Re:Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants
by yellowapple on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @08:54PM
(#26498658)
To expand on this, quite a few wallet apps nowadays default to using a fresh wallet per transaction as a privacy measure, further inflating the number of wallets relative to the monetary supply.
Re:Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants
by sennight on Thursday March 18, 2021 @12:02PM
(#26504055)
No, you are confusing "wallet" with "address". A wallet is little more than a seed for an RNG and a log of transactions. Every new transaction starts with a source address and results in two destination addresses: the primary destination (payee) address and the address where the remainder of the source balance goes. You definitely want to maintain control of your change, so your wallet uses the seed to deterministically generate a keypair for a new address and that is where your change gets sent.
I've got no interest in digging into their methodology, but feel pretty comfortable assuming that they've grossly misrepresented all of the above as "accounts".
Re:Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants
by CobsterLock on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @09:03PM
(#26498715)
i dont mean to be condescending, but how could they implement privacy without centralizing? like the bitcoin card provide must hold all your assets for you for you to gain privacy, no?
Re:Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants
by seanyesmunt on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @10:36PM
(#26499207)
I believe they were talking about Bitcoin wallets, not card providers.
This seems obvious to me. Many people have bitcoin wallets with only a little invested. In my case, I have a few wallets just to play around with. I assume all of those wallets count as "accounts" in the above, which would really drive down the amount of money the average account controls. However few people actually have wallets with large amounts of money. I could easily move far more money into my wallets, but I choose not to.
On the other hand, when we're talking about non-bitcoin wealth the numerator is much larger (everything you and me have as assets could count as wealth, not just what we've invested in a specific thing) and the denominator would be much smaller (every one of us only counts as one person, while bitcoin wallets could be created on the fly)
In other words, the above is quite the apples to oranges comparison.