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Comment by datadata | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> Speed is one advantage of crypto payouts. Reach is another. Millions of talented freelancers live in countries where it’s hard, if not impossible, to open a local bank account. For example, a majority of the people in Djibouti, El Salvador, and Bhutan don't have bank accounts. With Stripe, freelancers in those countries are now able to receive funds via USDC in minutes. With the addition of USDC, Stripe cross-border payouts extend to more than 4.4 billion people in more than 110 countries—a majority of the world’s population.

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I'm one of those, work remote from argentine is simply pay 90 tax becouse of a broken conversion rate technically, becouse you can pay 15 income tax and don't but have a company and return assets like bonds, is a mess . this is really useful and I trust stripe more than the competition

What does “pay 90 tax” mean? Surely you don’t mean paying a 90% tax rate?!

Probably an exaggeration, but caveats apply.

Say, you get paid in USD.

    You got paid: 10000 USD

    Income tax: 15%

    Government exchange rate: 130 ARS per 1 USD
    Unofficial exchange rate: 330 ARS per 1 USD

Now, if you do things like daddy government says and use the official rate, you end up with this amount:

    10000 USD * 130 = 1300000 ARS  and then  1300000 * (1 - 0.15) = 1105000

But if you do what's good for you and still pay taxes to not go to jail:

    10000 USD * 330 = 3300000 ARS  and then  3300000 * (1 - 0.15) = 2805000

Now consider your "effective" tax rate:

    You got paid: 3300000 ARS (fair market value)

    Government rate: (3300000 - 1105000) / 3300000 = 0.66
    Unofficial rate: (3300000 - 2805000) / 3300000 = 0.15

Note that it's before you consider future devaluation of peso. For tax purposes you can say you received 3.3M ARS, but just keep it as 10k USD. Then your effective "government cut" rate over the years could very well be in 90% territory if you do the stupid thing and hold pesos.

> For example, a majority of the people in Djibouti, El Salvador, and Bhutan don't have bank accounts

> With Stripe, freelancers in those countries are now able to receive funds via USDC

That is just people opening bank accounts, but with extra steps.

No you just use any number of mobile crypto wallets, many of which are open source. You don’t need any permission to receive USDC

USDC is a completely centralised 'stablecoin' and has a blacklist function which means they can seize funds of people who they don't like. USDC again is not even regulated as I said with no proof backing this other than 'attestations' which is not a full audit of reserves.

How is this decentralised money that was promised by crypto and blockchain? You may very well use Wise, Moneygram and other regulated alternatives which works better, is also relatively faster and is more stable and widely accepted than these USDC tokens.

USDC can be sent peer to peer with low fees. And I would be extremely surprised if Wise or Moneygram are cheaper or faster.

Does it adhere to KYC and AML at exchanges and other fiat ramps? I think it’s a clever backdoor hack to instant cross border value movement without traditional banking (Wise and company), but the reach of government is always there.

Curious what US Treasury, FinCEN, OFAC, etcs take on this is. The plumbing is easy, it’s the laws, regulation, and compliance that are the work.

High level, Stripe is reaching for growth when there isn’t much innovation to be had in financial utilities besides reducing waste and inefficiencies by cannibalizing your business or someone else’s while the industry continues to commodify basic services like payments, cross border transfers, and deposit accounts (lending and data is the last bastion of profits for financial services).

https://www.pymnts.com/news/fintech-investments/2022/stripe-...

This is partly incorrect -- USDC is regulated and audited. You're confusing it with Tether

https://www.circle.com/blog/how-to-build-trust-usdc-audits-a...

No. I am talking about all stabletokens including USDC.

I don't see any fully independent verifiable real audit of their entire reserves anywhere with USDC, and a lousy blogpost by Circle isn't strong enough evidence and no substitute of this.

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