Stripe Crypto | Hacker News Reader

Stripe Crypto

stripe.com

413 pointsseabj0rn415 comments

It is important to recognize that Stripe is largely selling well-made shovels for the gold rush here. They have a history of diving more deeply into this market [1] and withdrawing from it before [2], so this is just Take 2. This time around, they are not themselves buying Cube Thingies or similar and don't have any exposure to the volatile world of ETH or other coins.

I think there will be decent transfer of money from venture-funded NFT startups to Stripe for the next few years, followed by a dip in the market when the startups discover that selling digital art is less of a viable market than they realize.

I am personally skeptical about the end market, but Stripe seem well-insulated from the risks. I'm curious what people who are bullish on this think though – what might I be missing about the digital art market? I think paying 12 million pounds for a Renoir is bananas too, but people certainly do it [3]. I just expect digital stuff to be more volatile because it's hard to communicate that combination of artisanship and rarity.

On the topic of well-made shovels, I highly recommend the Voile Telepro in HN Orange [4] as a portable snow shovel to keep in your car if you live in a snowy climate. They will probably be on sale in spring and summer.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150516061807/https://stripe.co...

[2] https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

[3] https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-pierre-auguste-renoir-1...

[4] https://snowmetrics.com/shop/voile-shovel/

> Updated March 10, 2022

Did they just update this after you pointed this out?

For me, Google's cache of the page[1] does not contain that and says a timestamp of 10 Mar 2022 01:35:20 GMT.

[1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cKDBTS...

Hm, I thought I saw the update as while when I was looking at the pages; but thinking through it I remember that I was adding links after I posted some of the text.

Also, it's quite possible others pointed this out (the Stripe team in general has great attention to detail!) and updated the page.

My interest in web3 + art is from finding new livable income sources for artists generally. Less about big money speculation, more about getting more artists supported such that they don’t need a day job or purely commercial art pursuits (as opposed to “fine art”). I understand the current state of crypto isn’t near offering this outside of hyped speculative investments

I’m also not interested in ideas on a shelf that could do this better in an alternate reality but aren’t active

I also recognize there are uphill battles conceptually for both adopters and builders, such as ownership models where access is not exclusive (which is also not without precedence outside crypto)

Not interested in discussing these distractions: the perceived quality of current art, what types of art are more deserving of their artists having a livable income off, ideas on a shelf for solving this at scale in an alternate reality, scam activity, or pretending proof of work chains are state of the art

I think Patreon and similar is probably a better avenue for digital. More consistent support than selling peices as NFTs or in meat space and with digital I think you're more likely to find 100 people willing to spend $10 for a new wallpaper each month than 1 willing to spend $1000 on an NFT.

NFTs don’t need to be as expensive as that, that’s only because currently all attention is on high-priced eth ecosystem

Patreon is also a huge rent seeker, we can do better for artist direct payment

Patreon is not passive income - people expect regular updates and special work/insight for private audience

In terms of consistency, meat space has big issues with accessibility and reach

Lastly you can look at the results. Patreon is not that widely transformative for giving artists livable income

I never said Patreon is passive income but it's consistent. The artist gets money for their output every month. People are only going to pay so long as they feel they get value. Unlike a subscription for rarely updated software you can still use that Wallpaper you got from being a patreon even if you're not subbed anymore.

NFTs aren't passive either nor are they consistent.

The whole point of NFTs is the scarcity aspect. Sure, you could maybe do 100 $10 NFT "prints" instead but now they need to manage that aspect and predict demand.

NFTs mimic the meat space art world with all the same problems like infrequent unpredictable sales with few benefits like convenience.

Scarcity of ownership not necessarily access

My concern around this space is less "does it make sense" and more "if the bubble collapses as I expect, what will happen to people who take the crypto/NFT money for granted"?

I'm more interested in solutions that I expect to be stable and last. I do understand why artists are hoping to cash on the NFT wave; I just worry that a lot of people will come crashing down along with the hype.

This is a solved problem: you pay them for their work, which is how artists have made money since time immemorial. The degree to which artists can make a living off their art is a function of demand and discoverability, not whether they have a payment system (they do need this, but they already have them).

I'd be curious to know what fraction of NFT enthusiasts had previously commissioned a piece of art, and of those how many were truly aghast at the dire state of payment systems without NFTs or at their inability to assert ownership via a blockchain. I suspect both are quite small.

The former is ludicrous, because Paypal/Kofi/Patreon/what have you offer a wide array of easy-to-use, feature-rich payment systems.

The latter maybe less inconceivable, but IMO it's driven by a desire to use blockchain tech for _something_, find something that it can conceivably do, and then deciding that that thing is therefore important. Personally, proving ownership and providence hasn't ever been a concern for any of my art purchases because they, like the vast majority of art, isn't worth selling a forgery of--nobody is coming to steal the forum avatar I commissioned or selling unauthorized prints of the obscure photographer I like.

This is just round three (or whatever) of blockchain being a solution in search of a problem: having failed to evangelize its wide use as a consumer payments system in general, its adherents moved on to hyping it as a solution to Enterprise IT problems (where selling bullshit is the name of the game anyway), failed to find traction (because everyone discovered it didn't actually solve any problems), and so we've circled back round to a consumer market, but now with more celebrity endorsements. It's still an effort to convince people that the blockchain version of something is much better and therefore worthwhile so that the worth of the tokens is tied to something other than transactions illegal goods and wild speculation. It's about supporting the livelihoods of people hoarding GPUs and wasting electricity to mine the tokens, not artists.

Buddy, think about the poor starving VCs. They got into certain coins at prices at fraction of a dollar. They need 10000x returns so they can keep putting 100m into a saas company that sales force can buy.

In the current system when an artist creates something and sells it, they typically get paid once, often lowballed. The buyer may turn around and sell it for 100x. The buyer made far more than the artist, who gets nothing in this scenario.

With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.

> With NFTs they can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely

How does that work?

Also, what is to stop people copying it anyway and what is to stop artist from getting underpaid?

All serious questions that I'd like to see answers to but don't understand how NFTs would solve any of them.

Royalties are built into marketplace smart contracts. Individuals can do P2P trades where the artist doesn't receive any royalty but this doesn't happen very often. Anecdotally, it typically only happens on large deals and people who do a P2P trade often send the artist their royalty anyway (but still benefit from not paying the OpenSea fees for example)

Not sure what you mean by the second question

Wait, so the purported royalty benefit of wrapping this in a contract can be circumvented, but the NFT tech is still good because people who circumvent this kindly send the artist the royalty anyway? Would they not be able to send the same courtesy royalty if no NFTs were involved?

Not what I was trying to say at all, I'm saying that NFT tech is good because the default option is that the artist gets royalties and this happens probably >95% of the time?

I think I felt compelled to mention that people send it anyway because it's good behavior and not all scams/crimes people say it is. In general I think the royalty thing is just one nice bonus of using smart contracts

please see “ideas on a shelf”

Idiomatically, "shelved ideas". Shelving can be more abstract, but generally it's not idiomatic for abstract-concepts to be "on a shelf".

Language aside, I think you're being inconsistent with that concept: there are better solutions for compensating artists than NFT's already, so it's inconsistent to say that you want active-solutions as a justification for working on an less-active-solution.

I'm replying specifically to "Would they not be able to send the same courtesy royalty if no NFTs were involved?" which absolutely there is not already a satisfying solution in place. No thanks for the language lesson

Ownership transfer is done by a function call. The function often has extra logic like % of the funds for the transfer going to the artist. I guess you can cheat by sending a small amount in the transfer and seperately paying the seller the rest but then you make the thing you bought seem cheaper in the official records so that's in most cases counter-productive.

So I guess the next goal here is a startup to implement this as a smart contract to go full circle. The market will do it because any transaction fee is a hindrance to it's liquidity and is a possibility to undercut someone else.

That's not always true. German copyright law, for example, includes a right for artists to a cut of the proceeds for auctions in the secondary market.

This is what I mean by idea on a shelf - this idea doesn’t have mass adoption momentum and is also not accessible to less established artists

Physical art typically doesn't get flipped that much, especially art from artists that actually need support.

No you're assuming based on what seems like no knowledge of the industry.

> With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.

Too bad this hadn't been invented when Ted Nelson was alive.

You scared me. He is very much still alive. (Or do you know something I don't?)

Huh. I distinctly thought he'd passed. Well, I'm very glad to be wrong!

I wonder what he thinks about this potential enabling technology for transclusion.

Oh so it's a pyramid scheme as well? What a horrible payment system. Imagine if whenever you sold your car you had to take a fraction of what you received for it and give it back to the dealership (or rather, the manufacturer in this case).

That's still beneficial to the artist as it usually raises the market value for the rest of their work.

Almost all art sold is only sold once. The figure I've seen is 0.5% of paintings bought are ever resold. Most artists would be overjoyed at someone flipping their work for 100x, because their future sales now look better. It is similar to gallery commissions, where 40% of hardly anything is a bargain and 40% of a lot is worth every penny.

Not in every jurisdiction. I would look at Droit de suite [1].

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

It was never a solved problem, it was an addressed problem. And the method of address poorly allocated credit.

Maintaining records for art transactions, and thus enacting a fee structure that would benefit the artist when art is traded, traditionally meant introducing a middleman - and the associated overheads are why "fine arts" are known as a gatekept world and commissions have become the default for digital art. A sneer like "yeah well did you commission art before NFTs" is tautological. Commissions are the business model because they're available with minimal financial technology, not because they're ideal for society. The result you want is "more art is produced and more artists can afford to produce at a high level". But not everyone is interested in commissioning a large quantity of art of their furry OC getting porked. And likewise, people have trouble commissioning an artist to work freely without adding some kind of externalized upside like "build my own personal brand". There's a saturation point to that business model in and of itself.

It's only been relatively recently that artists also started to be able to access intellectual property law as a business model, but running an IP business involves a perpetual defense of property through legal enforcements, since we are in the age of mechanical reproduction. So it also has barriers to entry and ongoing overheads. I don't hear anyone saying that game developers should all work on commission, though.

The proposition of NFT art is just a revision of the gallery system - make intellectual work an asset, but on a much broader scale. The fee structure is automated, and the art itself is open to viewing and therefore doesn't need the same degree of IP enforcement as a paywall model; the only provenance question is the initial one of whether you actually minted your own work. And naturally, among the first people to have jumped on this are charlatans who have tested that exact question of initial provenance.

But I can say, having closely observed and participated a little, that NFT art on the whole is not uniquely bad or good, it's still "just" an art market, just one geared towards the artist who is interested in making their brand a speculative investment. And that is another way to get art made.

Assuming blockchain (and OpenSea atop that) count as "no middleman, no overhead" and not a new middleman (but it's a good one, because Andreessen Horowitz will make bank if it succeeds) atop technology that requires more energy consumption than small countries, it still isn't some magical wand that creates more people that spend disposable income on art.

Commissioning art is one of _many_ ways you can do this. Non-commissioned works are readily available too! I also purchase those! Some of these are one of a limited set (common for photo prints), some of these aren't (Bandcamp albums). Point being, if you were someone who wanted to buy art before NFTs, you could do so. I'm skeptical of there being some large market segment that desperately wanted to buy art but only realized they could with the advent of NFTs.

The royalty business model also already existed, where it made sense. There's no contract governing me reselling the painting I bought from someone at the local farmer's market because there wasn't any expectation on either my or the artist's part that it'd be resold at all, much less for a sum vastly greater than its purchase price. It's going to hang on my wall until I die, at which point it'll likely get tossed in a bin.

That's in contrast to say, a film score, where the expectation is that it will be resold (as part of your theater ticket price, but whatever) many times over: ASCAP exists, and handles paying the IP lawyers on behalf of its members, because that's a business model that works for them. They've been managing this just fine for over a century.

> atop technology that requires more energy consumption than small countries.

Look, this argument is a narrow one against PoW chains. You can point out correctly that a large share of the market/money is on those, and maybe Ethereum will or will not switch at some point, but it remains an argument against PoW nonetheless. Go support artists selling NFTs on Tezos then.

> This is a solved problem: you pay them for their work, which is how artists have made money since time immemorial. The degree to which artists can make a living off their art is a function of demand and discoverability, not whether they have a payment system (they do need this, but they already have them).

Some digital art cannot be printed (i.e. videos). "Paint my portrait"-style commissions are undesirable for many artists. "Here is some money create whatever" style commissions run into the same problem that for digital art, in that it is not clear what the buyer actually gets. People are commissioning NFT artists! It's all good.

