Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards
satscard.com
satscard.com
I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't.
That said this is a neat hack. Reminds me of what the Kong folks were doing, I bought a couple of bills as a sousvenir. [1]
You did not specifically write it, but the way you plainly state ".. but it can't." makes it appear as if it were an evident fact that can be derived from simple reasoning available to everyone who spends some time thinking.
I'd say it is absolutely possible that "crypto" (or as I would narrow it down: Bitcoin) can improve society.
One can think of it this way: society/humanity can be seen as a very complicated board game (that's played simultaneously by all humans) with certain elements (cards, rules, ..). The rules somehow evolve during the game, some are stable some change, new elements get added from time to time.
The set of elements in the game at some certain point in time might strongly favour a very narrow set of participants which might already be in a very strong position (which could be seen as unfair). A new rule or other element in the game might counter/dampen the effects of the existing rules, so that after adding the new element there's now less tendency for concentration of success than before.
Technologies in the real world are like such new elements/rules in the game. New real world technologies (such as Bitcoin) may very well change the dynamic of the real world in a way that dampens various unfavourable outcomes.
No, one cannot easily prove whether Bitcoin does ineed have this effect.
But likewise, one cannot prove that Bitcoin certainly has only negative effects on humanity/society either.
The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money. Nobody with money has trouble accessing a bank account. There's tons of online-only bank accounts you can open, often with no fees and zero or limited minimum balance requirements. Ally or Schwab in the US. Internationally, there's Wise, and all sorts of regional options like M-Pesa in a number of African countries. Historically we've had postal banking.
The problem is a social one, for congress to solve.
It's akin to saying people are hungry because they don't have grocery bags. The issue isn't the lack of bag, it's lack of food to put into it.
They might have some money but they may not have a home address.
The GDP per capita of Burundi is $221. A couple years ago a single Bitcoin transaction cost $60. The thermodynamics of these kinds of systems make them dramatically more expensive than classical finance because you have to replicate the data so many times. The only reason a Bitcoin payment doesn't cost significantly more than that is nobody's using it, lol.
It's slow, it's inefficient, and worse yet, there's no authority to help try and stabilize the currency. The worst off are hurt the most by wild volatility swings, and crypto is volatility incarnate. The promise that volatility would decrease as a function of market cap simply did not materialize.
Enough with the silly privilege arguments, let's stick to facts.
I specifically called out M-PESA because it's a regional solution to an actual problem they have. [1] And not a blockchain in sight.
[1] https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/what-we-do/consumer-...
Ah yes let's counter an argument with something that is a couple years old.
This was brief during a time of high usage, which has also been fixed. Today, the average bitcoin transaction cost is a couple dollars.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
Let's also not forget that there are a lot more chains now, where the fees are pennies.
Technology-wise, most countries have faster methods of sending money than how US system works: FedNow is a very late welcome addition that analogous systems already exist in other countries for years, even in places where you don't expect (Nigeria, Myanmar and India of all places do have near real-time transactions). It's genuinely embarrassing that when FedNow was initially announced, most financial analysts and bankers have simply exclaimed "finally!" because that's how behind US is.
Society-wise, most people who are having monetary problems also have much more pressing life-or-death problems: there are danger where they are living (either due to conflicts or due to the general inhospitality of the place), they don't have access to clean water and food, they don't have decent work despite their best efforts, and they don't have a place to study and improve their skills. It doesn't help that their government tends to block improvements that will go to their citizens and just plunder their countries' resources. What problems does cryptocurrency solve here?
Check cashing isn't just about cashing the check, it's a predatory short-term lending facility. Actually cashing a check is a solved problem.
And again, not addressed by crypto.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
While we sit around waiting, the private sector stepped in with a (interim?) solution. What's wrong with that?
The folks you are alluding to who fall into this category are the least sophisticated and most desperate. This makes them easy marks. They shouldn't be buying into unregistered securities to resolve their banking problems. That's how we got the Great Depression and why we not have an SEC.
Further, these folks are disproportionately affected by the insane volatility and high fees of the crypto space.
