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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

How is this peer-to-peer? It sounds like a centralized payment middleman. Am I reading it wrong?

Somebody's confusing person-to-person (P2P) with peer-to-peer (P2P).

Aren't those synonymous? It's no more "person to person" than any other bank or paypal transaction. Elon is once again subverting the terminology to mean the exact opposite of its established meaning.

Peer to peer = Centralized middleman

Full Self Driving = Not self driving at all, requires constant human attention

It's peer-to-peer in the same sense that Venmo is. From the user's perspective, you just plug in your friend's @handle and hit send, even if it's still centralized on the backend

That's the thing that's confusing, we already have an acronym for Venmo's model and it's called C2C.

C2C also happens to be the model for eBay, Etsy, Craigslist, Ali Express, and Amazon Marketplace as well as other payments companies including Paypal, and Zelle.

P2P's defining characteristic and what sets it apart from C2C is that it doesn't include a middleman. Think Bitcoin, Napster, and Bittorrent.

Isn't this just destructive misuse of the terminology?

@a sending @b a direct message on X is not "peer-to-peer" communication. Why would sending a payment, which is functionally the same thing to the end user, be counted as "peer-to-peer"?

Yeah, this seems like the standard usage. A search for "peer to peer payment apps" gets articles that talk about Venmo, CashApp, Apple Pay, etc. A search for "P2P {..}" or even "person to person {..}" yields the same articles despite them using "peer-to-peer".

I got a little invested in disproving myself on this- I feel like I've heard peer-to-peer used this way a ton, but half of the comments here were criticizing it.

If you search C2C you get Venmo, CashApp, and PayPal too. Who's right?

Kind of? "C2C payment apps" on DuckDuckGo gets me [1], which lists eBay, Etsy, Craigslist, and Amazon. It mentions Paypal, Venmo, etc., but only in passing. Then [2] does call them out in a more direct way- it mentions C2C payments and Venmo in the same sentence, but then calls them peer-to-peer by the next paragraph. And the first result of a google search [3] is an unrelated app. And finally [4] does use C2C to describe Venmo, though it calls Apple Pay and Paypal C2B.

Overall, I do think peer-to-peer is the vastly more common phrase for this, and these articles seemed much less directed at a layperson. But who's right? It's a language thing, so the answer I think is usually 'everybody!'. I'm just weirded out and getting overinvested.

[1] https://www.clarity-ventures.com/ecommerce/what-is-consumer-...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/real-time-payments-help-b2b-...

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.edvin.ukujy...

[4] https://theconversation.com/c2c-the-next-frontier-in-mobile-...

It's paypal if it were called X

It kind of was!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)

Man, Pete Thiel rained on Elon's parade and now he's gotta spend the rest of his time trying to recreate a company from 20 years ago

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