The attitude of "buyers don't need NFTs they can support artists another way" is strangely inverted. If you can convince more people to spend money on art in other ways, that's great. Meanwhile, /artists/ need to find a way to earn a living.

How many new art buyers will NFTs bring when the speculative dust settles? How much will artists need to adapt to cater to that audience (i.e. creating PFP style collections?). We do know that the number is > 0.

>> "I'd be curious to know what fraction of NFT enthusiasts had previously commissioned a piece of art, and of those how many were truly aghast at the dire state of payment systems without NFTs or at their inability to assert ownership via a blockchain. I suspect both are quite small."

The main complaint I hear from actual commission-taking artists is that even something fun and innocuous but potentially readable as suggesting banned uses, like "fuck yeah," in the comment field on the paying side will make PayPal suspend your account. The artists I know are universally opposed to NFTs with more artists I know of coming out against every time a new NFT site launches with stolen art.

Yeah; the distributed ledger thing was always a funny value prop to me because it was like…so, replace what we already do today and are responsible for the accuracy of due to many various laws with…something orders of magnitude slower, orders of magnitude more complex, that requires orders of magnitude more compute power so we can…expose all transaction records to everyone involved?

Also, re: art, kinda agree: the current gallery system takes a huge cut of sale prices and a lot of galleries don’t do much to help artists. The real winners, though, are the landlords.

We’ve purchased art with checks before, and even in the “mid-range” price segment, logistics are much more of a problem than counterfeit risk. The logistical part still needs a good solution. Putting a large piece on a palette and trying to get a shipping company to treat it like the delicate and irreplaceable piece it is is tough and/or very expensive. Putting a canvas in the mail is a huge risk. Discovery is another big problem, as many people who might buy art don’t even know how to do so. It’s not like you just scan a QR code and enter your credit card details. A lot of it today is a very personal high-touch sales process that doesn’t always add value (much like cars, but sometimes with zero sleaze if you’re dealing with the actual artist directly). Once you get to the broker model and “if you have to ask” pricing it’s even more opaque and in more need of a solution that isn’t just auctions, but NFTs aren’t the solution.

What is the pitch for how web3 will help artists find income without purely commercial art pursuits? Every single web3 art project I've seen has been entirely commercial.

When I say commercial art I don’t mean it’s not sold, I mean it in distinction with fine art. Commercial art means for example product photography or designing a book cover

That said there are also public goods approaches, either where you have ownership without exclusive access (interesting but not obvious to most people how to productize) or grant models

Not sure what you mean exactly by commercial art pursuits? I'd say about 99% of NFT projects are garbage but I'm a fan of artblocks (https://www.artblocks.io/).

I can talk more about how the system works if you are interested, but some established generative artists have created projects on their platform and have made more than they could before web3.

Maybe I don't understand the question enough because I'm wondering if DeFi is excluded as a viable answer, but possibly you're just not aware of it? But it seems like it's making lots of people money and that seems inclusive of artists.

Unfortunately most new NFT projects are computer generated (no humans need apply). They have basically figured out that paying an actual human for the art is not needed when people will just buy cg art for the same price. There is one that just minted RGB colors. Its reddit AMA was pretty hilarious actually.

Those that do include human art have a strong tendency to just lift uncredited art from Pinterest or deviantart. Supposedly the purpose of NFTs was to provide the provenance for art. But it seems that most NFT art is stolen from actual artists.

Please find another thread to talk about concern for the quality of the work or the current amount of scamming

Yeah, this is kind of what I meant by it being hard to project the combination of artisanship and rarity. I suppose that I personally would pay some money for beautiful programmatically generated art too, but that's probably a very niche market.

NFTs are a shit way of supporting artist and a lot of high profile artist are just having people make NFTs with links to their work without permission so they aren't really making anything off this situation.

What makes it a shit way of supporting artists? I have seen some fraud like you describe, but I think it makes a lot of sense for digital only artists.

The fraud I describe makes it a shit way of supporting artist. As for digital only artist, there are plenty of non-NFT ways to support them. Commissions, Patreon, and merch to name a few.

Have fun living and getting ahead off some $30 tshirt sales / supporting the artists you like that way

The only reason NFTs sell for more is because of the hype and the likelihood of there being some bigger sucker to resell it to at an inflated price. This won't last forever and then you'll end up with the same same 30$ t-shirt-like prices but in NFT land. The "art" and "artist" involved is irrelevant here - what matters is that you have something that the current market has a lot of demand for.

fwiw I’m interested to explore the $30 NFT price point with a broader project (not pfp or 1/1 or jpeg stuff) and am a lot more optimistic for it than trying to deliver as much value or as little ecological impact with tshirt merch. I think you’re focused on the speculative peaks of what’s going on now, or only what’s happening within eth

I mean NFTs currently are an environmental nightmare. The common response to this is "but that will change with Proof of Stake" and I'll believe it when it happens.

It's already happened, maybe you're talking about when PoS is dominant / happening in eth, which is not all of crypto and not settled that it will remain dominant

I am referring to PoS in ETH and while it is not settled it will remain dominant, it currently is dominant so all the talk of how eco-friendly crypto will be is just talk until that happens. It is not settled that Proof of Work will takeover as the dominant mining method.

Excuse me - I started by talking about my non-eth non-PoW project, which absolutely is vastly more ecological than tshirt merch. Your response was that it is ecologically impactful then it turns out you’re talking about other things

If you were certain an NFT you were buying was not fraudulent and was created by the artist would you still think it's a shit way of supporting them? Is it bad that they have an additional way to make money on top of commissions, Patreon, and merch?

> If you were certain an NFT you were buying was not fraudulent and was created by the artist would you still think it's a shit way of supporting them?

Yes.

> Is it bad that they have an additional way to make money on top of commissions, Patreon, and merch?

No.

My interest in web3 + art is from finding new livable income sources for artists generally

You should track down the New York Times article from this past weekend. From memory, it says that despite all the hype, almost no artists are making any money from NFTs. The average sale price is less than $400, which doesn't even cover materials.

What exactly are the "materials" to create an NFT?

Photoshop?

Time and expertise to develop skills, rent, food and bills while they work.

Gas fees

I’ll look it up. But, not a fan of current dominant marketplaces or tools for artists so not very fussed with reporting focused on current status quo

Why do you limit your scope to digital art? There are plenty of other potential applications, from tickets, music and gaming to gumroad-like marketplaces

This had been discussed a lot of times. All of those proposed uses are better served by regular databases

When crypto proposes something that *is*, rather than something that *could be* people will stop considering it as a big casino.

> All those proposed uses are better served by databases

I've often wondered how NFT's would fare in a situation like Diablo 3's colossal failure of a marketplace, where people could sell their rare items to other players. The whole concept broke, because "rare" doesn't mean anything when players can just flood the market with weapons created via modding. This seems to be exactly the use case NFT's are made for.

For the record - as a digital photographer - I find NFT's for art to be a laughable concept. Keeping possession of my raw files has always been a sufficient means of copy protection for me.

It's high spread market. Any financial firms are salivating at how to take advantage and profit from it.

Coinbase whole business is spreads.

> Coinbase whole business is spreads.

Coinbase collects fees. Even if the spread is minimal (I think Bitcoin goes to something silly like 8 decimals but even for a book in USD, the bid/ask spread may be 39 842.54 vs 39 482.55, so a spread of one cent), Coinbase still takes a fee on every trade. And they take a fee from both the buyer and the seller.

I'm not sure their business is related to spreads.

Stripe is largely selling well-made shovels for the gold rush here. ... This time around, they ... don't have any exposure to the volatile world of ETH or other coins.

Which is... even more evil? They're encouraging an externality which harms normal people but not them.

It was also safer to sell shovels in san francisco than it was to go to the Klondike and dig for gold. the analogy is correct.

They're not encouraging crypto anymore than a liquor store encourages alcoholism. The liquor store may lower the barrier to entry for obtaining a bottle of alcohol, but it's ultimately the alcoholics choice to enter the store and purchase it.

Offering a product is not evil or immoral. It may be amoral but that's not the same as immoral. Ultimately the market decides what stays and goes except in extraordinary circumstances.

"Offering a product is not evil or immoral" - this is the motto of my "Heroin for kids" brand. Selling a ponzi scheme may not be illegal, but it seems plausibly immoral.

Yeah, but in this case Stripe is one step removed morally as well. I don't see this as materially different from them being a payment processor for an online liquor store or a pyramid seller like LuLaRoe.

You could say that a payment processor should morally screen their clients in general, but that seems like a stronger and not-so-reasonable statement. They do prohibit certain kinds of businesses, but I think the bar for that is very high and likely related to chargeback concerns and such.

Both would fall under Stripe's list of prohibited businesses.

Oh yes, the "If I didn't sell them X, someone else would have done" excuse.

Plenty of places do regulate liquor stores heavily for this reason.

You are conflating logistics with morality. The market will provide argument may make sense logistically but that does not mean its morality.

Logistics is something else entirely.

Any consumer driven market is strongly indicative of its consumers morality, people just don't like to admit it.

What I meant to say was just because people want something doesn't mean its moral to provide it. People want tobacco, doesn't mean we have to make it super easy and addictive for them.

Distributing drugs is punished much more harshly than individual consumption.

> Offering a product is not evil or immoral

So weapons-grade uranium, chemical weapons, payday loans, extended car warranties, life insurance, habit-forming painkillers, etc are all fine?

As a society, we have decided that some products are indeed unacceptable / immoral.

Aside from the WMD's, it's not the products themselves that you likely have grievances with, but the advertising behind them.

Payday loans, while a bad reputation, can truly help someone out in a pinch who has no other options - but often they're not presented to be as abhorrently predatory as they usually are.

Extended car warranties are pushed by the car salesman who tell the consumers that they need it when they almost definitely do not.

Life insurance is actually a wise investment for some, not even sure why you put that on the list.

Pain killers provide an essential service when used properly, the vast majority of consumer don't form a habit, and those that do were almost certainly not told by their doctor or pharmacist the potential addictive nature of the chemicals.

All those products are, in my opinion, completely fine. What's not fine is the often fraudulent advertising required to sell those products. But that's a different discussion.

Ugh - not a fan of declaring everything you disagree with as "evil".

I think NFTs, along with the vast majority (but not all) crypto, are total bullshit, but I also accept (a) I could be totally wrong in this, in which case, my loss, and (b) offering rails to sell these items doesn't strike me as "evil" in the slightest.

The magnitude of the carbon footprint alone is not enough to hit the threshold?

How about the obvious breeding ground for scams, and the tacit approval by the community because all that money (assets) flows to the top?

There are more reasons, too.

Just because you don't understand someone's argument doesn't mean you should trivialize it.

Evil is not an argument. It is a trivialization itself.

One can argue that it's a bad thing (evil is still too strong a word I think.) But that's not what's going on here.

On the carbon footprint: Ethereum will adopt proof of stake soon, of course you can trade NFTs on other chains but at least there’s an effort to drop the carbon footprint to very low levels. That’s more than you can say about most economic activities that have a large carbon footprint.

The scams seems like a very weak reason. The internet is full of scams, is the internet evil?

Ethereum has had "proof of stake" as a goal for multiple years, with no obvious evidence that it is any closer to implemented today than it was 3 years ago. I will believe Ethereum to be proof of stake when I see it.

The "kiln" testnet is currently running and will carry out the merge in the next few days, which is the final step before the existing proof of work testnets transitioned to proof of stake and then the Ethereum mainnet itself. I think that counts as "obvious evidence".

> with no obvious evidence that it is any closer to implemented today than it was 3 years ago.

Apart from a working PoS beacon chain, several multi client dev nets and the last merge testnet before the real merge (barring major bugs) currently running

I have a friend of a friend who has a really low salary (think less than $500/month - third-world country) who spends 1/3 of his income on LoL digital items. Knowing that really changed my perspective on the viability of NFT. It's more addictive than digital stuff that you buy but can't sell.

Now you can buy to maybe sell for a higher price in the future. That should increase engagement and the user base. It is still a very particular behavior that only a small fraction of society engages in.

But there is 6.6Bn smartphone users in this world. If a tiny 0.1% of the population buys/sells NFT for fun and addition, that's still 6.6 million user. That's billions of $$ pumped into the NFT economy and dozens of billions of "value" for these digital items.

The world is crazy once you go from the local scale to the global scale.