These so-called financial products are just proxies for US dollar liquidity in the global financial system. If we had to write a prospectus I don't know anyone who isn't a money manager who could figure out how to actually deploy this sensibly. Let alone a homeless person without an address. How are they to 'do their own research'?
Something that makes the problem worse isn't a substitute for a proper solution.
In the US you generally need an account at an AML/KYC exchange to buy crypto for dollars and a bank account, so already we're off to a bad start. Or you can use a bitcoin ATM, which costs like 20%, dramatically worse than predatory lenders.
Lightning fees are less than $0.01 - much better than the alternative of $20 for cashing a check. And the volatility is a small price to pay for financial control, for someone who (with good reason) doesn't trust banks or the government that's failing them.
Actually the easiest way the government could kill crypto would be to get rid of the corruption and help those "undesirables" with their problems, instead of making them fend for themselves. I'm not holding my breath, but in a way I hope that happens.
They're not using it, at all. Trading volumes have plummeted, nobody uses it for exchange of value due to the volatility and the fees. You wouldn't say people are 'using Apple' because they're holding Apple stock, and you shouldn't say people are 'using Bitcoin' because they're holding onto it in a portfolio they've probably written off due to massive losses.
> Lightning fees are less than $0.01 - much better than the alternative of $20 for cashing a check. And the volatility is a small price to pay for financial control, for someone who (with good reason) doesn't trust banks or the government that's failing them.
(a) Lightning is totally unsustainable because it requires you complete an on-chain transaction to open a channel, which would take about 75 years, trillions of dollars and all the remaining block reward to do for everyone on earth. It would even take months to open a channel for everyone in the Bay Area. Then it suffers from quadratic routing complexity, and offers few if any of the guarantees of the underlying chain.
(b) It's not the replacement for $20 check cashing, that's a loan, a cash advance. That's what you're paying for. You can cash checks for free at any online bank.
> And the volatility is a small price to pay for financial control, for someone who (with good reason) doesn't trust banks or the government that's failing them.
It's literally down 60% from a year ago (almost 70% adjusting for inflation). By any objective or subjective measure that's a "big price to pay" for anyone who purchased last year. So no, it's not.
You yourself called these people out as 'living paycheck to paycheck' so by definition your own users would be utterly rekt using what you're advocating for.
Setting aside the 'crypto' third-rail, what if I came up with a way for anyone without AML or KYC to buy and sell shares of GameStop. Would you then immediately tell me that poor people should use shares of GameStop as money? In Africa? I suspect that would be viewed as overwhelmingly predatory.
This is obviously false. Just look at the transaction rates on the publicly available ledger.
And: Moneygram has all but publicly admitted that crypto remittances have grown large enough that it's affecting their core business, and they're trying to re-insert themselves as a middleman. https://my.linkedin.com/posts/moneygram-international_moneyg...
If you actually meant trading volumes (which matter zero for adoption btw), those haven't changed much either. Zoom out to 1w: https://bitcoinwisdom.io/markets/gdax/btcusd
> Lightning
The naive routing complexity is quadratic, yes. GPS routing is also quadratic. So is IP routing. But practical implementations use heuristics to decrease that complexity. In practice, you just need a good enough path, not the theoretically optimal path. The internet and lightning are still working fine as we speak.
> It's literally down 60% from a year ago
Bitcoin's current MVRV is 1.457[1], meaning the average holder current has a 45.7% profit. I guess if you cherry pick a high and low price you can imagine some losses, but anyone could cherry-pick numbers in the other direction too.
The 45% profit is nice, but for those living paycheck to paycheck it unfortunately isn't a huge help since many people wouldn't have been holding long enough for the gains to accumulate.
And as an asset, gold is priced dramatically over it's industrial value, and it's un-productive. People shouldn't invest in shiny pebbles anymore than they should invest in digital magic beans, IMO.
Crypto is here to stay, no amount of what you coin as opining, will make it go away. If anything, you're doing a great job driving people to wonder more about it. When people disagree with something so passionately, it drives other people towards it even more.
> When people disagree with something so passionately, it drives other people towards it even more.
I have no problem with that. That's why we have this site, so people can see different viewpoints. They're free to make up their own minds.
> It is tired and I don't mind calling you out on it.
