategy and marketing. It requires a combination of two other mysterious forces; talent and clue, which are unavailable at business school.
It's all going to crash horribly, isn't it?
I would love it even more if it wasn't made for yet another rent seeking, blood sucking, middleman bullshit company that feasts on people being discouraged from using cash, yet having no privacy respecting alternative that is run for their benefit instead of getting rich off their situation.
Square, as a name, is simple and well-known, and the logo is recognizable, inoffensive, and amenable for design updates.
Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now).
I suspect this has something to do with it. I had a co-worker once describe Jack as a magpie. He's usually much more interested in the new shiny thing. That was Cash App for a while. Now the blockchain stuff I guess. I haven't worked there in many years so I don't know for sure.
Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff.
I had a big WTF with this move, and have a similar feeling about the blockchain efforts. But I also tend towards the new and shiny, so I have a harder time faulting that.
Accepting Bitcoin as payments has never been about facilitating payments. It's not rational to go through all the trouble of transferring Bitcoin, paying transaction fees, waiting for the transaction to clear (took over an hour when I tried it a few months ago), and then surrendering all of the protections you'd normally get when using a credit card.
Accepting Bitcoin is about propelling the Bitcoin narrative: The more you can put "Bitcoin accepted here" on everyone's website, the more you can convince other people that Bitcoin is going mainstream and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).
I disagree with this part of the paragraph. Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less.
I mean the "pay for starbucks using bitcoin" ship sailed, what, 10 years ago? Bitcoin is absolutely nothing more than a giant pump & dump scam. Of course pedants will say "technically it isn't a pump & dump" just like "technically it isn't a pyramid scheme"... Bitcoin might not meet the technical definition of any of those... but it is a scam none the less.
You can't convince them - in their mind, you are part of the "scam", and hence not trustworthy.
No point in debating, they will buy in when it clicks for them.
Why bother with Bitcoin, when you can just use money from a country with a competent Federal Reserve? IIRC many countries have "dollarized" (either de jure or de facto).
Eh, that's pretty obviously untrue under any reasonable definition of "competent Federal Reserve."
Now, there are definitely unreasonable an/or extreme ideological definitions under which you could make such a statement (e.g. the most reasonable of these are monomanically overoptimizing to one metric), but those definitions are irrelevant and can be ignored.
It's not obvious. Is any central bank that debases currency through money printing without some kind of fixed peg/ratio to a scarce asset competent?
No. This is self-evidently true as, by doing so, they are perniciously taxing the savings of the poor in order to feather the nests of the (asset-)rich.
There is no avoiding the truth of this inviolable fact as Cantillion himself described many years ago.
You're...
>> monomanically overoptimizing to one metric
As long as they do the debasing competently, as in the currency is able to sustain a healthy economy, then they're a competent central bank.
Bitcoin could never sustain a healthy economy, for instance, because it strongly promotes hoarding and speculation.
This is a contradiction in terms...
Bitcoin promotes hoarding no more than gold does. And speculation no more than FX or commodities trading does.
If a payment currency was pegged to bitcoin and the backing ratio remained fixed things would be fine like they were when we had the gold standard or even the later USD reserve currency standard when the USD was backed by gold.
However history had shown that these arrangements did not hold as central bankers simply couldn't resist firing up the printer and breaking the peg with the scarce backing asset. Political pressures, wars, whatever the reason. Every peg was broken.
Human greed, misplaced albeit well-intentioned mistakes, and simple human fallibility will continue to tempt even the most honourable people close to the money spigot. It's happened throughout the ages and human nature will not change in this regard.
Bitcoin _algorithmically_ prevents this debasement and so it is literally the perfect base monetary asset. No one can fuck with it.
> This is a contradiction in terms...
No it isn't. For instance, I can see carefully controlled debasing (e.g. inflation) as motivation to put money some use rather than sit on it, for instance.
