Mastercard ends Binance card partnership in latest blow to crypto giant
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Because it's a playground for scammers
My theory is that HN (like people in general) simply hates change.
The same for the web.
There were and are scams, but there was value.
The cryptocurrency space, 15 years in, has failed to do that.
I have a contract that Brad Pitt wins the Oscar in the next 3 years how is that validated ? Is there some widely accepted source of truth ? Couldn’t the provider be hacked or be tempted to be fraudulent.
I’m assuming the source of truth isn’t the Oscar academy cause web scraping could break easily. Still it’s a lot of faith in human honesty and site security for automatic execution worth millions
Smart contracts keep having bugs. And all I hear from DAOs is that they're cornered by the agents with the most tokens - how is that an innovation over the current state of affairs in society?
> value is provably false.
None of what you said would suggest anything like. What you're talking about is redistribution. People buying tokens using real money from those who bought them cheaper creating:
> tons of crypto million and billionaires
in the process. Could you explain at what point this actual value is created?
This news is about Binance being increasingly isolated. Mastercard’s deals with others (e.g. Gemini) are going strong.
Crypto is a currency.
It is laughably not a currency.
Something that has sporadic price fluctuations, is used as a gambling token for speculation, and cannot send value instantly to another person (crypto waiting times are over 9 hours) is not a currency.
Little to nobody in the world uses crypto at all.
Nonsensical cope. If that were true, HN would not love solar, wind, fission, fusion, room temperature superconductors, etc. HN is hype about potential/new technologies that might make sense and have real applications. Cryptocurrencies aren't that.
Finally, most of it turned out to be just plain marketing made by those who needed more and more people in the system/scheme.
At least this is what my take is on this.
And it wasn’t just Luddites or the uneducated not understanding what was going on, but really smart people weren’t convinced and the benefits of the technology never solidified. In fact, turns out everything really was a scam.
There’s probably a bit of smugness from Making correct predictions, and there’s also probably a bit of regret that we didn’t jump on the gravy train and sell at the peak even though we didn’t believe in it.
There is a brief window (2021-2022) where it was a bad time to buy and even that might not be the final word. The last time this happened was in 2018 where the price of bitcoin peaked at half it'd current value.
If anything, it is starting to look like Bitcoin is a respectable asset. It has outlasted several allegedly-reputable banks and is weathering a difficult credit environment quite solidly. It is still very risky, but it is hard to dismiss it.
[0] Over the last decade, say. Not much to hang an argument on, but it is the opposite of a scam.
And Bitcoin is an asset now? Back in my day we were trying to buy pizzas and beer with it. Bitcoin illustrates the point very well. It’s was supposed to facilitate transactions. Except, there was never ever a plan, or a plan I understood anyway, on how that could be achieved.
And now people hoard it like gold.
That isn't evidence that bitcoin is a scam either. You can still buy and sell it. None of the crypto I own was effected by the exchanges going bust. The exchanges may well all be scams for all I know, and that would be very bad ... for the people who own exchanges.
Hell, I've even been used Tether - which is clearly a scam - and still gotten a valuable asset out the other side of the transaction. One of the promises of crypto that is holding is nobody has to trust the infrastructure even a little bit for the system to hang together.
Crypto + scam exchanges is more trustworthy than fiat + reputable banks. The reputable banks often turn out to be cardboard cutouts in front of corruption.
> And now people hoard it like gold.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply with this but yes, people do. They are treating it like an asset. It doesn't matter what people intended for something to do, what it does is what counts. If someone owns a bitcoin they own an asset currently worth around $20k, and with pall the evidence suggesting that it will go on being worth around that much for the next 2 years. Your incredulity doesn't change that.
Thankfully, they've mostly shifted to AI scams now.
But that sounds awesome?
Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37290356 As I am writing this, three comments. One by the author, the other two about ChatGPT.
Most of the people who bought and sold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency are speculators. My interests don't align with their interests. I want a stable currency (whose value doesn't fluctuate) with close to zero, if not zero, transaction costs. That was the whole point of cryptocurrency for me. If it can't do that, I have no interest.