It's really attempt 2.0 and some sprinkles of "you may get rich" on the steam market with a hugely more inefficient system, which you can't even showcase in game to your friends. All the while the gas fees causing a constant drain on any transaction.

Try looking how many pages you need click through before you emerge from the minimum $0.03. The market for digital "art" is a hard one, because scarcity can only centrally be enforced.

https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?appid=730#p1_price_...

Speaking as someone who has worked in the crypto space, I tend to agree. This play is about offering well-made shovels to the industry.

The regulatory hurdles of getting into or out of fiat from crypto make it nearly impossible for all but the biggest players due to Money Service Business laws in each of the 50 states let alone internationally.

As such this is a regulatory arbitrage play and one that will be welcomed by the industry as it is currently filled with extremely expensive options (Looking at you Prime Trust) and predatory actors.

Stripe can clean up here in the short term if their product offers fair and transparent pricing to industry as is their brand.

I do suspect they will stick around this time as the number of players has grown and the US government looks like it is finally ready to embrace the industry and bring some much needed regulatory clarity.

Important to note that Stripe has NOT announced any crypto/blockchain/NFT products or tech of its own.

The only news here is that Stripe is letting crypto companies use their various fiat processing services, now that they feel comfortable that they can legally do so. Confirmed by pc's comment [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30629169

Yes, the Stripe Crypto team started six months ago and the first step was to tune our fiat payment APIs to work with exchanges, on-ramps, and NFT marketplaces. Working on lots more, so stay tuned for more announcements very soon!

I would love to know how often real-world money is referred to as "fiat" inside Stripe.

"Fiat" does not mean "real-world money" as any money you consider "real" is "real". "Fiat" refers to money not backed by something physical, and it is not a new term that appeared from the cryptocurrency space (as many believe).

The search trend, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Fiat%20M..., seems to be relative stable since start of collecting trend data (2004), with slightly increasing volume as we get closer to today, but generally stable.

More information: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.asp

fiat means by decree.

Bitcoin made the term fiat popular.

Uhh... Popular on Reddit maybe. The term 'fiat' has been standard among traders, economists, and other professionals for a very long time. Other options were common until quite recently.

I've heard it used often in the past (like 10 - 15 years ago) by some of my Ron Paul loving anti-Fed libertarian friends that were always talking about how we need to move back to the gold standard. I think Bitcoin certainly exposed the term to even more folks with different backgrounds outside of those who study or work in economists and finance.

> Bitcoin made the term fiat popular.

I don't think this is true, and I also provided a link to Google Trends proving this is not true (at least in terms of "Google Popularity"). Do you have any evidence that Bitcoin made that term popular?

I don't think so. Fiat has been a common term in finance for many decades.

Just last year Stripe wouldn't even allow any crypto business to be their customers. You could not use Stripe if you business was crypto related. A client of mine had to switch implementation to checkout.com because of that. I wonder what changed...

What changed is, someone very powerful said this: "One of my incredibly big misses over the last decade was not buying enough Bitcoin. At $60k per Bitcoin, I'm still not sure if one should aggressively buy it, but surely it is telling us that we are at a crisis moment for the Fed."

I searched for who said this but came up empty. Where is this quote from?

Pretty sure it was Peter Thiel.

https://sports.yahoo.com/tech-billionaire-peter-thiel-says-1...

Thanks for the link. I didn't find that quote in the article, but maybe it was in there. If it's not in there then it's crazy that you linked that article saying "Peter Thiel" - another commenter said the same thing. If it's in there then it's weird that my quoted Google Search didn't yield at least that article.

And pretty sure by "not enough" he means only bought single digit 1000s of bitcoins rather than hundreds of thousands or millions of bitcoins.

a recent Peter Thiel talk: https://youtu.be/Bw1ByVhJt7A?t=740

I'm not sure he actually is all that good at picking such things given his history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Clarium_Capital

> Thiel used $10 million of his proceeds to create Clarium Capital Management…

> 57.1% return … 7.8% loss … 40.3% return

> …By 2011, after missing out on the economic rebound, many key investors pulled out, reducing the value of Clarium's assets to $350 million, two thirds of which was Thiel's money.

Sounds like it was overall somewhat profitable?

Yep. Until very recently, we weren't able to support businesses selling crypto. (The regulatory details are complex.) We're now rolling out support and this page is basically about that change.

So now you can sell NFTs using Stripe, but still VOIP business startups competing with RingCentral, 8x8, etc. get their Stripe accounts cancelled...

Maybe Stripe is using the adapter pattern — once fiat is deprecated, they can remove the technical debt around business restrictions. ;)

To be honest, I thought your refusal was probably well justified considering the disproportionate levels of credit card fraud involved in anything to do with crypto. I'd love to see your end of year statistics now...

> disproportionate levels of credit card fraud involved in anything to do with crypto

Source?

Personal observation on 2 projects. See above for details on another reply.

> disproportionate levels of credit card fraud involved in anything to do with crypto

I'm really curious what your source is for this. Anyone legit in crypto who's taking fiat is doing way more KYC than your average ecommerce store.

Besides, why commit credit card fraud when there are so many scam options available in the crypto world. :)

There are always scams of different flavours around - that doesn't stop anyone from picking one or another. The appearance of easy money attracts those who seek easy money.

My personal observation. A large proportion of credit card payment were fraud, or flagged as such. It was such a huge number (% wise) that I (thought I) understood why stripe pulled the rug out. And in another project I observed a very large and sudden increase at attempted fraud right after elements of crypto were introduced (including attempts at impersonating me, and someone else involved).

But honestly, when it comes to the crypto world, I'm that guy who laughed at that other guy for buying bitcoin at 20 cents. There was a lesson there somewhere.

That’s way a huge amount of NFT’s don’t end up as rug pulls and scams right?

I mean that's different from the kind of fraud the parent post was talking about. If a user used their credit card to buy an NFT that quickly went to zero, that's not a fraudulent credit card transaction still - the user authorized that transaction. CC fraud would be if someone stole your credentials and bought something before the card was revoked.

How will a bank that has restrictive policies around crypto know that a Stripe payout made into a customer's account was not related to an NFT sale?

Essentially, how are existing Stripe users protected from Stripe's reputational self-harm here?

How would this bank even know stripe is accepting a new currency? Why would it matter. Money will flow into your account from stripe. Stripe is not a cryto service provider defined by banking regulations.

That's like saying a bank won't accept a transfer from another bank because that bank allows you to pay them in cryto.

> Stripe is not a cryto service provider defined by banking regulations.

But it's now a payment provider that allows businesses in the UK to engage in what surely must be considered high-risk crypto business by the bank (NFT marketplaces).

This is the sort of thing that gets businesses denied banking service.

> That's like saying a bank won't accept a transfer from another bank because that bank allows you to pay them in cryto.

Or a bank won't accept a transfer from your bank because your bank might be taking deposits from entities subject to strict sanctions, and the plausible deniability is very thin.

I think banks are working on that as we speak. Cold days in Cypress soon, etc. The reputation risk of "doing crypto" might be decreasing, but the legal risk of violating sanctions seems to be increasing.

Can you be more specific than "Regulatory details are complex"? I think we would enjoy hearing about the complexity! :)

Well, regulatory details have been complex for years and capable companies with smaller compliance/legal teams found a way to do it.

My sense is it's more about the window shifting enough that it's palatable enough for a Stripe product team to stake their professional rep on now. "If Twitter and Square are doing it..."

To an extent, I wonder what the impact of the SEC ruling for BlockFi (crypto exchange) did to clarify the regs for larger companies like Stripe.

Did anything necessarily change? I imagine there can be a different answer between the two questions "are crypto businesses bad risks as a payment provider?" and "is cryptocurrency a bad risk as a payment mechanism?"

while the crypto community wants to avoid as much regulation as possible, it's important to realize that sensible regulation is a boon to the industry as it clears a path to allow institutions and traditional FinTech companies to hop onboard.

So, the timing of this Stripe announcement could be related to the Biden EO: https://apnews.com/article/biden-cryptocurrency-executive-or...

It's very strange seeing the option near the bottom of the page to donate a fraction of your revenue from Stripe Crypto to carbon recapture efforts. I agree with Stripe that, at this point, the solution to our climate problems must include carbon recapture, but it's not an ideal situation to be in.

Businesses entering the crypto space always seem to tout carbon offsets and sidechains that use less energy, but offsets are insufficient, and NFTs minted on sidechains inevitably migrate to Mainnet, where they're just as environmentally destructive as any other NFT, or they fail.

Stripe's carbon recapture efforts seem to be in the same category. Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place. If Stripe's support of crypto increases the use of blockchains, the overall impact of extra carbon emissions could very easily outpace all the carbon recapture they'll ever achieve.

It's a shame. When Stripe announced their carbon recapture efforts, I was impressed by how sincere they seemed in finding solutions to climate problems. Next to Stripe Crypto, however, it appears to just be greenwashing.

(And to head off the replies, I know all about proof-of-stake, but it's not relevant here. I'm unconvinced it will work, and even if it does, the ecological damage done and being done in the meantime is massive. If Stripe really cared about carbon emissions, they'd wait to launch Stripe Crpyto only on proof-of-stake blockchains, and only after they proved that the energy usage at scale was similar to the energy use for transferring fiat currency.)

The “ecological damage” is a rounding error and being mitigated in several ways. This is not a serious concern for cryptocurrency, despite how often and blindly its repeated.

This is not a convincing argument, but even if it were, carbon recapture is currently even more of a "rounding error" in the grand scheme of carbon emissions. Current carbon emissions are somewhere around 50 billion metric tons a year. I've seen varying estimates of crypto emissions, so I'm going to cite one [1] on the low end here, since it's more favorable to your argument, but the highest I've seen is less than double this number, so they're all in the same ballpark.

ETH currently emits 7.4 million metric tons of CO2 a year. Bitcoin is much higher. I've seen estimates as low as 16 million and as high as 55. There are other chains as well. To keep the math simple, let's round it to 50 million, so crypto is contributing 0.1% of total carbon emissions. Like you said, a rounding error.

I think we're just going to have to disagree on mitigations. I don't think they're working very well.

Crucially, at the beginning of 2019, according to the source I linked, ETH was only at 2 million tons a year. It's more than tripled since then. In 2021, Carbon recapture removed an estimated 9 thousand tons of CO2. [2] The CO2 from the growth of ETH eclipses anything that carbon recapture is currently capable of. The technology will get better. The most optimistic estimate I've seen is that carbon recapture will hit 30 million tons a year in 2070. But this year, Stripe Crypto only has to increase crypto transactions, across all blockchains it supports, by 9,000 tons to completely offset all of the money it's putting into recapture efforts. Even if you remove all the other chains, Stripe only has to increase ETH transactions by 1.3% to achieve this own-goal.

Long term, Stripe alone could end up causing more CO2 emissions on the blockchains to grow faster than all of carbon recapture.

1: https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/ 2: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-...

On the bright side, Ethereum devs have just launched the final testnet before the switch to Proof-of-Stake.

It would be great for Stripe to continue investing the same amount of money into carbon recapture even after Ethereum’s carbon emissions drop over 99%.

As I said in my original post, it would be great if that happened. I'm skeptical proof-of-stake will work at scale. If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work.

They damage they're doing in the meantime is more detrimental than their recapture efforts are beneficial.

> If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work.

Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto?

Since that is a blockchain that is not only more eco-friendly [0] and many times faster than both Ethereum and Bitcoin put together but one can use right now today rather than waiting for Ethereum Proof-of-Stake for many years.

I am not going to tell merchants to pray on a calendar month when ETH 2.0 will launch. They'll just use other blockchains instead if one was told to 'wait'.

[0] https://solana.com/news/solana-foundation-carbon-neutral-202...

> Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto?

This would be a great argument if Solana were the only cryptocurrency that Stripe was supporting, or if Stripe was only supporting cryptocurrencies with similar carbon footprints, but the top image above the fold is a screenshot of using Stripe to purchase Bitcoin. ETH and other PoW blockchains are also featured on the page.

My core argument is that supporting PoW blockchains does more damage than their carbon recapture efforts reduce. The presence of Solana in the list doesn't invalidate that.

This is your suggestion:

> Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work.

> but the top image above the fold is a screenshot of using Stripe to purchase Bitcoin. ETH and other PoW blockchains are also featured on the page.