> Bitcoin promotes hoarding no more than gold does. And speculation no more than FX or commodities trading does.
Maybe gold promotes hoarding too much, as well. When you get down to it, it's also questionable to tie your money supply to the availability of some arbitrarily-chosen commodity. Do you want deflation until someone discovers some big gold deposit, then things swing inflationary? Bitcoin seems even worse since it's designed to be deflationary, since people will irretrievably loose them and at some point no more will be made.
Google for: „cantillon effect“ (also accounts for inequalities inside one country like the US)
I would mock them, call it a ponzi scheme, call them shills, etc.
I think Satoshi did it right. He said -
> If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
He said this when Bitoin was still extremely niche and inexpensive.
But because you asked, I'm going to tell you what the personal event taught me - people are irrational.
Watch "Gods Must be Crazy" and try to understand the allegory of the bottle and what effect it has on the tribe.
That's what Bitcoin has achieved in cyberspace.
It's far more likely that in 50 years we will see negative interest rates on cash and thereby complete abolishment of the business cycle, involuntary unemployment and growth dependence than a move back to a currency designed to maintain dynasties.
Sounds like Herbalife to me.
Yeah, it didn't take long for the aristocracy to click that owning land and passing it onto their heirs for all eternity is good for humanity and the landless peasants are just jealous that they can't abuse their own landless peasants.
And comparing money with land is also incorrect - having Bitcoins in a wallet that you're never going to spend is as useful as having no Bitcoins at all. Unlike land, where you can live, extract resources, grow food, etc.
Alternatively, you could say everything is a scam. For example the USA is a scam. It only exists because people play along and collectively decide it exists.
At most you could argue that tanks would come and force people to play along if they stopped. So is that perhaps your threshold for something not being a scam? What is the minimum number of tanks that stand ready to enforce an idea, to make you call it "not a scam anymore"?
These kinds of arguments held water when BTC doubled after two years or something, not anymore.
Yes, did you not realize that?!
Are you really rallying this hard against people discarding its economic value without understanding something as basic as deflation?
-
Deflation is more deadly to a currency than inflation. By far.
You reduce interest rates to 0% and then what? You can try negative interest rates, but with the kind of deflation BTC has seen you would need negative triple digit interest rates which is a complete absurdity.
You'd probably see the government outlaw physical cash to boot, forcing you to use a bank and forcing the bank to constantly siphon your money if you don't spend it quickly enough.
It would be a literal hellscape.
I also don't think Bitcoin will just keep doubling every year forever.
But all that is besides the point.
As for "people discarding the economic value of Bitcoin", clearly right now it has value, so those people are wrong. Whether it will still have value next year is another question. But right now, you can sell 1 Bitcoin for 56000$, so it provably has value.
Understanding why that would be disastrous to the point of irrevocably destroying a nation and leaving millions in abject poverty should be table stakes when you have the bravado to shrug off the fear mongering economists who study this stuff for a living.
Maybe you are the one who is clueless?
Are there even any examples of deflation ruining things, apart from Krugman's babysitting exchange? I don't think we should hinge the faith of nations on that one story, which may as well have many other explanations besides the deflation theory.
You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
Also new currencies have been created a lot of times in the past, technically their value would also have been increasing by 10000% over night.
Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x". There are economists advocating socialism and economists advocating capitalism, for example. There are even economists advocating Bitcoin.
Ever heard of The Great Depression???? Go read up on it and tell me if deflation made things better or worse.
> Bitcoin exists and hasn't left millions in abject poverty yet.
Bitcoin is not the official currency of a country! The closest cases we have to that are failing economies where BTC is used as a life raft and its taken * 10 million percent * inflation to finally make BTC an attractive alternative!
>You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
The only way it wouldn't have is if it was highly regulated... sounds like a great match for BTC right?
Like you realize we ran this experiment before right? Do you know what the gold standard was? And why we moved away from it? Hint: Go look up deflation and it's role in the Great Depression again.
