And it sounds like this system targets global payments. Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo? Where would we see Tempo?
Very genuinely curious.
And it sounds like this system targets global payments. Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo? Where would we see Tempo?
Very genuinely curious.
I don't think that customers or businesses should see Tempo very much. In the success case, Tempo is a platform like SWIFT or ACH that others employ behind the scenes to orchestrate transactions. "Decentralized, internet-scale SWIFT" isn't exactly the right analogy (there are clearly lots of differences), but it's not totally wrong either.
Why are businesses finding crypto easier/faster/better?
Yeah, I think this is the natural follow-up question. The answer differs a bit based on the use-case, but there are a few common reasons:
* Instant on-chain transfers avoiding trapped liquidity. If you're transferring money from financial institution A to institution B, and the transfer takes a day, you're either slowed a day in taking the next step or you have to somehow cover that float. Depending on your movements and their predictability, that can require big buffers.
* Fees that are lower than cards. Card payments are instant, which is often valuable (and superior to many bank transfers), but card transactions are also expensive relative to stablecoins. (And while card authorization is instant, settlement is not.)
* Reliability. This sounds funny, but, when sending money between countries, there are many more manual processes involved at the associated financial institutions than one might think. Money is frequently just... lost, and humans are required to hunt for it. (We see this all the time at Stripe.) Crypto is punishing if you make a mistake, but, if you do things correctly, reliability is all-but guaranteed.
* Fewer currency conversions. Wholesale FX for major currencies is very cheap, but minor currencies can have bigger spreads, and the actual fee incurred by a regular customer (e.g. with their bank) can be significant. Stablecoins often make it possible to skip conversions that would otherwise happen.
* Access to USD-based functionality. The US is the world's most sophisticated financial services market. Having a stablecoin means "having an on-chain asset", but it also typically means "having a USD asset", and a lot of major parts of the ecosystem (e.g. US equities and credit markets) primarily, or only, deal with US dollars.
Acknowledging the obvious, a reflexive answer frequently invoked here is "it's regulatory arbitrage", but I think this is some combination of misguided and incurious as an explanation. First, stablecoins are now formally regulated in the US (with the GENIUS Act) and in Europe (under MiCA), so their use is now very explicitly regulated. Secondly, it implicitly assumes that the only reason one would seek an alternative to the traditional ways of doing things is because someone is doing something illegitimate. I think this usually indicates a lack of understanding of the challenges, complexities, and costs associated with high-volume cross-border money movement. Indeed, and somewhat ironically given the claim, one of Bridge's large customers is the US government.
And crucially, the reason to use crypto rails here is a legal one, not a technical one. There's no throughput, cost, or reliability advantage over existing centralized systems. Quite the opposite. What crypto offers is access to a regulatory regime designed through heavy industry lobbying, one that e.g. doesn't even require full 1:1 low-risk asset backing. That would never fly in traditional finance.
None of this implies illegitimacy. Regulatory arbitrage can be perfectly legal. But it does mean the uptake isn't about technological superiority. It's about governments creating a parallel rulebook after sustained lobbying pressure. That distinction seems important to keep in mind.
Other comments speak to this - but I wouldn't describe SWIFT (the predominant cross-border payments rail for high-value transactions that you couldn't just throw at a fintech eg. Wise) as centralized.
It's a bunch of hops, across correspondent (but separate) banks, that slow payments down, make them expensive + inconsistently traceable + introduce a bunch of manual ops burden along the way across each of the banks in the chain.
These are slow by design - abuse/fraud. How does blockchain solve that issue?
> * Fees that are lower than cards. Card payments are instant, which is often valuable (and superior to many bank transfers), but card transactions are also expensive relative to stablecoins. (And while card authorization is instant, settlement is not.)
Once again - CCs are instant because the % fee pays for fraud and customer service. What is to stop centralized blockchains from incremently increasing fees to the level of CCs over time? ...nothing.
> Crypto is punishing if you make a mistake, but, if you do things correctly, reliability is all-but guaranteed.
Once again - this is a feature not a bug. Things are slow because of bureaucracy AND abuse, not JUST bureaucracy. Crypto is only beneficial today because the actors using it are savvy. When the laggards join, we'll just fall back to the norm.