I'm not the one telling Stripe and merchants to 'Wait for ETH to migrate to PoS' to support crypto payments, just because PoW blockchains still exist and are burning up the planet. Maybe you can tell the CEO of Stripe, (Patrick Collison [0]) to cut support for all PoW cryptocurrencies on Stripe then?

So you're also telling me there isn't a choice or a way to avoid PoW cryptocurrencies and only accept PoS cryptocurrencies? Are you also going to tell merchants to close their Stripe accounts because Stripe still plans to continue to support Bitcoin? Outside of Stripe, Bitcoin is still there and burning up the planet. It's not the only cryptocurrency that exists is it?

> My core argument is that supporting PoW blockchains does more damage than their carbon recapture efforts reduce.

And? Everyone knows that.

You can do something about that and not accept and cut support for those PoW cryptocurrencies as a merchant and use eco-friendly alternatives? If Bitcoin was the only cryptocurrency that exists today, then there would be NO choice and that would be a problem, but that is not the case today.

The presence of non-proof-of-work cryptocurrencies that exist and are working today like Solana, Algorand and Polkadot tells you that there is choice beyond PoW; even Stripe knows that.

[0] https://twitter.com/patrickc/

> So you're also telling me there isn't a choice or a way to avoid PoW cryptocurrencies and only accept PoS cryptocurrencies? Are you also going to tell merchants to close their Stripe accounts because Stripe still plans to continue to support Bitcoin?

No, I'm not telling anyone do do anything. I'm merely pointing out that Stripe supporting PoW blockchains causes more carbon emissions than their recapture efforts will offset. If they wanted to avoid that, they could have only supported PoS blockchains, or not supported crypto at all. But it's their decision. I'm not telling them what to do, only pointing out that this decision reduces their recapture efforts to nothing to greenwashing.

I haven't tweeted at Patric Collison because the decision is already made, whatever I say isn't going to change that. A coworker of mine did try to discuss the issue with our Stripe sales rep and was told that the decision has been made and it's not changing. What good would it do to pester and antagonize the CEO on Twitter?

> And? Everyone knows that.

Then why are we arguing? If you read my original post, it was clear it's the only point I was making. I also made it clear that the existence of PoS blockchains doesn't invalidate the argument as long as Stripe supports PoW blockchains.

Perhaps worth clarifying: emissions are tied to hash rate (and price action), not transaction count which is effectively capped by limited block space. Your post makes it seem that Stripe’s service getting used will quickly increase emissions, but if ETH price and hash rate drops significantly in the coming months, the emissions would also follow suit regardless of transaction count.

I agree though, the tech is currently immature and energy inefficient, and Stripe could have committed to PoS chains (eg: Tezos) if they really wanted to avoid bearing any additional emissions responsibility.

Personally I am happy to see this service, as I currently have to rather painfully roll my own crypto-commerce stack to support ERC20/ETH as a payment option in my business operations, and I would rather a well-engineered product to remove some of this overhead.

This is correct. I was using transactions as a standin for demand. As in, Stripe could increase the demand for transactions, which increases gas fees, thus enticing more miners to participate, increasing the hash rate.

It's hardly a rounding error, but I'm sympathetic to the fact that there are a lot more important concerns with respect to climate change than PoW, however, there is still a valid ecological critique of PoW due to it's inherent wastefulness relative to every other technology.

The amount of waste necessary to support the network must always grow since any new efficiencies are immediately obviated by the incentive to bring on more miners, the total utility provided by the network (i.e. the rate of transactions it securely processes) has no relationship to the amount of energy that the network burns. With every other technology, new effeincies make the technology able to do more useful work while burning less energy, in this way anything based on PoW is fundamentally flawed. You could hook up a fusion reactor of the future to the bitcoin network and it would not provide any more utility, yet the network would eventually consume all the energy produced by the reactor given enough time to increase mining capacity.

I know the typical response to this is PoS, and I think a switch to PoS would be great since its impact on the environment is within the realm of normal software. Whether or not PoS can actually work for a large network is a different discussion.

There’s a full featured testnet for the merge (Ethereum PoS) you can run right now. Yes, the developers were too optimistic with timeframes before, but it’s close and I’d expect it by EOY.

I'm following the progress. I don't like estimating release dates for other peoples' work, but I wouldn't be surprised if your EOY estimate is correct.

The biggest concern I have though, is that you can run as many testsnets as you want, but that doesn't mean the rollout is going to survive contact with the enemy. I'm very pessimistic that PoS can replace PoW in real-world usage. Once everyone is on the PoS ETH, I suspect that problems will eventually manifest, and either ETH will be forced to roll back to PoW, or there will be splits, and one of the PoW chains that splits off will supplant ETH in popularity.

I don't think this will happen immediately, but I think it's very likely to happen within a few years of ETH switching over to PoS.

The Ethereum PoS Beacon Chain mainnet (it’s not a testnet) has been running since December 2020: currently over 300k validator are active, with nearly 10 million “real money” ETH staked.

https://beaconcha.in/

https://beaconscan.com/

Yes, and it's definitely impressive, and I know this might seem like moving the goalposts, but the market cap of Beacon is very small compared to ETH Mainnet. More importantly, it's not _the_ ETH blockchain. Beacon may be working so well because PoS is optional. The people participating in Beacon have bought into PoS on a conceptual level and are working to make it work. When you're incentivized to, you can ignore the pretty fundamental design problems of PoS.

Once ETH tries to get everyone into PoS, that's where I think problems start.

If ETH weren't so established right now through the NFT marketplace, I might suspect you'd see a jump to other blockchains, like Bitcoin, that are still on PoW. Since it is established, I worry that people will try to make it work for a few years, but it ultimately won't work, and ETH Mainnet will either be forced to revert to PoW or lose popularity to another fork.

There's roughly USD $26 billion equivalent staked on Beacon, which puts it squarely in top-10 territory of crypto market caps, so I'm not sure why you consider it "very small", even compared to the ETH1 mainnet, but I guess "very/small" might be subjective.

While NFTs are a non-negligible component of trade volume on the Ethereum blockchain, numbers I've seen recently put monthly volumes of e.g. OpenSea in the single-digit USD billions equivalent. The daily volume of ETH is currently about USD $14 billion equivalent. I don't think the NFT marketplace is what's greasing the wheels.

It’s still bandaided in terms of withdrawals not being allowed. So there’s little incentive to attack PoS, as you can’t reap any rewards.

I didn't mean to imply that NFTs were the biggest economic driver of ETH, but rather that they occupy the zeitgeist. There are systems that are successful because they are successful. If you look at Bitcoin, ETH, and a couple other altcoins, they are much more popular than all the other blockchains out there, and are seen as much more important than other blockchains. They have a perceived legitimacy and large numbers of people participating that other cryptocurrencies do not. Due to the nature of human attention and competition, there's room for a handful of cryptocurrencies in this space, and the rest, including Beacon, will never garner the same kind of attention or participation unless they replace one of the big ones.

When you have way more forces in the market, many who aren't motivated by making it work, I think that's where PoS has some real weaknesses, and I don't think we'll see practical attacks against it until one of the important ones goes PoS.

   I don't think we'll see practical attacks against it until one of the important ones goes PoS.

I definitely agree with that.

   I think that's where PoS has some real weaknesses

Sure, attacks and mitigations for them are actively being researched. A couple of examples:

https://ethresear.ch/t/change-fork-choice-rule-to-mitigate-b...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10086

Which ways?

> Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place.

That's not necessarily true -- it depends on the marginal costs of each. Right now carbon capture is pretty expensive, but I can see that potentially changing with more investment put into it, which is what Stripe is trying to do.

I'm mainly talking about the present and the near future. But there's more to the equation than carbon in, carbon out. Recapture isn't going to fix the non-warming issues with emissions, like ocean acidification.

In a world without renewables, we'd never get to a place where the marginal costs of carbon capture would be lower than the marginal costs of burning fossil fuels for energy. The best hope for recapture is to be powered by cheap renewables. This requires having a lot more renewable capacity than we do now, which is absolutely something that's happening and should continue to happen, but it's not environmentally free. Mining and battery production/recycling/disposal have economic consequences.

In its best form carbon recapture is trading emissions today for the promise that they'll be mostly recaptured in the future using renewables. But renewables also have to serve our other needs. So all the carbon we burn in the meantime creates more demands for solar panels, wind farms, dams, wave farms, and batteries in the future.

Thus, it is better to not emit than to recapture. We recapture because we have ti.

While the energy usage of Proof-of-Stake systems like Bitcoin does seem embarrassingly excessive at first glance, I think there's more nuance here than it first may appear.

One of the problems with renewables is that they are spike-y and there's a limit to how much you can control the spike. When renewable sources peak, they can put more energy into the grid than the grid can safely handle (too much power can cause damage). Battery storage tech is currently lacking for dealing with this (though https://www.energyvault.com/ has an interesting take on this) and power degrades quickly when sent over power-lines, so that limits distribution over long distances.

In some scenarios, when energy becomes too plentiful, power companies may actually start charging negative costs - ie, they pay people to take more power out of the grid. When you combine these two factors, power producers have an economic incentive not to use renewables.

Enter Bitcoin - paying for power consumption is a huge component of operating costs. Mining rigs that are positioned near renewable power sources have an advantage in that they can just stop mining when energy prices get too high and start mining when energy prices are low enough. This provides a profitable way for miners and renewable power suppliers to operate together.

Deployed properly, Bitcoin mining actually improves the economics of renewables. Because doing so improves the profitability of mining, there is an economic incentive for miners to move toward renewables and build infrastructure that only mines when it is most profitable - ie, the times when not mining actually hurts renewable efforts.

NOTE: in theory non-cryptocurrency applications could serve this same role to make renewables more economical, but many applications have an always-on requirement; you can't run a data center only when the sun shines, but you can mine crypto only then.

If that were the only energy used for blockchains, then that would definitely eliminate the environmental arguments against cryptocurrencies, but I doubt you could run large blockchains on only renewable spikes.

Even then, if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs.

> if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs.

I don't exactly disagree - with better storage tech, we could put the energy to more immediate uses. But why postpone improving the economics of renewables until we have better battery tech (which has an unknown timeline)?

There are a few reasons I can think of. I'll be upfront about the iffiest of them. I philosophically don't like the notion of digital scarcity. I've blogged about it [1] before, but in short, capitalism is a pretty good system for dealing with scarcity in the physical world, but like any system, it doesn't work well for everyone. Cryptocurrencies can allow those who have been failed by the existing capitalist system to improve or worsen their situation, but they do so by introducing digital scarcity, which doesn't make more sense. Increasing the number of capitalistic systems on the Internet reinforces the capitalistic systems in the physical world, and I believe the flaws of capitalism can't be solved by more capitalism in the long term.

Secondly, renewables have been falling in price long before cryptocurrency mining picked up. The economics of renewables don't need the help.

But more realistically, as I alluded to upthread, blockchains don't only run on renewable spikes. Even if they ran on 100% renewables, that would mean solar panels, dams, and wind/wave farms would be rolled out specifically for mining. There's also the mining rigs that are constructed. That equals rare earth mineral mining, manufacturing, and transportation of resources for the sole purpose of cryptocurrency mining, and those actions all have environmental consequences.

When those consequences are in furtherance of something that I think is a net negative for society, I'd rather have the resources used for something else.

[1] https://meipouchou.com/blog/web3-metaverse-lain/

Stripe doesn't give two shits about the environment. It's just good PR. If they did, they would know that investing money in carbon recapture is not an effective way to combat climate change. I've had it up to here with people trying to find a technofix to all our problems. It's much more simple than that.

You think “carbon captures” is better PR than alternatives that do work such that they picked this instead? Or you think they just pulled it out of a hat? Or is your explanation just not that good?

The alternative that does work is simple -- don't do crypto until the extreme carbon emissions are handled to a reasonable degree. It is clear that is not the case now. The end goal is vague but with due diligence you can keep mining crypto and the environment can keep at least some of its richness.

Once the merge happens (proof of stake) and finally shard chains are deployed to mainnet ethereum[0], the main source of high fees and high emissions (ethash GPU farms) will fall tremendously.

0: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/

Yes, I think "we're investing in hightech innovation that will save the Earth" is better PR than "we're helping reforestation projects".

This is inline with the disconnected Silicon Valley / Tech elite group think that every single problem on Earth can be solvee with technology.

This is unrelated to the specific story, but as more and more companies and people I respect get involved with it, the more I realize I need to have a working knowledge of Crypto Currency so at the very least I can be involved in the discussion.