Leaving the gold standard gave the government tools like interest rates that didn't have to compete with a commodity. Let alone a commodity increasing in value 10,000% in 5 years
> Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x".
This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks.
-
Your comment as a whole just tells me this is not even worth the effort I've put in to get to this point. I'm not even trying to be rude, you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here.
It seems quite ridiculous to claim the Great Depression was caused by Deflation. It might as well have been the other way round.
I have a Billion Reichsmark at home. Was the collapse of Nazi Germany caused by Inflation? I rather doubt it. An egg cost 100000 Reichsmark in the end because there were few eggs to go around. In the Great Depression, presumably labor was cheap because there were more workers than demand for work.
As for the gold standard, most economists agree that we don't know how the experiment will end yet. What if the central banks keep interest rates low forever - nobody knows how that game will end. And they can not easily raise rates again now without bankrupting a lot of people.
In any case it seems humans have existed for thousands of years without central banks setting interest rates.
"This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks."
What an idiotic comparison.
"you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here."
Yeah you know nothing about reasoning. But you are entitled to your beliefs and cherry picked "facts", of course. Let's hope you won't get responsibility for any nations money supply any time soon.
The fact that it's technology, and that it's opensource doesn't mean it's not used for scams (and almost exclusively for scams).
In what sense do you claim BTC is used "almost exclusively for scams"? Seems to me for the most part it is simply being traded. Do you mean Ransomware? What fraction of BTC transactions happen because of that?
You have to read context and understand what people are saying. When people say "Bitcoin is scam" they mean the way it's used, not the tech itself.
> In what sense do you claim BTC is used "almost exclusively for scams"?
In the sense of the word scam.
I was wrong though. Bitcoin is used almost exclusively for two things: scams and hoarding. There are almost no other uses.
> Do you mean Ransomware?
No, I don't.
It just comes across as "those people have no idea what they are talking about".
Honestly I don't care that much about people using BTC for scams. I care about the tech.
I find it difficult when people say "BTC will be worth xxxxxxxx$ soon". That kind of statement may be scammy, or at least speculative. But that is different from the tech.
It doesn't. When the tech is exclusively used for hoarding and scamming, it becomes synonymous with its use.
> Honestly I don't care that much about people using BTC for scams. I care about the tech.
This really is a non-sensical statement. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum.
There are a gazillion startups in Bitcoin, I don't think they are all into hoarding and scamming.
Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
"This really is a non-sensical statement. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum."
Of course I care about what can be done with the tech, but not about the scams. There are many other uses. However, I don't have to convince you, it doesn't matter to me.
They are.
> Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. Show me a start up, and I will show you how the very same things can be done and are being already done faster, and more efficiently without Bitcoin.
Apart from the very, very, very small use case of sending money to failed states, and even that use case is hinging on a lot of ifs.
> And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
Yes, but that's not their primary use.
> There are many other uses.
If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now.
Right, so how can I get a bank account that nobody can shut down?
"Yes, but that's not their primary use."
Neither is bitcoin's. So is gold also a scam, in your opinion?
I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever? How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
"If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now."
So gold is also a scam?
What's a bank account when there's literally nothing useful you can do with it, except hoard, scam, and trade other meaningless tokens?
> Neither is bitcoin's.
The absolute vast majority use cases for bitcoin are scams and hoarding.
> I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever?
It's not. It's very, very simple.
> How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
You assume that having many lines of code is equal to something not being a scam.
There exactly two kinds ow people who peddle bitcoin and crypto: scammers who know what they are doing (and yes, writing millions of lines of code), and gullible idiots.
> So gold is also a scam?
Outside of technical uses? Yes, mostly, as in the usual scenario of "you need to hoard gold because soon everything will fall, and you'll need gold". So are diamonds. There are very many scams. But blockchains, and bitcoin among them, take the current crown.