And no, just because it is useful for some people in some shitty country doesn't make it generally useful. If carrying knifes and guns to a bank is considered normal in some shithole it doesn't mean that the rest of the world need to adopt this insane idea.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if many companies are using crypto as a simple and unregulated way to suck money from unsophisticated traders. I wonder how many people lost money on crypto, and where most of the wins are at.
I am also curious how much portion of crypto is actually used for "goods" out in the wild versus simply used for trading. Simple metrics like volume on all exchanges / volume outside of exchanges should suffice.
I understand the criminal abuse, but it is just an easy way of paying out like you say to countries that banks flag (not sanctioned ones; just one that ‘normal people don’t send money to’).
Whether you like it or not, things have external cost to them. "Let's spend a trillion dollar building a bunker for every citizen in the event that a nuclear fallout do happen". "Let's give everyone AC because its getting hot...and will keep getting hotter because we keep installing ACs". All of these things are "good" but people very rarely talk about their externalities.
There's a thing called "opportunity cost", "externalities" that no crypto bros ever brought up when discussing how bad their system compared to the current system.
Should we sacrifice the relatively very efficient global financial with one that can barely handle a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its precursor? What about user protection? Correct me if I am wrong, but it is perfectly possible to lose all of your coins due to fraud and there would be no way to recover it back. How is this even a reasonable financial system?
The first step to a country's growth is the acceptance of one's place in the world. Pretty much all of the emerging countries of today at some point kinda accepted the state that they are in and decided to get out of it (Japan, China, Indonesia today)
Mind you, I classify certain states in the US as shitholes. The fact that you _need_ a gun means that it is ultimately a shithole place in my book.
There are a lot of weird peculiarities of the international monetary system (things like the weird not-capital-controls that US citizens operate under where nobody will give them a bank account or whatever) that crypto just bulldozes through and I don't have to worry about when sending someone in a foreign country money.
Much easier just not to have US customers.
Because crypto and its industry is a complete scam and nothing that it has produced is of any value.
Crypto is a complete grift and there is not a single person in it for the technology. The only reason it exists is because of the regulatory arbitrage and loopholes that needs to be closed which will shut crypto all down.
All in all, crypto is full of greed, scamming, grifting and completely the lawless shady behaviour of evading regulations.
That is why we hate it and it needs to be extinguished by drafting crypto laws in every country.
It seems likely that MasterCard and Binance signed a two year contract and that has now expired and the "less than 1% of customers" simply is covering the cost of operation. Existing the contract early might have been rather expensive though.
While I don't know it could also be that the cards are issue with a two year lifetime and MasterCard didn't want to close cards early.
Either the contracts expired or they reached a situation where they could break it.
ninja edit: looks like further down someone made the point that the Russians were using Binanace to move cash with BTC, which violated sanctions. Mastercard is at risk of violating those sanctions and it sounds like they just tapped out rather then risking staying in crypto.
UPD: okay, it did work and there's a whole hidden thread now.
Something like CBDCs always seemed inevitable, given how much more of their privacy citizens are willing to give away with each passing year. But I wonder if the crypto space has accelerated the implementation.
The crypto bro fools thinking this was a use case need their heads corrected by regulation. Binance and the like are inherently not fit for the financial system.
And I'm going to make an on the record bet that you can quote me on:
Crypto will all completely collapse before they will find any possible use case that hasn't already been solved by the current financial system.
The collapse will be even bigger than FTX.
Some might want to extract money with crypto from public. And some might. And they might not care if someone else also makes some money as long as they make enough of it themselvs.
Are you implying that basic understanding of finance and economics makes you a part of some 'elite' these days?
What crypto would have need, was for the larger institutions to have stayed long term, but that's not how "Wall Street" works. It's no different from dropping shares in a company once the risk gets to high. The future for crypto, if one exists, is beyond the horizon for Wall Street in terms of a payout. Their lack of support may very well have contributed to the collapse, but I don't think they've actively made plans to destroy crypto-currencies.
Crypto mostly collapsed because it failed to be useful. The MasterCard deal was the most useful part and only because it could convert funny money to real money, and very few people used that. MasterCard is likely begin generous when they say "less than 1% of customers". There's no way that close to 1% of MasterCards customers had a crypto-backed card.
as it stands it's just a vehicle for finance-tech-bro speculation.