Does anyone have any good resources for learning the building blocks/vocabulary of Crypto Currency?

You could check out crypto.tre.gd

Reddit.com/r/buttcoin

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-s1...

Thanks!

This is the highest signal list I'm aware of on the topic: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/

For a book with more in the weeds details: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Technologies-C...

Thanks for the thorough answer.

https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

Am very glad to see this - was considering adding Coinbase's Commerce product due to quite a few requests to accept BTC payments for our hardware at https://kubesail.com - I suppose we have an extremely privacy focused user-base currently. Since we already use Stripe, I would be very glad to simply "enable bitcoin" as a payment method and leave it at that.

Somewhat sadly, I was quite involved in web3 several years ago when the web3.js project was very young - so I have mixed feelings about being glad "someone else is gonna handle it for me". I suppose in the last 5 years I've gone from "Not your keys, not your coins!" to "I just don't want to spend a ton of time on this". Does that mean crypto has failed to live up to the dream or does that mean it's finally boring enough for old-business-owner-me to make use of it? I can't quite decide!

I am a former Stripe employee, so I am quite biased, but I'll just say: In my experience, if the Collison brothers do anything - you'd be a fool to think it's not extremely well thought out. If I hear a rhyme I assume there is a damn good reason.

> Am very glad to see this

Am very sad to see this.

I suppose it is inevitable but it could even present problems for businesses in the UK where their banks are allergic to payment platforms that accept cryptocurrency.

It is bonkers to be downvoted for this, but I explained my reasoning in more detail in another comment if credulous people care to reflexively downvote me there too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30629808

For businesses in times of gold-based commerce, reliable bank notes were greatly welcome. Gold was heavy and hard to validate, whereas crypto is easy to validate but also so light that without proper key management it will float away :). I don't blame you for not also wanting to perform high stakes private key keeping on top of a business

I don't think this allows for crypto payments nor for 'discreet' transactions

See: https://support.stripe.com/questions/crypto-supportability-a...

Really? The OP link does not make this at all clear.

If the text says one thing, the opposite is suggested by the screenshots in the page.

I do not expect it to be clear to the people reviewing transactions at crypto-phobic banks.

I would prefer a payments provider that will have absolutely nothing to do with these businesses, but either way, the way this is being communicated looks like an attempt to split a hair too finely.

If you want to accept cryptocurrency payments and want a privacy focused service you can try Cryptapi...

Not to be negative, but when evaluating financial services CryptAPI are failing most checks:

- Three employees on LinkedIn, none with a background in finance, security, accounting, etc. - No audited security certifications (PCI DSS doesn't directly apply, but there should be _something_ that shows that _someone_ checked their processes/code/infrastructure for reasonable best practices) - No fraud protection or anything like that.

This could be nice for a crypto-only side-business that someone is running, but it can't be used by a serious company that needs to supplement their non-crypto payments with a crypto payments option.

Well, I've been using their service for quite a while and it works great.

I like that each transaction is forwarded to my wallet right after the first confirmation on the blockchain, so the money is always on my side.

Not saying I don’t agree with you, but a lot of fiat measures or security certs are based off the weaknesses of tradfi. I am guessing that crypto payment processor requires a much thinner layer of trust and leverages a lot of the underlying blockchain technology without having to build more glue around it.

> I suppose we have an extremely privacy focused user-base currently.

If you're serious about this, you should strongly consider Monero.

> Build your crypto business with Stripe

I would hesitate building any business on Stripe. However, if you are considering using Stripe Crypto, build the integration it in a way that you can easily migrate away.

We built our credit card processing and invoicing on Stripe. We've only processed $2.5m and now we are migrating away. We are 2 months into the migration.

It's worth the migration cost, working with Stripe has been an absolute nightmare. Really wish we had built our billing system differently... and not with Stripe.

Do you mind giving more information? I've mostly heard good things about Stripe about things like their documentation and APIs. I'd love to hear stuff contrary to that. I personally don't use Stripe either but I'm interested in hearing your reasons so we don't go through a lengthy migration that ends up biting us in the back.

Documentation is amazing, dashboard is amazing, pricing is high, you have to have a lot of volume before they will consider lower rates and/or removing/lowering the flat per-transaction fee. I'm also migrating away. Another reason I'm leaving is in-person payments. They have moved forward on that front but their offering is still pretty lacking. Lastly other processors will profit-share with you much earlier, stripe will do it but again, you have to have a lot of volume first.

I'm not OP, but I have a story to share:

I worked for a company which is selling a tool that allows windows users to spoof unique identifiers of their computer. A lot of software these days grabs MAC addresses, disk and monitor serials in order to identify users. So, this tool just hooks into the windows kernel, and returns made up identifiers when a program requests them via the windows API. It does not change any files on the user's disk, and it does not modify any other programs in RAM. Literally the only thing it does is hooking the kernel like a 3rd party anti-virus. It is basically like the "randomize MAC address" and "change advertising identifier" on modern smartphones. Just for windows.

Well, one day I woke up with this email in my inbox: https://i.imgur.com/g91KDqE.png

They stopped the payouts, as this tool was deemed as a "restricted product". The cited point as the reason of the termination is the following:

> Compliance with Applicable Laws: You must use the Services in a lawful manner, and must obey all laws, rules, and regulations (“Laws”) applicable to your use of the Services and to Transactions. As applicable, this may include compliance with domestic and international Laws related to the use or provision of financial services, notification and consumer protection, unfair competition, privacy, and false advertising, and any other Laws relevant to Transactions.

As it came to light, a 70bn company namely Activision filed a lawsuit and subpoena against us as the tool is used to bypass their (poorly) implemented anti-cheat. Nothing had been decided in court yet (whether the product is unfair competition or piracy), but stripe still chose to just kill the account for our core product.

I'm glad that they didn't lock away the money for 180 days minimum like PayPal usually does. Employees need to be paid, and this just sucks for everyone.

Curious what happened with your integration and subsequent migration?

I work at Stripe and I'd like to hear what went wrong here. (Feel free to email me directly at edwin@stripe.com.)

This page is more useful: https://support.stripe.com/questions/crypto-supportability-a...

Basically can sell crypto for KYC backed cash in the US. No credit cards. No paying in crypto?

Thanks for puncturing the silly hype.

Things like this where companies reinvent traditional payment processing “but with crypto” is the antithesis of what crypto used to stand for.

As a former believer in the original goal of private p2p digital cash, I am saddened by what crypto has become in practice.

Crypto is just centralized as the traditional financial system.

Oh and nobody actually uses it as a currency. I feel like I’m one of few who’s actually purchased goods/services.

There are still crypto projects whose primary focus is privacy (eg monero). But unsurprisingly, it's difficult to spend that money without going through a KYC process.

I think the "dream" of truly private transactions was always unrealistic. Governments have many tools at their disposal to get what they want.

Even cash is only so private. In the USA cash purchases over $10,000 require a report to the IRS.

Monero is my favorite crypto project and the only token I still use today. Their randomX pow protocol is brilliant and the anonymity is opaque as you can get! Requiring those huge memory pages for efficient mining is a great solution for deterring mining botnets.

> I think the "dream" of truly private transactions was always unrealistic. Governments have many tools at their disposal to get what they want.

Unfortunately you may be right. I sure hope not.

Particl.io has built a marketplace for this. It hasn't taken off yet but the 'dream' seems to be their dream too

Just recently moved from Stripe to Paddle after realizing their new tax collection stuff locked out a bunch of my customers--it only supports credit card transactions, not Apple Pay or Google or any of the EU payment options, and Stripe has no ETA on fixing this. With the tax bits, I still have to file and worry about thresholds too, so I switched to Paddle. On top of completely eliminating the tax remittance crap, I also have PayPal support now (highly requested by customers, especially international).

Is Paddle still Only open to SaaS only ?

Last time I check they won’t even accept any other business.

If by SaaS you mean subscription, then no. I sell one-time software purchases through them.

I mean something non-Software. I quite like their overall model and integrated experience. Along with Paypal support, while not getting any mention much in tech cycle it is surprisingly popular.

I am a SaaS but I sell a lifetime subscription as a standalone product, works fine with Paddle.

> their new tax collection stuff

Couldn't you turn that off ?

Well, yeah, but I need it so I'm not sure what you're getting at? I didn't just turn it on for funsies, tax remittance sucks. There are APIs you can use, but they're more expensive/complicated than stripe's tax solution that they acquired. Paddle (or some other merchant of record) makes it even easier.

Ah ok, I meant if you want to do your own Tax collection with Stripe AND get more payments options for your users, then it is possible, correct ?

(but here you prefer Paddle to remit EUR VAT taxes for you instead)

I know, that for setting up my stripe account, I HAD to provide a credit card number, which I did not had, as they are not needed in EU.

My European debit card number worked just fine (as it basically always does when someone asks for a “credit card”)

I only had a EC card, but now have a credit card as well.

(all those different standards are a bit annoying)

By choosing to only have an EC card you’re making a deliberate choice to make your life difficult by using an incredibly obscure method of payment, no?

You can hardly expect those to work even in other EU countries, much less with an US based online business.

Almost everybody else in the world has a visa or a mastercard (or unionpay)

"By choosing to only have an EC card"

That was the standard normal card, I had ever since with that account - which is what all the people around me have - but it does work all across europe, in every shop I went.

Paypal is fine with it, so is coinbase. And every other online service I used.

(while backpacking international, I indeed had a credit card at that time)

So I recently only got a credit card(again), to be able to use Stripe. But most won't bother to do this, unless they have to.

> but it does work all across europe, in every shop I went.

That’s because deep inside it’s secretly something like a mastercard maestro, no?

Why don’t you just get a “normal” card from N26 or similar?

I used to have one of these weird not-visa not-mastercard debit cards, trying to use it internationally was just asking for trouble.

"That’s because deep inside it’s secretly something like a mastercard maestro, no?"

Maybe? There is a maestro sign on it, but it is not a debit card.

But my point was, that I do not know, nor want to know all the details of banking communication. I want it to work.

It is a normal card around here and it does work in europe. So I never had the need to change, until now. So now I have a credit card, too and that is fine for me. But most other people here still don't, as most do not do international transactions.

So if Stripe wants to get into that market, they likely will have to adopt. No one here would offer stripe on their webshop - with only a few being able to use it.

Late appendix.

Apparently I do have an debit card and apparently something at Stripe had changed, since when I tried it some months ago, because now it all worked(without me changing anything) and I did not even needed my credit card. Who knows.

I'm trying to run a marketplace, would that be possible through paddle?

I skimmed the landing page. It looks like a collection of existing products and they are saying here’s how you could build on ramp and off ramp products. They are basically saying use our product to handle fiat currency and the customers. And once fiat leg of transaction is complete it’s upto you to manage the crypto part. I don’t see anything Crypto specific product here. For example, custodial Wallet as a solution. Am I missing something super obvious?

They used to not allow crypto currencies to use these products (credit card processing, treasury) due to the fraud risk and regulations. Now they are

I’m a long time crypto skeptic, but maybe I am turning my ship around a bit. It’s very conflicting subject because I bought btc out of spite in 2010 to prove a point to my friend that deflationary currency makes no sense. I guess the jokes on me.

The whole thing was a pure toy. Way more than doge coin or NFTs are today. I got 2K btc with the money I usually put to vanguard monthly.

Through out the years I’ve kept my view that the whole thing is a joke, but not so funny anymore. Going mainstream did nothing good to the scene and rising price created this current eco-catastrophe.

Yet this year is the first I actually used crypto as it was intended to transfer value instead of just cashing out. Defi and NFTs are not yet useful for me but the discussions around ethereum development are super interesting and keep pushing forward regardles of cryptobro scene.

I used to think that maybe this is similar to early web era, but now I shifted to think that we are possibly in the vacuum tube era of cryptocurrencies.

At least now it looks like this thing will outlive me. It sure didn’t look that way earlier. When price crashed it somehow felt right, but it never stayed there.

Writing post like this is probably the final top signal X)

That’s an interesting 180 degree turn from saying “no” to crypto support to now allowing crypto support. What regulations changed behind the scenes?

If anything, with the recent executive order, I expect the regulatory landscape to change quickly to make cryptocurrencies even less desirable to support for payment.

As expected, lots of people unhappy. RailsConf had to cancel a talk on web3. I wonder if Stripe will face the same pressure.