FWIW - the banking system in the US is awful and the experience to transfer money into other fiat is just as abysmal. However I think crypto's current idealism is a factor of the parties involved, not the technology itself. We're just reinventing finance...it's just this time with Silicon Valley in control instead of Manhattan.
Technologies are themselves disruptive, as their introduction can shape human behavior. Choice doesn't happen in a vacuum.
FWIW - I personally would choose a quicker and cheaper transaction all day, every day, but if it came at the expense of losing my money, I'd have to think twice about it. You yourself said it best "crypto is punishing if you make a mistake".
That is NOT TRUE! Technologies that are disruptive are those that intrinsically possess features that present benefits that exceed the switching costs of existing technologies. Therefore they are inherently disruptive. The timeline of product adoption is decided by consumers yes. Which is actually preceded by (and accelerated by) visionary leaders who can figure out what the benefits of said technology are, where to best use it and then tell people about it (market the technology).
Here's a simple example: graphical user interface. Anyone who saw it early on at Xerox knew it was so obvious. But the timing of its mass appeal, adoption and who would produce the preferred interface was questionable.
This comment alone makes me incredibly skeptical about the way you think.
A business can choose if they want
1. slow, pay for customer support and fraud protection
2. instant, lower cost, mistakes are irreversible
Are you really "once again"ing Patrick Collison on the issue of how payments work?
Then users will just go to a different chain that provides a better outcome.
Would you agree that "actual regulatory evasion" has been a top-three use case across the history of stablecoins? (That is: hackers, money launderers, sanctioned entities, and crypto exchanges do things with stablecoins expressly because doing them with dollars in banks would be illegal in an enforceable way.)
And, would you agree that GENIUS is a formalization of the low-regulation status quo of stablecoins? (That is: the bank system does KYC, AML, and reporting on both sides of every transaction; the stablecoin system generally only does that for onramps and offramps.)
This is not to say "regulatory arbitrage" is the only thing going on with stablecoins. Existing payment rails are imperfect and rent-seeking for reasons that don't have to do with the above. I'm just surprised you're describing the arb as such a non-issue.
Which misses the mark given the context, since the GENIUS provisions aren’t yet effective or enforceable, and Tether’s history shows that regulatory arbitrage does exist.
Today, if you want to transact between businesses or retail (folks like you and I), you need to find a route between the two entities' banks. This route might take several hops, passing through some central banks, and some of these hops might be instant or might take days to actually settle. On top of that, you need to pay the service that helped you find a route (SWIFT) and potentially the nodes your transaction goes through. Bottomline, it can be slow and a lot of middle men are taxing you.
This is why you see services like (Transfer)Wise, that basically try to bank everywhere, and allow you to send money faster by taking a shorter route (kind of like a wormhole :D). But they have to add liquidity everywhere, which they have to rebalance constantly, and it's centralized (single point of failure). FWIW it's great because for a long time this is the best thing we had.
Now, let's take a look at the other side. Using stablecoin is a matter of just creating a wallet. The openness by default of blockchains make it really easy to integrate with a blockchain as an entity (just use the SDK, it's there by design). Furthermore, it's in many cases instant and cheap (unless you're transacting on a slow blockchain, but then that's your fault).
That being said, the elephant in the room is that one stablecoin (let's say USDC) is now present on many blockchains. So if you have USDC on chain A, and I have USDC on chain B, we're back to our "tradfi" world where we have to find a route between our two chains, which might take us over many bridges, which can be slow and costly. The alternative, like with Wise, is to use centralized players who have liquidity on many different chains and can move things around by just updating their internal (and centralized) database. It's tradfi all over again :D
In Europe you can wire money across borders for free, you just need to know the account number. Arrives in seconds at 0 cost.
I feel like a lot of the fintech in the US is purely a result of a lack of regulation.
For the example of Argentina, the real reason that business is using crypto is because their currency is unreliable. It might be a good fit there but trading in dollars would've fixed that too.
And a wire, which is as close to sepa as I think you can get, costs 10s of $ each time.
Basically, the international business problem is real. The Argentina case is mostly lack of a domestic stable currency though. These are legit use cases, fast and cheap transactions aren't.
If you actually offered those US businesses with instant, verifiable transfers that cost nearly nothing, do you actually think they wouldn't move to that?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
I don't know if I'd call that a "unified economic zone" without some qualifications.
https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/about-sepa/sepa-timel...