So you can not give me the thing that Bitcoin delivers, without Bitcoin. Case closed.
Sorry, you are clueless, and your attitude may bite you in the ass in the long run. Discussion is over. You can keep your beliefs.
I have given you that. "Bank account that can't be shut down" is meaningless if it doesn't provide any function beyond storing bitcoin.
> Sorry, you are clueless,
I'm not.
> You can keep your beliefs.
These are not beliefs. These are things grounded in reality. Unlike, you know, anything bitcoin-related.
You can not just store bitcoin. Your assumptions are ridiculously wrong.
While you can not pay everywhere easily with Bitcoin yet, you also have to think of it in terms of insurance. When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled, more and more people will seek refuge in Bitcoin. There are many scenarios where Bitcoin can provide a way out. Extreme cases like having to flee the country - are you going to carry gold bars across the border?
A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
So, what else are you going to store there?
> you also have to think of it in terms of insurance.
Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year.
> When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled
There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely.
> A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
Ah. "For some reason or another". Could you tell me those "some reasons"?
Let me help you.
--- start quote ---
[In the US] the majority of the unbanked and underbanked are American-born while a growing number are immigrants where the two groups have low income as a commonality and lack the minimum balance to open checking and savings accounts
--- end quote ---
Wells Fargo requires you to have 25 dollars to open a checking account. People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year.
Same goes for other unbanked populations across the world, the vast majority of whom live in developing countries.
> With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality.
You can transfer BTC. What else can you do with a bank account?
"Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year."
It's still early days. Fluctuation is better than devaluation to zero.
"There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely."
At least a billion people in China, for starters. And you vastly underestimate the number of people who are being cancelled. You only hear about the famous cases. The number of people whose funds have been frozen by PayPal is legion. Also the people who are not cancelled yet may still be unhappy about constantly having to worry and having watch their steps to avoid being cancelled. It's not a good feeling. Sometimes stories even make it to Hacker News, maybe you missed them.
"People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year."
Even those people will have banking needs, and the transaction costs are being tackled with things like Lightning. Fiat banking is not free, either.
"There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality."
Or people who see the issues in our current system and try to create something better. People like you will probably be unable to understand the mindset of pioneers.
MtGox & Bitfinex & the Satoshi mystery should have been enough to end cryptocurrency's future as a security instrument. They weren't. There's more than 1 fool born every minute, I suppose.
I am aware of the pre-mined Satoshi coins, but it's perfectly possible that the key to those got lost forever by now if they weren't explicitly designed as a pump & dump/kill switch for Satoshi's benefit.
Why is a fixed supply a bad idea for a day to day currency? Just look at Bitcoin.
A currency is effectively a public good, it's needed to facilitate trade. People sell stuff for currency and this creates a chain of transactions. If someone saves money beyond what they intend to spend, it's like damming a river. There are less transactions on the other side, in extreme cases no transactions may happen, which means an infinite chain of transactions has been interrupted. If the owner of the dam periodically releases the water (spends the money) then people downstream don't mind it. However, the dam owner may abuse his power and charge these people for the privilege of not having their water drained. (real interest) People get indebted to the dam owner but at least the infinite chain of transactions is no longer interrupted.
However, there is a problem with this. The dam owner makes it harder to make a living. Everyone starts building their own dam because it is more profitable than working. Suddenly, there are droughts everywhere even though there is no lack of water in the dams. That's how you get a 30s style depression. It's like panic buying money instead of toilet paper. All these Bitcoin investors are panic buying into it, for whatever (possibly valid) reason.
When you think about it, a fixed supply currency is meant to be exclusive for elites that don't want to give up their power.
In my opinion we might be in a mini depression (Japan and euro area) since 2008 or maybe even 2001. Our money systems are more flexible than a gold standard, however, pessimistic outlooks prevent banks from lending to small businesses. So you get a lopsided recovery at the top income spectrum where the rich are highly credit worthy and get their shoes kissed by the banks, meanwhile the average person still gets up to 10% interest for a small $10k loan.