I'm sure this will go very differently from the last cryptocurrency bubble, where a whole bunch of merchants started accepting them, just to realize half a year later that beneath the hype, nobody was really interested in using these so-called currencies as an actual currency and quietly shelved it.

Used to be a big Bitcoin advocate, we accepted it on our website but removed it due to it just not being worth it for the odd sale with the extra accounting required.

Bitcoins original goal was to be an online currency, this has not transpired nor do I think it ever will which is why I (unfortunately!) got out. Talking to random people on the street the main feeling I'm getting now is as some sort of gold analogue, which I also think is doomed to fail. I just don't see Bitcoin growing out of it's main use which is criminality and unregulated gambling.

I think you're not correct, your timescale is just too short. Monetization happens in three phases, roughly.

First, it is the store-of-value phase. Anticipation of future value, based on past and present value, will cause people to hoard a good as a savings technique. Bitcoin is still in this phase. Usually when you say this on the internet, someone will come in and say "Oh, but Bitcoin's volatility makes it a poor store-of-value!" But again, it's short-sighted. Looking at the 200 WMA will easily demonstrate the store-of-value aspect of Bitcoin.

Second phase is "medium of exchange". This is the thing people always point to and say that Bitcoin has failed. But it hasn't failed, it just hasn't reached it yet. This phase is started when a good becomes valuable enough that merchants begin to demand or incentivize payments in the good. As you mentioned, there are accounting, tax and technological impediments currently that make it less convenient to accept Bitcoin payments. These will be overcome with time, however, as the impediments are eliminated, or the value of Bitcoin makes it economically worthwhile to transact anyway.

The final phase will be "unit of account". Once a Bitcoin circular economy starts, people will begin to think of prices in Bitcoin, instead of dollars, euros, etc.

This may sound far-fetched to skeptics, but I consider this to be a near guarantee to happen eventually. Bitcoin's network effects and unique balance of incentives more or less ensures that it can't be killed, that everyone is better off participating in the network or they will be worse off in the long run.

Indeed this is by design. Cryptocurrencies are deflationary, which means that it is always better to hold your coins than to spend them. They must be deflationary as there is no reason to mine them or buy in early other than the promise of future gains. Working well as an investment is antithetical to working well as a currency.

Stop flagging my legitimate concern and questions about the scam that are Crypto/NFTs market

Are you guys CCP agents trying to censor the people against this scam?

You want the news but not the concerns? c'mon lol

---

That's very sad, this should be banned Why should people accept money created out of thin air and speculation?

Why let that kind of criminal money into the economy?

Now america amassed ton of stock (coinbase, paypal and the plethora of other services), who really owns crypto coins nowadays?

This stuff smells bad, and yes, it should be banned

Shame on anyone who participate into this giant, state organized crime against the economy

Poor people won't realize they became even poorer because someone's random NFT picturing a $5 pixel art picture from Fiver, is worth more than their house

When can I accept crypto payments for products and services with Stripe?

I don’t expect this to have a lot of volume from the start, but it’s important that payment platforms like Stripe start accepting cryptocurrency so this can get bigger.

My respect for Stripe plummeted when I reached out about a closed API and got a passive aggressive answer from support.

I don't think I've ever gotten that kind of rude sarcasm/passive aggression from a simple support inquiry, and I vowed never to use their services again.

Their competitors to this specific API were much nicer to work with and onboarded us after some basic introductions, so part of me wonders what other fronts Stripe has better but less well known competitors on.

Can you share the API/competitor?

Marqeta, Treasury Prime, Synctera

All companies that actually spoke to us and assisted when Stripe Treasury essentially said "why are you bothering us?"

Can you post the reply? I'm curious about what they said.

Sure, I inquired about the API, and got a templated reply that simply repeated the API's landing page

I replied saying I'd be interested in knowing what they're looking for in potential beta partners:

> That is good to hear. All you need to do is follow the instructions listed in my previous email and wait on contact from the Treasury team. I am happy I was able to assist you.

> Thank you for choosing Stripe!

Keep in mind the "instructions" are to fill out the form that got me into this email chain in the first place: in other words there's nothing about what I asked there.

There's the whole "That's good to hear" reply to a question I asked...

And I was especially taken aback by the whole facetious "happy I was able to assist you" bit after completely ignoring my question.

The entire interaction felt like "why are you bothering us", which is honestly would be a fair position if they're looking for established players for example... but why not be direct?

We had other companies flat out say their partners want X million in funding before they'll work with you, and that was fine.

It'd actually take less work than writing out a non-answer like that

Doesn't sound like you even interacted with a human being but a badly written bot.

This doesn't come as surprising since they have timed this with Biden's executive order on regulating cryptocurrencies, so this is probably why you are seeing Stripe pushing Crypto right now.

Also, all smaller cryptocurrency on ramp businesses are doomed.

Some high quality humor on the page with "Cube Thingy 1", "Cube Thingy 2", and "Cube Thingy 3"

And the Cube Thingies are real! https://niftygateway.com/collections/cube-thingies

"Not yet Available". Aww.

Come back later today for minting time—open edition at 6:30 PM ET for two hours.

I just want to say that the extraordinary unseriousness of this (and the NFT twitter icon, really!?) has convinced me that Stripe is through the looking glass, now.

This is such a demoralising turn of events.

"We will not rest until 1 billion people are collecting NFTs." Is it Apr. 1st already ?

Every day is April 1st now.

More and more I am convinced that the weasel that crawled into the LHC and got itself killed only died _inside_ the collapsing time bubble it somehow created through an unspecified accident and in which we are now all living.

Outside the time bubble, it scampered away and Brexit, Trump's victory, the Ukraine war and the Tiger King series never happened.

I'm failing to understand what this is.

Is stripe adding crypto support to the existing API (USD, EUR, and now some crypto coins). Or are they just allowing crypto businesses to accept fiat?

The main point of crypto these days appears to be to replace the current middlemen with different middlemen who can make more profit while offering the consumer much less legal protection.

It's a bit concerning.

How to participate in crypto? Just head to a privately owned exchange that might be traded at a stock exchange! Alternatively use a startup service that in turn relies on a privately owned backend that might as well go public at any point.

Or get to localcrypto, localbitcoin, localmonero and find a peer who is willing to give you crypto for your cash.

CryptoBarter is here!

So we simply ~~kill the batman~~ -- er... trade resources for resources, and determine a balance between what I am asking for vs your offer?

Its amazing we need digital fn currency to algorithm this bullshit for us to maintain trust in such NOTES

Which are run by private companies and take cuts don't they? Also last time I checked the rates on P2P exchanges are ridiculous for any trusted seller

At least on Binance there are no fees involved in P2P trading

or more protection, depending on your perspective. I'd think russians wanting to interface with US services right now would find crypto offers more protection than fiat.

Further, I know a few small businesses that have had large sums of money locked up by services like paypal without any communication. Crypto also provides far more protection from issues like that.

Except any company facilitating this would be in violation of US sanctions. No way Stripe-crypto is going to be a 1-click money laundering tool

I don't know how this applies to their crypto offering, but:

> Stripe currently does not support users located in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. While users with direct or indirect activities involving Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are not broadly considered prohibited by Stripe at this time, all major credit card networks have announced that they are ceasing services to Russian financial institutions. Additionally, Stripe will not process transactions involving sanctioned Russian financial institutions and does not support Mir. This means transactions involving Russian-issued cards are likely to be unsuccessful. We encourage you to ensure compliance with relevant sanctions regulations in your jurisdiction.

https://support.stripe.com/questions/impact-of-sanctions-on-...

Why the fsck would they block Ukrainians? Makes no sense.

I figure they are betting that Ukraine will be sooner or later part of Russia.

or the limited partners of the private equity firms that invested in them are Russian oligarchs telling them what to do lol

This is pretty common (simply by the size of the investments), and Yuri Milner's DST Global was in some funding rounds so they probably have a big stake.

Yuri Milner is exhibit A of how the offshore feeders fund a bunch of US tech startups, mostly for the alpha, but that also comes with influence

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/yu...

So, sanctions result in cutting off Russia, investors result in cutting off Ukraine ha.

I don't know but for some context, see the end of [1]. (It's not about Stripe specifically, but about why banks do this.) The whole article is useful background.

[1] https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/moving-money-international...

It's just bizarre. You end up paying your cut twice: once to convert it into crypto (paying the exact same card fees you'd pay for a direct card payment), and then once again to pay someone like Stripe for this. For either a business owner or a customer, that's a loss - increased infrastructure fees just to do business.

It's the opposite of the crypto dream. But that's not Stripe's fault; it's Bitcoin's, for not creating a product which is actually capable of living up to its goals, and instead requiring all this 'glue business' to make it work. I hope someone else creates a new radically-different cryptocurrency which can be truly new, and not just a novelty stuck on top of Visa/Mastercard.

I think this is exactly right. The implementation of the technology has necessitated all of these different layers, each of which create new opportunities to take a cut.

Many of the crypto businesses in the ecosystem talk about removing financial friction and control, but it seems they are only interested in introducing their own versions of them, and building their own little Wall Street while they can still get in on the ground floor.

Here's a great example: how are you going to "reach the unbanked" in the third world if you have transaction fees, paid by the user, inherent in your architecture? That's just nonsense. It's a step down from cash in every way. Cryptos which aren't feeless but talk about the "unbanked" are full of hot air. And this pattern of false promises is all over this space.

transaction fees on L2s are in fractions of a cent, certainly lower than the fees paid to PayPal or Stripe on regular international payments.

a feeless public ledger seems unlikely to ever work at scale; it would immediately be polluted by spam.

A feeless public ledger already exists, is transacting around the world, and has overcome spam attacks multiple times at this point: Nano, from one of the original developers of Bitcoin.

thanks, hadn’t heard of Nano before, it looks interesting.

I should correct to say a decentralized public ledger “free of transaction costs” is hard if not impossible. Nano seems to remove fees by having users engage in PoW (ie: cost of energy expenditure), so it is feeless but not free.

there are many many more ways to acquire crypto, which many many people have done already

it sounds like you have only attempted to acquire it by a combination of

1) Purchasing it

2) with a credit or debit card

All it comes down to is that its a $2 trillion market with an extremely high volume of transactions, at all and when compared to the capitalization of the market

so service providers cater to that, and fortunately for the end users, a very large portion of that $2 trillion did not require people to pay once to convert their existing cash into crypto.

So liquid, in fact, that it needs a host of very opaque and questionable stable coins to maintain some semblance of liquidity.

A $2T market cap doesn't mean a whole lot. It's unclear how much money actually changes hands in this system. You and I could make a $2T market cap system today, right now. I'll start an excel spreadsheet and sell you a cell for ~$40. BAM! $2T market cap excel spreadsheet, even though only $40 has changed hands! Neat, eh?

I've argued with crypto enthusiasts long enough to anticipate the requisite "WHAT ABOUT STOCKS" retort. Yes. Stock market caps are also a sloppy measure, though significantly less so in magnitude. Businesses are regularly purchased outright at their market caps. There are, of course, exceptions, like Gamestop, Tesla, AMC, and many other meme stocks. But these are the exception to the rule.

The questionable stable coins are 10% of the total market capitalization ($180bn) and even the worst, most fear addled estimates are that 90% of that is paid up capital, where dollars were exchanged directly to create an equivalent stablecoin, and a large portion of it is overcollateralized. The people just wish that was 100%, in the case of Tether.

Strawman arguments are interesting, because usually it involves creating an argument nobody had offered just to discredit that argument, hoping to discredit the thing people actually were talking about. But in your case, your argument isn't a problem? The crypto ecosystem doesn't need to host stablecoins, it just does because people launched them and others found utility in that. They contribute to the market capitalization, and the liquidity, bolstering my observation. Is there a term for that? Reverse strawman?

Hmm. I'm not sure I follow. My point was two-fold:

1. Market capitalization is fairly meaningless, especially when you don't know how much money is changing hands (wash trading, for example, is rampant in the crypto world). I'm confused why you're citing market caps, again, to try to suggest stable coins don't play a significant role in crypto's liquidity. That doesn't make any sense.

2. Liquidity is very much lacking in the crypto world. Bitcoin's order books are extremely thin, which is one reason volatility is so high. Stable coins were developed not in a vacuum, but precisely because liquidity was so lacking.

> Market capitalization is fairly meaningless

I agree with that. Marketcap + Volume can still be compared to other assets. Determining how much is wash trading versus something else is unfalsifiable in crypto, the nature of transactions cannot be determined with only a limited analysis available on centralized and decentralized exchanges. But not the unlit markets, or the nature of transactional demand.