I suspect that banks cannot solve this because it would be illegal for them to do so.
If many banks could send and receive money from across the world money laundering would become way way easier (in this sense the lack of privacy in many blockchains can be seen as a strength) and it is how offshore fiscal paradises work
Crypto here would similarly make very little sense.
And occasionally, they will withdraw that service for arbitrary and capricious reasons
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685011
Crypto stablecoins running on blockchain rails provide an alternative to that network.
do you mean "electronic funds transfer"? because "wiring" is an old school thing that uses Telex machines and and gets processed by people and I would doubt it carries no fee. (It's probably been modernised so that people handle virtual slips of paper, but it very much carries the feel of an "order on a slip of paper" type of transaction and is far from instantaneous.)
I'm genuinely asking, I only know about the US systems where electronic funds transfer is known as ACH which is an automated clearing house, and wiring is called wiring. From the US, I can wire to European banks. I can't ACH.
You are underestimating how toxic the Argentinian government was.
We did do that with capital controls, the problem is that it was illegal, and the Argentinian IRS is very active trying to tear you a new one. Argentina has long become a bimonetary economy, dealing with ARS for everyday transactions, but saving in USD and pricing assets in USD (real state for example).
To give an example where this would have helped, my parents in Argentina needed to send money to my brother in Europe. The government had made that illegal with capital controls, so I had to transfer him money through wise from a 3rd country and when at some point later I visited they gave me the cash.
People underestimate how annoying and distopic governments can be if given the chance.
If something can be accomplished on the blockchain, which requires N nodes, a business can probably replicate that same objective with less than N nodes because they don't have to pay the cost of verifying that nodes are acting honestly. This business is incentivized to be honest because otherwise they lose their business. Someone has to pay those costs for the N nodes on the blockchain - who will it be? Transactions seem cheap now because funding for these blockchains is often used to subsidize costs.
You mentioned ease of use, like the use of SDKs, but blockchain technology does not enable that. All blockchain can do is that if you ask it "hey i was told the state of the world was this. is it true?" and the blockchain will tell you yes or no. If you want to provide those kinds of guarantees to customers in a reliable way, all you need is cryptography, not blockchain.
So in this case, "this business is incentivized to be honest" might be the precise "problem" this is meant to solve.
Sort of like banks use customer money to offer loans to avoid the need of centralised liquidity.
The Blockchain technology is important to allow different exchanges to interact with each other in ways that I suspect would be not super legal through a central entity.
When A sends money to B both have an expectation that B is able to access such money through normal monetary systems like: seeing their bank balance go up, withdraw it as cash, or transfer it again to C which will have a similar recursive set of expectations.
Unless your database is the de facto central banck for the currency A and B use you will have to convice B's monetary system to believe B now has more money. The simples and almost only way to do that is to pay the appropriate price in a currency they like.
Which requires liquidity.
As an example if you wanted to install a bitcoin ATM with withdrawl* in a train station (or anywhere else) you would need liquidity in whatever currency the user want to withdraw.
* I suppose you could withdrawn bitcoin by giving out fresh wallets with the sum or by simply transfering it.
because it is the banks that do the transfer, so they need to have liquidity
> Bitcoin doesn’t transfer funds, it’s just a shared ledger of what funds have been transferred.
the bitcoin blockchain act as a single bank in terms of transfering between bitcoin wallets, there is no need for central liquidity because it is all "internal".
A perfect example is arbitrage between bitcoin exchanges, to my undestanding many exchanges do internal transactions off-chain and only interact with the public blockchains for deposits/withdrawals. If a user wanted to exchange bitcoin for ether and then withdraw the sum the exchange would need to have liquidity in ether for the withdrawal.
For business running the same code on their 1 node instead of N is not a replacement, because their counterparty has no reason to trust whatever is running on that 1 node.
Your reasoning re: N nodes are expensive is also flawed. Executing a single payment transaction takes a fraction of a second of compute. Even if it is replicated 10,000X, it's still extremely cheap compute-wise. The low cost of transactions has nothing to do with subsidizing.
I mean, why are you doing this kind of business with someone where you can't even trust that?