Please explain how does me not spending money stops others from spending theirs?
On the positive side, economy with a large number of savers would be less vulnerable to crisis. Governments won't be afraid to let zombie-companies die, because they know that people are not going to starve when this happens.
The overall system is just software, and it can be improved.
L1 is capable of 4.6 transactions per second.
L2 is capable of 25 million per second currently.
L3 will be in existence long before getting a channel to every human on Earth becomes a problem (please note that this is something the traditional financial system has also failed to do, despite hundreds of years and legislative support).
I've not even got anything against LN per se, what I'm pushing back on is the marketing that it's some sort of panacea, that it makes BTC a viable payment mechanism, or even that its particularly interesting.
At this point it looks like a bait and switch. We were promised a decentralized currency and we just got a get rich quick scheme.
Meanwhile buttcoins have ridiculous spikes in miner fees. New bullshit "distributed app" like the next cryptokitties is clogging Ethereum again? Now moving $10 costs $40! Money of the future!
Current stablecoins are fraudulent wildcat banks. Research Tether.
Unfortunately, they built the currency to be deflationary, so it’s only used for speculation.
The governments are unable to rebase it to fund their wars and propaganda though, so naturally they don't like it.
> While this view of Bitcoin might sound like it is a betrayal of Bitcoin's original vision of fully peer‐to‐peer cash, it is not a new vision. Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto, wrote this on the Bitcoin forum in 2010: Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin‐backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases. Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others. George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and self‐regulating.
That sounds good, then? Hope you are not implying that it's a negative thing.
Short term this is good PR, long term it’s about positioning the brand. If blockchain hype continues to grow, it will be powerful to have a brand closely associated with it.
Dozens of dollars! Seriously, that is the going rate for boosting an article to the HN front page (not to say it will stay on the front page, flagging and dang are quite effective).
1. https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...
I guess every company that rebrands has a specific reason to do so. Apple hasn't done anything to soil their name too badly, so they don't have to.
See Filecoin: approximately 1/100th data stored as Backblaze, approx 100x the fully diluted market cap of Backblaze, for a 10000x $ per byte stored.
That left their well known company name as an umbrella brand, whereas Google, Facebook et al came up with some obscure umbrella brand way late.
I'm not an Apple fanboy at all, but I think this shows they had more vision than most. Most tech giants had one very focused, ridiculously successful product and tried to find meaning beyond that later. From everything I've heard around the early Apple decades, they always had this mentality of focusing on new product (lines) as their way forward. Probably to some degree because their focus is/was hardware, not software, but I don't believe that's all there is to it. They literally create new products that have the potential of making their established, more expensive products obsolete: For example the iPad.
Sure, "Meta" _means_ something, but Apple (now) does, too, by association.
That said, Apple has some terrible branding in some areas. Is AppleTV the hardware, the subscription service, or Apple's TV app?
Pity the poor person out there trying to understand what is going on / what is block.xyz.
At least we are told nothing will change with TBD54566975 (?).
https://twitter.com/tbd54566975?lang=en
The bitcoin world is crazy.
All of these corporate cryptocurrency pushes have strong "How do you do, fellow children?" vibes.
But the funny part is a lot of the crypto people are eating it right up, mostly because they have to accept any and all big business investment in the crypto space to further pump their own assets.
But it's curated by JAY-Z!
That was the first wave. This much bigger wave is people like your uncle who's not tech savvy but bought $100 in Bitcoin because they heard you could get rich from it. The ideological component is just window dressing (eventually a lot of ideology becomes window dressing so that's not too unusual).
Random uncles putting $100 into BitCoin isn't driving the market.
Cryptocurrency is very corporate now, including a mix of shady corporations who love playing in this unregulated space.