Compared to currencies, crypto assets function similarly with M0 and M1 being the tiny liquid cash thats actually moving and M2 and M3 being the illiquid much larger aspect of the currency. It requires a completely new standard to criticize crypto assets based on the exact same observation.

Compared to securities and commodities, crypto's much lower marketcap and high volume (see my first paragraph for why I don't mind the volume) is a great proportion. So, in your two-fold point, there still must be some standard for relative comparison, what would your alternative be? I choose market capitalization, understanding that a significant portion of it is relevant to value transferred from other financial ecosystems directly for exchange of the crypto asset, supporting its valuation much better than a low float asset we make in a spreadsheet.

> Liquidity is very much lacking in the crypto world

Its pretty decent. The unlit markets are bigger than the lit ones. Any OTC desk can corroborate that. Someone trying to swap in and out can use both the lit markets and the darkpools. For the size of the market, crypto's liquidity again relatively great. Of course, I see how paradoxical it is to mention "size" of the market, again, but you're not leaving me with much in the English language to work with for relative comparison. Although its totally fine for me. The market works for me.

> Stable coins were developed not in a vacuum, but precisely because liquidity was so lacking.

Although I disagree with the liquidity issue, I don't ... care about this distinction? I consider stablecoins to fulfill a market need and are crypto assets, the market noticed and used them, some of the biggest ones are currently surrogates of fiat assets. Liquidity begets liquidity, so anything that attracts liquidity is a net good to me. I don't consider the crypto space to "need" them, I consider the market to have chosen the thing that fulfilled a need, and that grows/grew the market.

> The main point of crypto these days appears to be...

Maybe you can ask people who get their funds randomly blocked and restricted by PayPal and seized for months/years while an "investigation" takes place if there's any use-case for crypto.

Maybe you can ask ordinary Russian citizens what their legal protections are worth once they've been un-personed by the world.

Or perhaps you can ask Canadian mandate protesters what their legal protections in their currency are worth at their bank middlemen.

Crypto has not helped any of these people.

Is it not possible to hypothesize how cryptocurrencies afford them options that other financial tools do not?

Do you know the reasons traditional financial services do not afford such options?

I can hypothesize those...and then also hypothesize a counter as to why it won't help, for long at least. Maybe you'd like to counter with an actual example of how it's enabled them, and why increased regulation of the crypto space won't prevent that (i.e., "I was able to buy a Domino's pizza with donated crypto" - additional regulation that would prevent you from traditional banking could also make such crypto, with its traceable history, be unspendable. They can't take it from you, but they can levy the same threats they do for people who ignore sanctions, which would mean crypto you've touched is now effectively untradeable amongst regulated businesses).

How about the people who saw crypto wealth disappear with the ebb and flow of the cybercrime and money laundering industry?

Or the people who will inevitably be fleeced when the main settlement token is an outright fraud which implodes?

>Maybe you can ask ordinary Russian citizens what their legal protections are worth once they've been un-personed by the world.

Their own government will "un-person" them for converting Rubles into crypto too.

The capability of self-custody is the thing to pay attention to.

Nothing else has this capability to the same extent.

Today we store most of our wealth in assets (market index funds, stocks, real estate, etc.) and some (typically very little, and rarely outside of a bank account) in cash.

Most of this is not actually controlled by you.

With BTC (and cryptocurrency more generally) you have the capability of having your private key in a hardware wallet under your control and retain the capability to transact independently of other institutions.

If you keep some percentage of your wealth here you retain certain advantages that you can't get elsewhere. The closest alternative would be having cash (in cash form), but it's hard to have that much, hard to travel with it (you can memorize your wallet seed words and recreate your wallet on the other side of a border), and cash is vulnerable to government stupidity (see: Russia).

I'm not sympathetic to the Canadian truck protests, but whether or not you care about what they're protesting - it's the capability wielded by the Canadian government over their private finances that's alarming.

All this is to say the focus on middleman and paying with crypto in the general case is kind of missing the forest for the trees.

The capability of a global self-custody capable store of value that can be trivially moved anywhere is a big deal and puts power back in the hands of individuals.

It's funny because some Bitcoin evangelists point to the US govt's 1933 confiscation of a gold as a reason to use Bitcoin instead.

... How is nabbing a gold ingot and different than nabbing a storage device? If anything, the threat surface of a digital wallet is much greater (you could steal it remotely if the user doesn't have good cybersecurity practices, unlike a gold ingot).

The storage device doesn't matter - it's the seed words that generate the wallet that matter. If you memorize them you're good (short of someone beating it out of you or legally compelling you - even then they'd have to be able to prove it existed in the first place).

You can trivially prove your gold ingot exists because you can just find it. It's also way harder to move your gold ingot out of your war-torn country, harder to transact with it, etc. The storage device does not hold the actual coins, just a private key that lets you update the public ledger that determines ownership (thinking the storage device holds the coins is a common misunderstanding).

I'm an open-minded skeptic, but there are real technology advantages to blockchain and cryptocurrency, there are a lot of scams too for sure - but that's not the interesting part. The HN median opinion on this is wrong as it often is (it was wrong about EVs and Tesla too).

You can also bury your ingots/drives deep in the wilderness and only memorize where they are at

Obviously that is not as easy/useful/realistic as a wallet you can generate from memorized seed words to instantly recover your wealth anywhere.

How does that protect you from someone who can seize your device? If they can seize your device they can also seize any physical assets that you possess. So your wealth exists only nominally, you can't really spend it.

The device holds a private key that can be regenerated from 12 seed words.

The device itself doesn't really matter if you know these 12 words.

The key is what lets you update ownership information on the public block chain. The wallet doesn't hold any coins on the device, just a key that let's you update the chain of public ownership.

For example:

- You live in Russia and see the writing on the wall for invasion and currency collapse

- Prior to the invasion you move 90% of your wealth into a BTC wallet.

- The invasion happens and the currency collapses.

- You want to escape the country, but the border exits are guarded by corrupt guards that will steal any money/valuables you try to cross with.

- You memorize the 12 seed words of your wallet and cross the border with nothing.

- On the other side you recreate your wallet and restore access to your wealth in a safe country.

This isn't just a hypothetical, this kind of thing has already happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29518181

So a key step in there is finding someone that's willing to take your local currency in exchange for a not-local asset that you can access later.

Would it be very different if that asset was Euros? Or ownership of gold that's stored in Chile?

If you need any documents you can store them in a secret passworded account.

You're right that if you have access to foreign bank accounts or currency that can be an option (can be hard to get if you're in a country with a hostile government). Often BTC is the most accessible option available.

Crypto is the only option where you have the (practical) capability of true custodial ownership (as opposed to trusting a third party to hold it for you). Practical meaning you can actually take it with you in a low risk way (you're probably not escaping your hostile government with gold bars if you're even able to buy them in the first place).

First of all, if you have to liquidate 90% of your wealth in the middle of a market crash you're going to lose most of it before you even get it out of the country. This, of course, assuming you can get out of the country, which for many people is not a realistic option. And finally, movements of capital across borders are highly regulated. You can't simply cross the border and "recreate" your wealth on the other side, because all you will have re-created is a pile of dirty money that now will have to be laundered at a great expense. All this is illegal, by the way.

> "if you have to liquidate 90% of your wealth in the middle of a market crash"

That's why I said before the invasion, if the market already crashed probably too late to matter, but you'd still want to get whatever you have out.

> "And finally, movements of capital across borders are highly regulated. You can't simply cross the border and "recreate" your wealth on the other side, because all you will have re-created is a pile of dirty money that now will have to be laundered at a great expense. All this is illegal, by the way."

We're talking about escaping an autocratic authoritarian government. With BTC you can simply cross the border and recreate your wealth in a way that protects you from that government accessing it - that's my point.

I don't think you're arguing in good faith so this is the last reply from me.

Indeed... to me it seems clear that you have little experience escaping autocratic authoritarian governments, and that you don't know much about international finance either (or finance for that matter), yet you somehow feel qualified to talk about these topics and give foolish advice. Don't do that. You're not helping anyone, or any cause.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion of bad faith. Luckily others reading this thread can come to their own conclusions.

You can currently take physical possession of commodities including all the precious medals, one doesn't have to allow their stock certs to be help by others, cash and other such methods still work but most people chose to let middlemen do it for them, just like most people do for Crypto judging by the market valuations of some of those companies.

You're right of course, but it's way riskier to take physical possession of commodities and it's harder to move them. These are things crypto is better at.

For cash, the advantage is that crypto is independent of government action and global. The crash of the Russian currency is an example of why this is important. Crypto is obviously more volatile than USD, so there's a tradeoff depending on the government backed currency's stability.

It's also harder to move similar amounts of wealth in cash or commodities (you could have self custody of a wallet with a billion dollars in it, can't really move a billion dollars in cash or gold).

These advantages are real and people are relying on them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29518181

As are the disadvantages as evidenced by all the ransoms paid in crypto, these ransoms are also evidence that the security required to keep your crypto secure isn't exactly all that common in some of the market segments the crytpo companies are trying to reach.

I don't disagree with you and I don't pretend there are no risks with cryptocurrency. The security requirements are obviously harder, the UX is bad and even technical users fuck it up.

Some of this will be improved by tooling, some of it is just what's required for self-custody.

Still, the capability it provides is new and gives individuals more power even with these tradeoffs. That capability is valuable and shouldn't be dismissed imo. It's a lever against authoritarian control and increasing centralization of power.

Like seemingly everything these days, crypto has a grifter problem.

It's becoming a predictable story - something with potential arises, with a community of mostly true believers. The true believers make money, but they're not optimizing for profit, they're optimizing for making the ecosystem better. The grifters, optimizing only for profit, not only start to take the lion's share of the profit, but also attract more grifters. The grifters eventually outnumber the true believers, because:

1. true believers are hard to make; grifters already exist

2. grifting as a skill can be applied anywhere; true believers need relevant skills

3. lower profits and higher burnout leads to attrition among the true believers; some of them even convert to grifters

So the grifters completely dominate the market. They then siphon the market dry, offering essentially nothing in return, and then move onto the next grift, flush with the proceeds from the last one.

Who is on the hook if credit card fraud happens? If i just want to accept crypto payment what's my incentive?

I just spent 12 months investigating crypto. I bought come coins, got lucky on that ENS airdrop, made a smart contract, bought an NFT, learned some Solidity, joined some Discords, listen to some podcasts, set up a miner and generally tried to learn about this area.

2 weeks ago I left all but one discord, unfollowed all Web3 specific accounts on Twitter and stopped looking at Binance etc.

My life has improved considerably. I’m sure someone is getting rich in there but I can’t work out who or how amongst the hype, pumps, grifters, scams and outright criminals.

I’m ok missing the boat if it turns out to be any more than a raft. My sanity and concentration is worth far more than whatever rubbish they are all peddling.

If you got into crypto in 2021-22.. you already missed the boat. This is the cashing out phase.

people have been saying this since 2011. thats not to say that the speculation that is taking place in crypto isnt ridiculous and destructive, but your claim is completely unfounded

The risk reward ratio is just not there anymore. We may see $100K bitcoin, sure, but that's just 3x, you can get that buying and holding TSLA starting today. But IMHO the risk of bitcoin crashing to, say, $10K is pretty significant, especially when Russia sanctions could be used as pretext to regulate crypto to death.

Sure, but that's only looking at BTC. There's a lot of other coins still jumping a 100-1000x in this bull run, even if BTC only went up a few times. The point about it all crashing is true though, high risk-high reward (and that risk likely outweighs the reward for BTC in my opinion).

this is how you prove that you just learned about crypto last week. if you think that bitcoin was more of a sure thing and less risky relative to reward in 2011 then you have no idea what you are talking about. first of all if bitcoin crashed from 65k to 10k that wouldn't even be the worst drop bitcoin has ever seen. thats like an 85 percent drop. bitcoin has seen MULTIPLE 95+ percent drops over the course of it's life. it's harder to regulate bitcoin today than it has ever been because there are multiple fortune 500 companies and s&p companies that would be massively negatively effected by this change. bitcoin is in a less risky political position than it has ever been in before.

I've been in crypto since 2012..

Very bullish for you to think TSLA is going to be a $3T company in the near future! I'm sure it will happen at some point. Maybe it will due to inflation hah.

But on average the market takes very roughly 7 years (probably more) to double your money. So you are talking about a ~10 year time frame.