Aside from that, block chains only provide trust if they're meaningfully decentralized. These hyper specific b2b ones seem unlikely to pass that test. Exactly who all is running verifier nodes?
The only people that need to run a verifier node are those that don't trust the other verifier nodes to do it properly. It's opt in, most will not run one, but a business that has enough money at stake can if they want to.
Then the blockchain client software provides the framework for cryptographic assurance that the two copies of the ledger are in sync.
> This business is incentivized to be honest because otherwise they lose their business
is true. And it might be true if you assume perfect competition, low barriers to entry, no egregious regulations, no regulatory capture, no bundling to force decisions regardless of 'honesty' (or 'fairness'), etc.
So in a perfect world, maybe. But I think the niche in all the imperfections.
This is missing something important, which we can see by considering one of the major problems merchants want to solve right now.
The credit card companies charge them ~3% and then give ~1% back to the customer, implying that there is a ~2% net gain to be had by cutting out the middle man. So why hasn't this happened? Because the alternative with the lower fees is ACH, but customers are less willing to give out their bank account number than their credit card number to a random small business.
This is the easy case for some centralized service to fix it, right? Have some large trustworthy company take the customer's bank account info and transfer the money to the merchant for a very small processing fee. But this is the part where your assumption falls through. Once the merchant has signed up for this, the payment processor is the only one with the customer's payment info. In other words, it's hard to switch, and then the payment processor can charge higher fees (eroding the benefit) and the high switching costs also cause the market to consolidate. And because you're tied to a single payment processor, when their fraud AI has a false positive they can erase your business overnight by locking you out and not answering the phone.
Now suppose you don't have a centralized system. Instead, the customer acquires a store of value (Bitcoin, stablecoin, something else) however they want. Customer A can get it from Coinbase, Customer B can get it from Stripe, Customer C can get it by selling something on eBay and accepting it as payment, and the merchant doesn't have to do business with any of these third parties to accept payments from customers who do, because they all support the same transfer medium.
Now you have a competitive market. Currently a new payment processor has to earn the trust of a large enough percentage of the general public for merchants to be willing to use them; a new exchange would only need the trust of enough people to be doing enough business to cover their costs, a far lower threshold. If a merchant wants to switch payment processors or has a dispute with one of them, their own customers wouldn't have to do anything different because the means customers use to convert dollars to tokens is independent of the means merchants use to convert tokens to dollars.
> Someone has to pay those costs for the N nodes on the blockchain - who will it be?
That's the boring question. The interesting question is, can you have a blockchain with lower fees than payment processors currently have? And the answer appears to be yes, e.g. the transaction fee for Bitcoin Cash is around a penny.
If trust is an issue, the bank can provide cryptographically signed receipts that show they've confirmed the entire lineage of your account, in the same way a blockchain does, but they would be the only verifier. The question becomes about how the cost of the additional trust from the blockchain relates to the incentive of doing honest business. I imagine that trust cost is pretty high.
> can you have a blockchain with lower fees than payment processors currently have? And the answer appears to be yes
The transaction fee is not the only thing being paid. They are also getting mining rewards. If a blockchain has mining rewards, maybe in the form of Bitcoin Cash, then that will dilute the entire pool of Bitcoin Cash.
How is this any different than the Fed or the fractional reserve banking system creating new US dollars?
> nothing about the technology itself makes the concept of transferring money cheaper.
Nothing except for the thing that matters: If you have something fungible instead of something with high switching costs, it makes fees go down.
> if it became a threat to payment processors, my theory is that they could lower their costs more than blockchains potentially can.
And that's why blockchains are useful! To exert the pressure needed to make that happen.
It doesn't matter if the centralized system can have lower costs unless it actually does, and for that you need the competitor to exist as a viable threat.
The miners get the fees. The fed does not keep the dollars they make. They also adjust the rates to avoid things like recessions.
> Nothing except for the thing that matters: If you have something fungible instead of something with high switching costs, it makes fees go down.
The US dollar is considered fungible... Help me understand how any of this is specific to blockchain technology and not included in non-blockchain technology. Have you worked with this tech before? Also, what about things like venmo and zelle? zero fees, super fast.
> And that's why blockchains are useful! To exert the pressure needed to make that happen.
I'm not saying they are not useful. I am saying the technology behind them is irrelevant to the costs.