I'm not tired, are you :)
It's been 15 years and no value outcome whatsoever. If the crypto community develops something useful, I'll be the first to jump on it. But for now, I'm sure OP will deliver, I just have to wait.
I spent 4 years in Vietnam before getting locked out due to covid. The last two were on a motorcycle traveling all over the country.
Women in the north have money. They store that wealth in gold. In order to keep it secure, they keep it in their teeth. [0]
These same women also have smart phones and really good and inexpensive 4g (probably 5g now) networking, because the government provides the telcom as a function of the military. Coverage is almost 100%, even in the most remote areas.
Those are the underbanked. They need security and they need a way to capitalize on their holdings (think collateralized Kiva loans). Crypto, today, provides that. I know it is true, because I'm doing it myself.
It is 2023, let's bring people out of the dark ages.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=vietnam+woman+gold+teeth
You don't need it. That doesn't mean it doesn't work as a solution. Not everyone can open a wise account. KYC makes it difficult for people without proper documents.
One can accept that most of crypto is bad, and still see that some people have some use for it (for now). Like, nuance is a thing.
The system is specifically designed to permit unchecked criminality. That is a fact. Lack of AML, KYC and any oversight, recourse or control that you would use to reduce malicious actor impact in the space is explicitly, intentionally removed. This allows for unchecked criminality. That's why we have the volume of ransomware we do, because in the past you couldn't send millions of dollars in Starbucks gift cards by FedEx to get your data decrypted.
Given substantially all legal use cases are served better, faster, cheaper, safer and more reliably using classical systems it's no surprise crypto self-selects for criminality.
The volatility is an objective reality. Its easily one of the most volatile assets on the market today.
I'm sure DDT salesmen would agree feel the same way if I said that DDT was 'just bad' despite its obvious and measurable negative effects on the environment, but I can't say I shed a tear when the eagles managed to emerge from their shells with all their limbs.
> It's a statement of objective reality.
No, it isn't. USDT, a crypto currency, is pegged to the dollar and doesn't have consistently huge swings in volatility.
> The system is specifically designed to permit unchecked criminality.
Fiat USD will always be the largest, by orders of magnitude, used currency for criminality, on the planet.
The one that's not backed? Whose money is supposedly in a bahamian bank run by the man who created Inspector Gadget? The one that settled with the CFTC and the NYAG for being unbacked? How you could possibly recommend this as a beacon of stability is beyond me. Especially when they don't even pay interest but you can get 5% on treasuries, so even if you just held it and they somehow never go under, you're still getting rekt.
However, USDC (or if we pretended there was anything in the vault at USDT) you don't need a blockchain lol. They could just put a portal on their website and you could just move between accounts there. But without the imaginary layer of indirection of the blockchain people would demand AML/KYC.
Those are fully centralized, fully controlled. USDT and USDC can be frozen by government entities and even by Tether themselves arbitrarily. They've done it many times.
This is a silly thing to advocate for.
> Fiat USD will always be the largest, by orders of magnitude, used currency for criminality, on the planet.
But not as a percentage of transactions. That's just a red herring. If you had the ability to wipe out a large pocket of criminality that provided little or zero real world value, why on earth wouldn't you?
What's next, comparing the size of the mob's bank accounts to the treasury as a reason not to pursue? Or because they kill less people than the army they're good to go?
> But not as a percentage of transactions.
Source? In your eyes, 100% of crypto is criminal, but that's not reality, by a long shot. So, if you're going to call it all criminal, I want a source for that. I know my transactions aren't and I pay all my taxes on it, so do what you will with that data point.
These are women in the north of Vietnam who know nothing about US dollar accounts and don't even speak english.
Who are the 'underbanked' ? What are their needs? What are the current solutions?
There is nothing "there" in crypto. It's a scam. Go and obtain every textbook you can on amazon about blockchains, bitcoin, crypto systems etc. and investigate their authors.
I've just done that: they're all part of various crypto schemes. They all make these insane claims in passing. NONE provide any evidence, any argument, anything at all.
None provide an analysis of the current systems in question, the various alternatives, and so on -- none show that blockchain is even minimally relevant to solving ANY problem.