Realize TSLA is not an EV company.

Who knows at this stage but I’m not smart enough to work it out that’s for sure

we haven't build economies on crypto yet. I think we are in buy-and-wait-for-price-up phase. Once we use crypto for utility, we will be in different phase.

> buy-and-wait-for-price-up phase

This is what I did 2-4 years ago... then it started going down by a lot so I cashed out. I actually did lose. Not THAT much, thankfully.

Can it not compete with, say, gold, a lump of metal that does nothing and is not able to be sent over the internet?

Because if it can, then crypto market cap is 5-10x undervalued.

> I’m sure someone is getting rich in there but I can’t work out who or how amongst the hype, pumps, grifters, scams and outright criminals.

I think you figured out exactly who is profiting from it.

After I posted and reread it I thought “well I guess that is who’s getting rich”

Went through this same cycle back in 2017-2018 and I realized that I didn't have enough energy to keep up with all the news popping up and some seemingly spiking the price of a crypto while other news just as juicy/valuable/hype-worthy didn't seem to do the same.

I know some friends who made good money from NFTs and some crypto pumps but most have either stayed flat or lost money.

So, I'm in the same place as you, I'll put my money on less "cool" investments and continue to watch the space.

Yeah you missed this bull run if you’ve only been in for 12 months. The run up in 2020 was the time to be in it. For example you could have bought SOL at sub $1 and made millions. I know so many people (literally dozens) that made that one trade and they’re now set for life.

So much of crypto is about being early to the bull run, finding the few coins that are going to outpace everything else, and just putting a few thousand into each.

Once the first big pump happens there are maybe a few other 5-10x opportunities, but certainly 2 years in everything is dried up. Exit pumps have already started and most major CT personalities are selling, regardless of what they’re saying publicly.

The good news is that you’ll have another opportunity in another 2-3 years.

Respect for actually getting into the thick of things and trying it out. I hope some of the hype can die down without totally killing the momentum.

Thanks, I made a legit concerted effort and just could make it stick. Maybe I’ll look stupid in the future but from where I am now with the information I have I’m ok with that.

Cool. Any thoughts on the article you're commenting on?

They forgot to update their terms of service.

> Prohibited Businesses

> You must not use Stripe’s services for the following activities:

> * Pyramid schemes

> * ‘Get rich quick’ schemes

> * No value added services

> * Predatory investment opportunities

You know they use Dollars, Euros, Pounds, etc as well for all of these scams.

Should Stripe ban businesses that deal in Dollars, Euros, Pounds, etc?

Serious question: Do you think pyramid schemes, get rich quick schemes, no value added services and predatory investments are new?

stripe: “we got to do crypto, or we lose talent“

is it one of those things?

I hear talent exodus to “anything crypto, web3“ is getting real

Noooo Stripe not you.

Oh please. Long time Stripe fan and customer here - this makes me sad from the inside. They even mention NFT marketplaces - scams all over the places. Why would they want to support use cases like that?

> Why would they want to support use cases like that?

Money? They are a business

> They are a business

with poor ethics

Because there is money to be had, and people like money.

I find the sheer volume of anger and hatred surrounding this and other related announcements completely unhinged. Why are so many people threatened by services that give their users options?

HN hates everything.

It's wild, considering the cryptopunk thing is happening _now_, not in the 90s.

The tech world is full of dreamers and know-it-alls. Proto-HN Slashdot is a great historical document of our malignant naysaying.

It would be great to have a place to have engaging discussion regarding Y-Combinator-backed startups that good hackers would find interesting.

Because if Bitcoin specifically takes off it will force governments to balanced budgets, exposing a lot of hidden corruption. Detractors cherry-pick concerns about energy usage, but never show the energy usage of the existing system for comparison.

You’re suggesting that these HN readers are criticizing crypto because they’re trying to keep government corruption under the rug?

I really never know how to read comments like this anymore.

Are you serious? Are you joking?

Are you for real?

Crypto right now, while being used by under 1% of population use, uses 40% of the energy of the global banking system[1].

In other words, if it were to increase to even 10% of the population using it, it would use over 4x the energy of the global banking system. If that increased to 50%, it would be 20x.

This would be somewhat mitigated in the case of Proof of Stake, but would simultaneously give major players in the market complete control of said market. Y'know, like a government.

1. Research report from Galaxy Digital, a decidedly pro-crypto source, page 8: https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2

That report says the data used for the banking system is derived from a computer model because they lack sufficient empirical evidence.

Is your honest interpretation of cryptocurrency critics that they feel "threatened by services that give their users options"?

Groupthink has decided that crypto is evil and killing the planet and any opinion to the contrary is wrongthink. This is the world we live in now.

I feel like I am engaging with a bad faith critique for the purposes of good faith discussion, which is a mistake, but OK, here goes:

Some businesses in the UK have banks that say they will close their accounts if they accept cryptocurrency payments. Mine does! I would without hesitation lose my business bank account if I did, because I am a trifling small customer.

Stripe was safe and reputable, but now it is a place where you can accept cryptocurrencies.

Edit: see note below.

I'm not currently clearing payments via Stripe for my own business, but the way I understand it, it's now likely to mean increased scrutiny from my bank about those payments when I do.

I'm not sure if it has rolled out in the UK yet. But if it has, will my bank be clearly informed when a payout was *not* the result of a cryptocurrency transaction? I've not read that far yet.

Either way it's reputational damage hassle people do not need.

And before you ask: I am of course comfortable with that bank policy. Because cryptocurrency is consistently crime-adjacent and fraud-adjacent. And it's not like banks are that well-equipped at dealing with old-fashioned frauds that have been around a century, let alone new frauds that have been around mere days.

Edit to add: apparently this document is not meant to communicate that cryptocurrency payments can be accepted. Which is not what the screenshots in the page do, IMO.

Though the fact that Stripe will allow NFT exchanges is more than enough to create reputational risk.

I still expect to have more difficulty when I add Stripe payments.

> Because cryptocurrency is consistently crime-adjacent and fraud-adjacent.

So are banks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering#Notable_cases

That's as may be.

But I have to deal with my bank, don't I? And there is regulation to protect my business.

Actually not really, I’ve switched banks used by my UK based business a couple of times. It has never been difficult.

I would certainly want to switch banks if I started hearing complaints about me using Stripe.

Perhaps I am overcautious.

But today Stripe changed its Twitter icon to an NFT, which is like a Belisha Beacon for idiocy, isn't it?

Why any business that is serious would -- in March 2022 -- produce publicity or support materials that mention being able to sell NFTs, I do not know.

It's very stupid.

While I largely share your feelings about NFTs, I think the general population outside of HN sphere does not.

I’d hedge my bets on this one, I’ve interacted extensively with the massive art market and NFTs really seem like a natural fit.

> While I largely share your feelings about NFTs, I think the general population outside of HN sphere does not.

I don't know. I know a fair number of artists/musicians/photographers and I can tell you that among those artists, the impression of NFTs is almost universally negative.

I would bet that more people think NFT is close to a "giant, planet-killing scam", which is hyperbole but on the side of caution.

I think the “planet-killing scam” is very HN-sphere thinking. Most people have no idea. Most non-technical artists I interact with seem very excited about NFTs, often asking me to help them create their own (unfortunately I’m not interested).

And what about when ETH2 goes live in some months and the main NFT chain moves to proof-of-stake? The “planet-killing” problem is already solved, that tech is going live this year. Seems like a fairly fragile criticism.

> I think the “planet-killing scam” is very HN-sphere thinking

It's not, at all. I've heard that phrasing or similar (that it's a pyramid scheme, that cryptocurrencies are wasteful) from people who don't even know how to find HN.

In the photography world in particular, mentioning your NFT is likely to get you laughed out of any forum in which you bring it up.

IMO if you encounter any non-technical artist "excited" about NFTs, tell them to stay the hell away, or risk being seen a bad friend. I tell people I will not help them, that I am very happily uninterested, and urge them not to do it at all.

It would be irresponsible not to.

>IMO if you encounter any non-technical artist "excited" about NFTs, tell them to stay the hell away, or risk being seen a bad friend.

Fuck that, despite me being incredibly skeptical of NFTs I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge the fact that some of my non-technical artist friends have earned 6-7 figure amounts selling NFTs.

6-7 figure amounts selling something of no worth to people who on average do not have any comprehension of it and which opens them up to fraud and scams. Great.

If an artist friend of mine sells an NFT I am going to struggle with continuing to see them as a friend, because it's morally bankrupt.

If a non-technical artist comes to you and asks for help selling an entirely phantom product to their presumably only-averagely-technically-aware fans, why would you get involved?

Anything that introduces non-technical users to crypto -- which is really the main function of NFT exchanges at this point -- is a moral hazard.

This is why I am so shocked to see Stripe involved with it.

Would you consider an artist who sells a series of limited edition prints to be morally bankrupt? How is doing this via the blockchain any different (besides catering to a customer base who prefers a digital format)?

I don’t get it. How are my friends morally bankrupt for selling NFTs to people like Will Smith or Dubai royalty? Same people who are buying their art to hang on their walls.

It’s not like NFTs brought them a whole new audience, it’s just that their existing audience wanted NFTs.

You might think NFTs are worthless, but the exact same argument goes for easily reproduced physical works of art.

Just want to say that I had the POV of the grandparent comment, but your answer was a very useful and real description of a particular problem of accepting crypto-currency. So thanks for sharing!

Slight tangent: Maybe it’s just me, but I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the label “crypto” being co-opted as official shorthand for cryptocurrencies. I see how it’s a natural truncation of a long term, but to many of us the word crypto can mean many other things. When I saw the headline, I wondered if they had released their own cryptographic library or something else to that effect.

It's really unfortunate. But I guess it's better than shortening it to "currency" because that would imply it has actual value.

What is actual value to you personally?

Can be exchanged for goods and services.

So crypto qualifies.

Why isn’t this new Stripe thing then about being able to use Bitcoin when buying things?

Or how do I use Coinbase for buying things? Try go to the coinbase website and look for how to buy things with your Bitcoin. What I read from the site is that it’s all about investing in the value going up, not about making payments to other people or businesses for services or purchases.

My question also.

> how do I use Coinbase for buying things

Download TOR, go to dark.fail, go to one of the onion sites, send them crypto from coinbase, purchase products.

I would have some difficulty paying my mortgage, my mechanic, and my grocery bill with crypto.

It has value on the tor market places

It is not just you. ‘Crypto’ is an odd shorthand for digital currencies.

Looking back at the initial whitepaper, Satoshi actually uses the word just once: “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” [1] The remainder of the paper uses terms like ‘hash’ and ‘digital signature’.

[1]: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

This battle has been fought and lost and the language has changed.

I've learned to just accept the new meaning and imo it's better that way (otherwise you'll end up being the person correcting everyone who writes linux to write gnu/linux for the rest of your life).

Crypto implies cryptocurrency now (especially in public facing writing), cryptography is the less common usage.

The problem is, words mean what most people think they mean. This means that sometimes, meanings change. I'm totally with you but you gotta admit that the people who think "crypto" means "cryptography" are a tiny, tiny minority right now.

Crypto means internet money. Cryptography is how it's built.

Kinda like Hacker. Ship's probably sailed though...

It's unfortunate, but what would be a good alternative?

Yes it does, but that ship has sadly sailed. Though, on reflection, if I was on the other side of the argument I'd probably be for it.

that ship sailed a long time ago.

but tbh, some of the most exciting cryptographic problems are being worked on in the cryptocurrency industry (zk tech, for example).

Here's how I rationalize it:

* "Crypto" means "cryptography"

* "Cryptocurrency" is a subset of "cryptography"

* Using "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" is valid as a synecdoche

So basically I use it both ways. That also makes more sense to me because "currency" feels like an overly narrow description of the current crypto ecosystem.

Stuff like this just gives credence to the farcical notion that crypto is reputable.

The leadership at stripe should be utterly ashamed.

This is an obvious but very powerful move by Stripe. Stripe is attempting to allow any business to become a place you can buy crypto, which will be really important to remove Coinbase and other CEXs as the only consumer-facing platforms where you can get into the ecosystem.

Of course, that just means replacing those CEXs with Stripe as the fully centralized service on the backend, and you can bet they'll be taking their cut! But anything that moves more money into crypto is good for the Web3 ecosystem. Which would, of course, only be a good thing if you considered growth of the Web3 ecosystem a good thing :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com