Somebody gets the money. Banks and government contractors get the money. It's not clear how that's any better than miners getting it, and either way it's creating new money that dilutes the value of your existing money.
> They also adjust the rates to avoid things like recessions.
There is nothing stopping the government from setting up a fractional reserve banking system denominated in a cryptocurrency. It works the same as it does in dollars. Alice borrows from the bank, pays the money to Bob and now the bank credits Bob's account and balances its books through the money that Alice owes the bank. If Bob wants to withdraw the money as physical cash or cryptocurrency in a non-custodial wallet then the bank either has enough reserves to do that or can sell the loan and use the proceeds to pay Bob. But if that doesn't happen -- which is more common -- then the balance credited to Bob's account only ever exists in the bank's computer and the bank has effectively created new money in that denomination.
> The US dollar is considered fungible... Help me understand how any of this is specific to blockchain technology and not included in non-blockchain technology.
US dollars as bills in your pocket, sure, but it's hard to transfer those over the internet without involving a middle man.
> Also, what about things like venmo and zelle? zero fees, super fast.
Venmo isn't a protocol, it's a company. It isn't free for businesses and they can still shut down your operations without recourse.
Zelle is a protocol, but it's designed for transferring money between individuals, not making purchases from a business or setting up autopay. What we need is a protocol that is designed to do those things, but the banks fight attempts to create it because they want to keep getting the 3% from credit cards.
> I'm not saying they are not useful. I am saying the technology behind them is irrelevant to the costs.
Suppose that something with the transaction fees of Bitcoin Cash was more widely used and therefore a viable way for small businesses to accept payments from ordinary customers. Which existing non-cryptocurrency service is a viable means to do the same thing for the same or lower fees? A real one, not a hypothetical cost structure that nobody actually offers.
You mean criptography and trust right?
if bank of america does something malicious, i can prove in court very trivially through those signed receipts that they did so.
So I don't need to trust bank of america - i just need to trust the courts to charge financial institutions that provably are breaking the law.
You usually can trust your bank, as long as you trust your government. Regulations make it difficult for banks to misbehave.
That being said, not trusting your government (which I can believe is a valid stance in some countries) is probably the only valid use case for blockchain IMO.
- SWIFT is really just a messaging protocol between a distributed, decentralized set of global banks that are all passing messages/money between each other. Your SWIFT wire might pass through an arbitrary number of correspondent banks, sort of like a flight route with multiple stops, until it reaches its destination.
- Consequently: money moves slowly (up to 5 days), is expensive to move (variable fees assessed either to the payor or payee, by every bank in the chain), and there is an indeterminate amount of manual ops burden, multiplied by every bank in the chain.
- As another commenter points out - services like Wise really just use massive amounts of liquidity spread out globally to try to minimize the number of true, bank-to-bank cross-border settlements required to get low-value payments from A -> B internationally.
Ironically, I think the great accomplishment of stablecoins is its "centralizing" of cross-border money movement into a single ledger -- reducing it to a "book transfer" of sorts -- where getting all the world's money to pass through a single ledger would otherwise be a very difficult (probably intractable) challenge _if it were not for_ the permissionless-ness + global neutrality of the blockchain that is tasked with doing so.
(I wrote about this in a slightly longer post here: https://text-incubation.com/The+great+irony+of+stablecoin)
I chose wire transfer. Which meant going to my bank, getting approval to get paid, fill out two forms, and making three total trips.
I now have contractors in Nigeria and Philippines who want to get paid in USDT. It's instant and there is a thriving local scene of P2P sellers for instant liquidity.
One way to see it is today the EVM ended up being the solution to a lot of other problems.
The banks are dying, their core banking is dying after 50+ years of service. There hasn't been any real investment since 2008, only minimal maintenance and cost cutting. Also generations of incompetent people at every levels created a situation with no escape.
Also things like SWIFT became very irrelevant in practice. I can assure banks did not really used it for a while.
When Ethereum and its EVM appeared 10 years ago a lot of people saw an opportunity to build a better "programmable money" platform but nobody really succeeded. At the same time Ethereum did not fail, improve and still secure the assets and run the smart contracts deployed in 2015. More than enough to convince the people on a sinking ship to jump on that boat.