This is a profoundly manipulated market: all the numbers are fake, all the ideas are fake, all the people are fake.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/us-government-enlists-usdc-f...
> US Government Enlists USDC for ‘Global Foreign Policy Objective’ in Venezuela: Circle CEO
Even the US government is willing to admit there are situations where crypto is the best option available.
> USD Coin (USDC) is a digital stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar.
Nothing is denominated in USDC, it isnt a currency (indeed, no cryptocurrency is a currency, since none are a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_account ).
The USD is the currency here.
So the mechanism here is that people in Venezuela have a route to obtaining USD without having to use the banking system because they can sell their USDC electronically.
What in this process requires (or even benefits from) blockchain exactly, or cryptocurrency?
Venezuela already has extensive digital payment systems, and there's lots of ways of getting money directly to people today. This USDC project was just a lobbied-for newspaper story.
The story above, as all of them, is a result of intense lobbying by shysters who use these throwaway-projects to pump the value of their assets. Stories like this come out all the time, usually within 5 years there's an embarrassing write up of all those involved.
I have no doubt a huge amount of money was wasted using the UDSC "option", enriching many of those involved. Articles like the above do not tell you about the alternatives, they're written to hype crypto.
This is what i mean about the "ideas market" in crypto being as fake as the prices market: it's all manipulated. All these stories are written and released by people profoundly invested in lying to you.
Sure, but those systems had been sabotaged by a politican/dictator named Nicolás Maduro who rejected the results of an election.
> What in this process requires (or even benefits from) blockchain exactly, or cryptocurrency?
A decentralized payments system is one that cannot be shut down by Nicolás Maduro.
Do you think the Venezuelan crisis was just a big conspiracy theory?
The state here owns the network, rendering all the premises of peer-to-peer systems invalid and thus all of their guarantees.
If the government there wanted to prevent receipt of USDC it well could, as much as it can completely cutoff the country from arbitary parts of the internet.
Indeed, it would seem much more inclined to do that than cut off the mobile network.
The reason it hasnt done so is preference, not that peer-to-peer systems are magic.
Spoken like a true first-world armchair warrior. Maduro shut off the non-p2p systems, as dicussed. He then failed to stop crypto payments. Do you think it was his "preference" all along to fail to control the flow of money?
Don't underestimate people's ability to figure out a VPN. It's not hard, and the prospect of literally starving to death can be quite motivating.
And since you mentioned magic, the real magic would be any country stopping its citizens from accessing the internet. Even in North Korea, there are people with unfiltered satellite internet, because Kim Jong Un has not yet built a Faraday cage around the sky.
lol..err, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_(token) -- the government has not tried to "stop" anything.
If any of these systems had any actual utility many states would spend the relatively trivial amounts of money to 51% attack them: https://www.crypto51.app/. Or force take over their miners. Or monpolise half the stake. Or control the (local) mining networks. Or one of a number of trivial actions.
These systems do not work. Their alleged properties are lies. They are not immutable, they are not decentralised, and they are not capable of supporting non-trivial economic transactions.
This is a scam. These stories are lies. They are told by people who are in on the scam. This is a manipulated market, these are manipulated ideas, this entire system is comprised of about 100,000 people around the world, 5% of whom benefit from it.
It is incapable of supporting millions of users, let alone how severely impoverished they'd be at the expensive of the present holders -- thank god such systems cannot scale.
Present holders, no doubt like you, desperate to bring cash into the system, more people in, so your present holdings can increase in value.
I find this reprehensible
Look under "NiceHash-able", if the number is less than 100% it means (to an approximation) not enough idle hardware exists on the planet to perform an attack. This means any attack must start with a manufacturing project that must stay secret for a decade+, then outpace growth and eventually surpass the capacity of the private sector. And then you need the energy to actually run the chips - no country would ever consider diverting that much energy away from their population.
If it were possible to compromise a $xxx billion dollar system, with only $x million, don't you think it would have been done by now? Maybe even by some bored billionaire just for fun?
And trust me, I don't think posting in a dead HN thread will speed up or slow down crypto's success in any way, lmao. I just enjoy the banter.