The average joe is just along for the ride, but they're being pitched the idea that decentralization is democratization. Meanwhile, there's nothing stopping a decentralized cryptocurrency from being owned by very centralized players. It is, after all, tradable by anyone.
No, but the companies providing easy ways for tens of thousands of uncles to put $100 into the market definitely are driving the market.
See: Robinhood, Venmo, PayPal, Coinbase, etc.
I guess it is so the owners can imagine the company to be whatever they want it to be, though typically they end up being nothing at all.
"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
Google makes (a little) sense for just search, but it makes no sense as a self-driving taxi service.
If you want your own similar company name, visit an elementary school and ask the 3rd grade students for advice. You can make "bleeblax" or "squibjub" or "tibflee" or "shubzoo" into the next unicorn company.
The googol connection actually would still work for Waymo since AI driving also requires huge quantities of data.
iTunes->Music. Searching for issues with the application formerly known as iTunes is borderline impossible now.
Whoever approved that must’ve gotten an MBA from a top-ranked school, because any decent person would immediately recognize it as a bad idea.
Same searching issues with ‘Mail’, ‘Notes’, ‘Reminders’, ‘Calendar’, ‘Numbers’, etc. Impossible to troubleshoot.
I’m as much of an Apple fanboy as the next guy, but I totally agree that this naming is ridiculous.
At least Safari isn’t ‘Web’ (yet).
Already been done.
Within platforms like Apple OS it's a very powerful tool: if you give your app for doing something a brand it effectively admits that there could be other apps, but if you don't that is easy to forget.
Jack should not have used Block, it should be either called "@jack" or the address of his bitcoin wallet
If you're company is "Apple", then you are rewriting the meaning of the actual physical apple object. An example alternative that protects the Nouns, would be to have to add a number on the end. Apple-1 could sell laptops, Apple-5 could sell apple peelers, Apple-2123 could make wool sweatshirts
You can say what you want about megaholding corporate conglomerates, but this has so much more style than abc.xyz.
You can also click and drag to rotate the cube. But yeah, it doesn't do anything particular spectacular.
"Square" => "Cube"
but
"Square" => "Block" just seems mediocre by comparison.
Certainly they want "Block" to invoke blockchain, but it seems more gimmicky with just "Block".
I get the need to productize endlessly on sea of ideas and perhaps incubate spin-offs but even GE and J&J are running away from its conglomerate ways… I mean umbrella corporation [1] ways.
—-
I think the current trend is coming about because of SAAS - in the olden days, startup feared big companies because they could make your product / company a feature in their product - but we’re seeing the reverse- they’re now seeing that millions of customers are willing to pay $X dollars a month for what amount to a feature as a separate product instead of licensing SAP type product.
[0]https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporate-umbrella.asp
[1]https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Umbrella_Corporation
Surely that’s the most problematic thing here… Block sounds to me like something that gets in the way. Like a blood clot or something… I guess they’ll be fine…
On a side note, the block.xyz website looks _amazing_
they should use the party tld, for block.party
With Facebook’s recent re-org to Meta, is this spurring a new wave of companies re-branding to be seen as relevant by associating with future technologies?
(I was at google during the alphabet announcement and seem to remember a wink from management towards the connection being intentional, but I could be remembering speculation as fact.)
> Not to get all meta on you… but we’re going to! Block references the neighborhood blocks where we find our sellers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a section of code, building blocks, and of course, tungsten cubes.
2018: $166 million
2019: $516 million
2020: $4.5 billion
2021: $8 billion+ in first three quarters
$SQ $BTC
It's like if Charles Schwab counted any stocks people bought as revenue.
I suspect the difference is that SQ may hold the Bitcoin and sell directly to the user rather than as a broker. But calling it "revenue" is still highly misleading, as margins will be razor thin, by definition (the transaction fee)
They also build cash app, a competitor to Venmo. They have investment and banking and tax products.
They also have some crypto side projects and own tidal.