My guess is the the EVM is becoming something similar to UNIX: a loose standard almost everybody will build on. Maybe not the best but something good and flexible to jump and we need to move forward.
Also the dollar urgently needed a new outlet so its on.
So it is not really about "crypto" it is more about the EVM as a platform.
Are there other uses? Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases?
You are literally in a thread whose top post is the Stripe founder describing use cases.
> For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America.
Let's say I make drinking water illegal, would you still do it? Sure you would, you need it to live, laws be damned.
In Argentina it was a similar situation, financially speaking, but with USD, as Argentina had like 1000% accumulated inflation since 2019, so basically the ARS melted in your hands, and the USD/Euros/crypto where your only safe havens.
So yes, the government made the transactions illegal, but the alternative was becoming poor (we ended up the previous government with around 55% poverty).
From the example given from Argentina, it bypasses capital controls, which until recently, made accessing foreign currency very hard/expensive/illegal. Argentina had a huge crypto boom because of them.
(The many other crypto coins since then are mostly BS freud.)
Whether or not it was the point of Bitcoin from the start, "removing the middlemen" is bullshit because you still need exchanges, wallet providers, people running nodes, etc. Cryptocurrency in practice just transfers power from traditional middlemen to new technically-advantaged middlemen.
Miners now replace this since there is a network fee required to transact.
I'm not sure what the current state of affair is, but ETH gas fees were egregious last time I transacted ETH.
Normal people cannot function in a cryptocurrency ecosystem without these new tech middlemen. This is exactly what I mean when I say _in practice_. Average people are still left to the whims of cryptocurrency corporations that are worse than banks because they're unregulated, much greedier, and much less risk averse.
you don't need exchanges or wallet providers, or any other intermediary, to exchange Bitcoin -- those add layers of convenience (conversion, storage), but they do _not_ strengthen the web of trust and do not provide the same function as intermediary banks and clearing houses do
yes, you do need people running nodes, but they're not intermediate layers, and you can run a node yourself to benefit from the system (though in practice it's no longer profitable due to bitcoin farms)
A lever of power is never removed unless the act itself can no longer be performed. All you can do is take someone's hand off the lever and hope that whoever grabs it next is better than the last hand that had it.
I find it very unlikely that wresting power away from government—which at least has some level of citizen participation—will end up with it in better hands. The most likely scenario is that some billionaire will end up owning it.
Right. What you propose is that you take government's hand off the lever and a million users will all equally get to gently rest their pinky on it and distribute the power equally.
I have never seen anything in the history of the world or my understanding of sociology to indicate that such a power structure has any stability. If you give out power in a free-for-all, what tends to happen is:
1. All of the participants already have some unequal distribution of power going in.
2. Those who have more are able to use that to claim a little more of the new resource.
3. Once they do they, they are able to use the increased inequality to claim even more.
4. Go to 2.
The natural tendency is towards increasing inequality. It takes a ton of work to build and maintain structures that encourage any level of egalitarianism.
Non-fiat currency is the most egalitarian system possible.
No, it requires network control. Consensus among a large number of independent participants who agree on a change is one way to have that control.
But another way is to have a minority of participants that control a disproportionately large fraction of mining decide what to do.
The history of crypto shows that over time, miners tend to consolidate until eventually you have a small number of miners who significant leverage over the ledger. None of that should be surprising: economy of scale is economics 101 and certainly applies to miners who buy and run hardware in bulk.
> Non-fiat currency is the most egalitarian system possible.
Egalitarianism is a property of human behavior and social systems, not the hardware that humans may or may not be using as intended.
I could pretty much go on forever…
It's not a push in any sense of the word. And outside of the US quite a few of financial institutions are "up to date" in most of the areas that matter to people.
> there is no need to reinvent judiciary and executive institutions in this step.
Strange how "up to date" inevitably involves rediscovering all the reasons those exist in the first place and why the "outdated" institutions do the things they do.
The second question is, once you take away anything that’s not permissionless, what’s left in crypto?
- Buying a physical good? You’re trusting the person manufacturing it, storing it, shipping it. If it comes to your door and it’s defective, they’ve already got your money, and it turns out your trustless system actually makes this impossible to resolve.
- Buying some skin for a game or something? Unless the game is also run in a decentralized fashion, they can just choose not to render that particular skin.