Also, all these "market cap" numbers are made up. These are heavily manipulated markets. There are about 100k users, and almost no buyers -- this stuff is trivial to bring down.
It's a scam.
Look how hard some governments have tried to stop this movement, and none have succeeded. That's real life evidence that they simply aren't capable.
I think this cloud will outlast the old men yelling at it.
Also: I hope one day someone calls my company a failure because it "only" has hundreds of thousands of users
Regulators are well-aware this is a scam which is why they're afraid of regulating it: as soon as they say "put up or shut up" the whole things collapses. they dont want to be blamed for that collapse.
As for politicians, they're corrupt. Trump and his cabinet were scam artists (betsy devos the wife of the head of a pyramid scheme, etc.); and likewise senior figures in the dems have historically been deeply connected to pyramid schemes.
This will all go to zero. The fastest way there is anyone actually trying to use it for money.
At the moment, it's one closed-off casino with a handful of people gambling with each other -- that's the total amount which any of this tech can support.
Regulators are hoping it will collapse in on itself without prompting.
I think the only law required here is "do something useful for real people" -- with that law this entire ecosystem will collapse and be exposed for the inherent fraud it is.
I encourage anyone with assets here to divest, and never to promote any of this -- do not rope people into holding the bag.
It did something useful for the Venezuelans. But you don't care about that because, why? Because you made up a story in your head that someone somewhere probably scammed everyone, somehow? And even with complete transparency and a publicly auditable ledger, they've kept it a secret for years?
All publicly available information points to the project being a success. Is there even a shred of evidence for your accusations? Or do you not need evidence to ignore events that don't fit your worldview?
---
https://www.reuters.com/technology/lse-teams-with-digital-tr...
What about the London Stock Exchange? Do you think they're just a bunch of filthy scammers as well?
The price of Bitcoin in 2013 was $200. Today it's $29,000. Wouldn't you say that, at a minimum, it's doing a good job of storing value in an inflationary environment? At best it is creating some spectacular wealth which is real.
In other news, breaking windows is great for the economy: it makes lots of work for glaziers!
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/15/crypto-energy-texas-... https://www.govtech.com/computing/bitcoin-mining-threatens-t... https://www.utilitydive.com/news/warren-bitcoin-texas-power-... https://fortune.com/2022/07/12/texas-bitcoin-miners-paid-shu...
Having a buyer of last resort is good for energy grids (or any product), not bad for them. It incentivizes grid build out. Instead of worrying about whether a particular energy development will have enough demand, they can work out a deal with Bitcoin miners to sell wasted energy to them.
Industrial users of power frequently work out power agreements that will pay them in the event that they are required to shut down. This is completely normal. The difference is that Bitcoin miners are EVEN MORE flexible in that they can shut down at a moment's notice, unlike manufacturing or smelting. Again, this is good for grids, not bad.
Did you read a single article. Bitcoin miners ARE raising prices for Texas citizens.
Not to mention the noise issues: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-noise-drives-nei...
I gave up caring about bitcoin around 2014 after growing out of libertarian brain rot. And sold my last 5btc in 2021 after the superbowl commercial gave me the feeling the jig was up and the last suckers were in. The sooner you come to this realization the soon you can dedicate your time better uses. Good luck.
Again, I would point out (not for you since your reasoning is clearly motivated, but for anyone else reading it) that Bitcoin miners overwhelmingly use electricity that would go to no other use, and thus is incredibly cheap, and would naturally be expected to have little to no effect on average electricity bills.
They incentivize the build out of green energy projects such as wind and solar. Projects that in many cases would never have happened without subsidies from Bitcoin miners.
When you say we have to pay them to shut down what you are really saying is that we have to pay them back for energy they already purchased.
The fact that this excess energy is available on demand to utilities ensures we have a more stable energy grid by serving as an energy storage system that we only pay for in times of severe demand.
Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom.
Digital cash that can give us the befits of paper money without the privacy drawbacks of CBDCs or 3rd party middlemen isn't a bad thing at all.
As I understand it, the people developing GNU Taler, are trying to solve this problem and have come up with a promising system.