It's just a picture of a musician and #Bitcoin and a picture of a hat. https://twitter.com/TBD54566975
Is anyone in this space serious?
I tried to humor them and use their new name when talking about the service to other people, but people had a hard time understanding what I was even saying. "I use this thing called Wise." "What?" - something about the word is actually hard to enunciate and people don't even comprehend the sentence. I think this is mainly a problem with using a pre-existing English word for your brand.
In the case of Square, their original name was already pretty non-specific/unrelated and they just moved laterally. I guess if they're getting into blockchain then maybe it really is more related now...
WWF to WWE - It tooks years for it to fully take hold. Sure some people will automatically think of WWE when you say WWF but not all will. And at one point it was called WWWF.
Datsun to Nissan - Honestly, you say Datsun to anyone they'll have no idea what you're talking about.
Marathon to Snickers - Very few people even remember this.
- @blocks (https://twitter.com/blocks/status/1466159597194907649)
That's annoying.
galaxy brain: blockchain holding company
I just hope the sellers don’t suffer because of this
The answer is in the following links:
> Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is Bitcoin. Its name is TBD. — https://twitter.com/jack/status/1415765941904941061
> We’ve decided to make our official name TBD54566975 based solely on this numerology report [picture]. — https://twitter.com/TBD54566975/status/1424818221652324355
tbDEX: A Liquidity Protocol [1][2][3][4]
[1] https://tbdex.io/whitepaper.pdf
[2] https://twitter.com/tbd54566975
Block (aka Square, Tidal, CashApp etc) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409630 - Dec 2021 (29 comments)
While Jack Dorsey is just talking about helping poor countries, Jack Mallers went there to launch the product, and has a great vision about using the lightning network to compete with VISA / Mastercard.
Rebrands always get a ton of negative press, but almost always the reason why companies try to do so is not what it seems from the outside.
For example, when Dropbox did their big rebranding (sure they kept the name, but I can remember reading the same comments when it happened) I happen to know that their reasoning is not what many people would think of.
Dropbox hit a growth plateau. The growth they had gotten from the engineering community where it started was slowing down.
They decided to reposition and rebrand their company to a new more creative community. This seems to have had some help in continuing the growth curve.
Many of these rebrands get a ton of negative comments, but you have to remember that the rebrand is not meant for you as an existing user/customer/fan/etc. it's meant to help reach a new audience. To push growth. Tap into new markets, please a board and show that you're moving forward to some exciting destination at the horizon.
When looking at rebrands, try to think of the business decision behind the scenes as to why these might have happened.
Didn't work out too well for them: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2163472.stm
> There's a lot of talk about the importance of a company being "founder-led." Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure. I've worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.
> I believe it's critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder's influence or direction
Ironic, given all his push toward making Square a Bitcoin company in line with his own Bitcoin whims.
2018: $166 million
2019: $516 million
2020: $4.5 billion
2021: $8 billion+ in first three quarters
$SQ $BTC
Did Jack jump from Twitter onto the end of the Blockchain train? So more money and employees are sacrificed onto the altar of blockchain hype.
Else they’re successfully trying to gain attention by pretending to move into blockchain.
Flash had a lot of faults, but they could have been fixed (and open sourced). The Flash editor was by far the best animation tool for the web and it got murdered by Apple to protect iOS from foreign runtimes.
Name change makes sense, especially in cryptocurrency services.
Google => Alphabet
Square => Block
Facebook => Meta ??
For Facebook they were dealing with the opposite, trying to shift past a torrent of negative press, the move to an Abstract name has been highly effective in turning down the (short term) negative press heat. Yes they announced new things but arguably it was critical timing from a PR perspective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395518
Two examples here -- When I read both titles and took a min to realize "OH FACEBOOK!"
Maybe early to the pre party and late to the after party?
This name change is going to be extremely confusing to end users who are out of the loop given the current dominance of the Square brand.