So, like, can you give me an example of a single transaction that is rendered trust-less because of cryptocurrency? It seems to me like whenever anyone actually tries to do anything useful with crypto, it ends up being what you would describe as an obvious scam.
1) people who put their money into custodial 'banks' and then get it stolen
2) people rely on protocols whose consensus protocol is controlled by a small committee of appointed VIPs
None of which is germane to my original point. I'm simply saying that Im advocating for central banks not having the power to manipulate the currency supply at a whim And somehow you're forcing me into the position of spending an hour reading every trash crypto scam you can find. Not terribly interested in discussing how you can get ripped off with crypto or fiat cash.
Once again, this is what Stripe is doing here in this very announcement.
> Not a single one of these examples is trustless, decentralized crypto
You brought up trustless, so surely you can find an example. I didn’t pull that out of nowhere.
There is a case for banks that hold your hand as if you are 90yo and there must be a case for banking where I know what I do and I take responsibility for my actions.
If i send my coins to the wrong address its on me. But if I want to send 10k to someone - no one should ask me to wait 3 days, to do 100 verifications if I am not being forced or scammed.
I'd want that protection for my mom, sure.
But I want to remove all that crap for me. I don't have time and energy for it
It clearly demonstrates that people do not have the capacity to make critical judgments and have to be somewhat protected from themselves.
That's als what regulations are for.
Like, blockchain technology to power distributed ledgers for peer-to-peer payments is pretty interesting and I think I'd prefer it exists, consequences be damned. Stable coins don't really fit the same use cases though, and generally do have at least some reliance on a central party, so it raises the question whether the desired technical properties can't actually be achieved using traditional technology.
Unfortunately, the answers pretty clearly center around not what kind of technology is used to implement the ledger, but rather the choice to implement one versus using existing payment networks. I don't think this is done in bad faith, but rather is the result of very different perspectives.
I think the blockchain skeptics have a point: even if there is something especially technically advantageous about using the blockchain for this purpose that really couldn't be accomplished some other way, so far the only obvious incentive to do things this way appears to be regulatory differences in how the blockchain is regulated versus traditional ledgers.
Very tangential, but seeing major entities and even governments adopt blockchain technology has made me think a lot about potential consequences in the longer term. I really wonder what happens to the properties of various cryptocurrency networks when and if quantum computers scale big enough to start breaking our cryptographic systems. I guess CryptoNote is just toast.
appears to be regulatory differences in how the blockchain is regulated versus traditional ledgers.
One is governed by humans/banks, the other by unalterable mathematical precision. If you truly don't see the value I don't know what else could be said.Hyper-inflation, censorship, corporate takeover of all interpersonal transactions, data harvesting, slow processing, fraud, offshore accounts, scams, laundering. The list feels almost endless.
Luckily we're talking about bitcoin right?
I've watched for over a decade how this forum utterly decimates any actual discussion of crypto (bitcoin) due to willful ignorance or blind naivety. So excuse my excitement when I get a chance to actually discuss its merits or disadvantages.
In this sense, I will agree that stablecoins are just a technological way of obscuring certain mechanisms in how fiat currency is distributed and is basically a derivative instrument that exists outside established regulatory framework (similar to how uber/airbnb operated for a decade until the govt caught up)
A regular log or ledger file could accomplish the same thing as a blockchain for significantly less technical debt or ongoing expense.
And note that the best use cases Stripe could find for "real world" use cases were a company trying to complicate its FX cash management, and a cash transfer app with fees higher than most of their competitors.
It is kind of wild how a bunch of people hyping blockchains five years ago has resulted in a thermostatic reaction where a bunch of other people have decided that distributed computing is easy, actually, you just need a ledger file.
But it's still just a ledger.