Is it curmudgeonly to be uninterested in searching for problems for an overhyped solution than is sadly lacking in them? Well, fine, then I’m happy to be a curmudgeon.
As for violence, that's literally one definition of government: a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It's not just currency that derives its value from that. It includes your own physical safety and all of the coordination that allows a densely-packed society to function.
If you wish to reconsider that, you'll have to go further back than trivia like currency. You'll have to reinvent everything about the social contract that makes government work. Otherwise you're just layering a band-aid on top of a much more significant basis of your daily life.
Basically tokenbros are reinventing banks, only with zero oversight and governed from offshores. Amazing alternative I must say. /s
Forever.
I don't think it is irrevocably broken. I for one think there is still a lot of potential in cryptocurrencies and public blockchains. I believe a credibly neutral store of value not in the control of any nation state is something that benefits the world.
Why can't we celebrate what is good and try to fix what is bad?
I think the issue I have is the crypto folk haven't wanted to fix any of it -- with the rare exception being ethereum moving to PoS. A lot of the "fixes" would break the "features".
Cryptocurrency communities are aggressively hostile to improvement. Every chance to make the ecosystem better is met with pushback. It's funny you bring up PoS, because how much energy was spent (pun absolutely intended) by the Ethereum community fighting that change?
It doesn't make sense to celebrate the good and fix the bad in cryptocurrency because a nontrivial portion of its userbase actively wants it to keep its terrible qualities and will fight anyone tooth-and-nail that tries to fix its problems. It's exhausting to even have conversations about what parts of the ecosystem need improvement.
I mean, this project is still using Bitcoin, right? So clearly we're not going to fix the bad parts of cryptocurrency, because if y'all in the cryto-community were willing to fix any of the bad parts, Bitcoin of all the implementations wouldn't still somehow inexplicably be your most popular coin. Cryptocurrency is a system with a lot flaws, but its biggest problem that gets in the way of it turning into something useful is that its community that has internalized those flaws as strengths.
And honestly, that's the charitable interpretation. The less charitable interpretation is that there are a lot of bad actors in cryptocurrency communities that aren't even interested in building something useful in the first place, they're purely interested in furthering whatever scam they're working on at the moment. How much of the PoS fight was about genuine academic disagreement about centralization, and how much of that "disagreement" was just a cloak over "I think I have pretty good thing going on with this GPU farm and how dare you mess with that"?
But there is a thriving ecosystem of developers who are very interested in improvement. The Ethereum (and level 2 chains) community has a culture of innovation and shipping features.
There are members of the broader Bitcoin ecosystem like this as well even if the core developers are not.
a dollar is a voucher for the US economy and the actual value was transferred on an immutable ledger, i.e. append-only physical reality of the universe
Vouchers already exist - they're called cashier checks.
> transferred on an immutable ledger.
Which isn't universally a good thing. If someone steals your voucher, there is no recourse. If someone steals a cashier's check, I can call the bank (and sovereign authorities).
Said differently, one is not equivocally better than the other. There's a tradeoff.
> Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.
I wish crypto advocates would stop being such apologists on HN. It's not productive. Make your statement, explain your rationale and defend your position.
My comment didn't state that melt value equals face value. Just that a metal coin has intrinsic value.
Fiat coins materials aren't changed in value to match their face value. They're changed to lower production cost and achieve a particular quality of production.
Paper and ink do have a marginal intrinsic value. It just isn't that much. In areas with rampant counterfitting, the value of a printed bill settles to the market value of the paper and ink.
https://www.usmint.gov/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/...
...you mean, the way you can melt a coin down for its metal value? You can use the paper for its value as... paper?
I'm not convinced "you can wipe your butt with it" makes a good case for its value, tbh
Also, it can. See the Ethereum fork and Bitcoin Segwit.
Plenty of times the market value of Bitcoin has dropped drastically because one person said or did something.
If any developers tried to convince anyone to run Bitcoin software that debased their savings, they are going to have a very bad time.
I was a part of the bitcointalk forums in 2010 when the dev team created a soft fork that modified the blockchain to change consensus rules. THink about it, devs changed the consensus mechanism, that goes against everything bitcoin is supposed to be. They can do it again