With blockchain, you just get a ledger that's harder to use and dependent on external connectivity.
here is what you're missing, and is very easy to miss:
the third party, unaffiliated, developer experience is better on an EVM than it is is on a traditional centralized database. Than it is on a shared database with a bunch of signers. Than on any "web 2.0" cloud platform. the developers continue to bring their entire audiences with them, even though those audiences are quite small, they've grown in aggregate to be large enough.
in web3, of which EVM platforms dominate and are the most mature, there is a tiny payment for deploying your application once, and then it exists in perpetuity for free at unlimited levels of bandwidth. your users pay to update the state of your application, and in many cases you can earn from them doing that.
there is absolutely nothing in the cloud world that achieves the same thing at the same cost. the payment paradigms are entirely different, you have to pay for hosting, deployment, the thing that handles your deployment, additional workers to unbottleneck your continuous deployment, the bandwidth, bandwidth spikes, and get nickel and dimed on a ton of more things, or paying a premium to a service that handles all that for you.
additionally, the concept of "composability" is attractive in the web3 space, again spearheaded by standards on EVMs, the concept is that third party applications are automatically compatible with each other. there are infinite permutations of combinable operations one can do or enable amongst deployed applications. you can compose, or combine, applications in a far less cumbersome and less fragile way, than with REST and APIs of different people's apps in the web 2.0 world.
and on top of that, if one of those permutations becomes useful and you make it user friendly to do so, you can collect a toll for others doing that operation. this is just financial services, where "basis points" are collected by intermediaries.
a common application are forms of lending. initiating borrowing, trading the opportunity, and closing the loan within a split second, leveraging 3 - 10 financial services at once, is something that's better faster and cheaper than what has been possible outside of the blockchain space. the ability to do so is gatekept by the other financial industry and payment rails in ways that are no longer necessary to debate. now you can do these things with $3 in capital instead of needing $3 million dollars to pursue getting an API key from some old slow moving organization.
the compelling reason to create a new EVM are to change some basic parameters. block time, the size of contracts (the aforementioned operations) that can be deployed, and which standards are included into that chain, and of course the governance model - how are new standards deployed and how are transactions added. making stablecoins a first class citizen would need a new blockchain. how your governors/validators/nodes and RPCs function under load would need a new blockchain.
it is very attractive to developers that they can deploy applications "in the cloud" that have a very nominal cost, doesn't cost them to maintain even amongst spikes in bandwidth. they don't have to incorporate or do any formalities while having unlimited financial upside, solely because there is already hundred of billions of dollars in notional value sloshing around in that space to cater to already.
edit: I'd actually like to work with Stripe or other web3 organizations again on these kind of applications, now that I notice how boutique it still is to understand what's going on, email in bio
Take the spacex example above. They are using a stablecoin to abstract away a bunch of illiquid and unstable foreign currencies. Getting rid of that huge pain of carrying 100 countries’ currencies via various banks is the value prop. The API could be cobol and it wouldn’t matter.
> The API could be cobol and it wouldn’t matter
you can probably get cobol to transpile to bytecode that EVMs can use. I get the point you're trying to make that excludes blockchains, but you don't make that point
I’m saying the API can be complete trash and whether it’s a blockchain or a traditional bank, the thing that will drive the decision is money.
>the third party, unaffiliated, developer experience is better on an EVM than it is is on a traditional centralized database.
The developer experience is completely irrelevant when millions of dollars a week are on the line.
The API doesn’t matter.
This is definitely a take, given how easy it is to write a program with security bugs using Solidity due to specific concerns like reentrancy that only exist due to the unique way smart contracts work. The inability to "undo" a fraudulent or mistaken transaction without requiring all validators to fork the chain also makes this a non-starter for many developers.
> your users pay to update the state of your application
Also a weird thing to call a "feature" for developers when this actively drives away potential users.
while being a funnel of 1 step for the users already in the ecosystem that find your application
the ecosystems turns the entire Web 2.0 marketing funnel industry on its head because the initial call to action is a payment. All of the mystery of converting to a paying customer is obsoleted in favor of unbridled commerce
this just points out another way its optimal for developers with ideas, when aiming for revenue in a web3 architected project for crypto natives. they have frictions, you solve them, they pay you. If you aren’t catering to crypto natives already, don’t launch a web3 application. the space is already big enough to ignore other potential users, and if you want that to be your cause to help the UX to grow the space, you can do that too.
> security bugs using Solidity
To your other point, I don't see 2016's smart contract coding problems as show stopping criticisms, because this is the lowest hanging fruit of experience for anyone learning solidity, all while standardization of open source methods has solved those building blocks just like in other languages. additionally, you can write an insecure application in the web 2.0 space as well.
There are enough and a growing number of developers that aren't afraid of deploying code on a blockchain. a lot has happened in the last ... decade? developer tooling has improved.