> My Visa card doesn't cost me anything to use
Gp said imagine
Actually, my card costs me negative money to use. I get cash back with no annual fee.
Visa keeps a very narrow margin, for providing... A pretty damn good service.
> We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023007pap...
They'll still exist, and they'll still work in nearly the same way they do today, the cashback rate will drop by half a percent, and the credit score cutoff for getting one will go up a couple hundred points. The working poor using them today will just end up using debit cards, instead.
I think you are conflating processor fees (2.9% + $.30) with bank loans (20+% for carrying a balance).
These are different companies in the system.
And application-level solutions like Cash App.
And something like CashApp is even worse - it only uses BTC as a way to circumvent banking regulations, and for name recognition. Otherwise, it could just as easily work on top of regular banking, or do away with BTC entirely and simply work with their own centralized ledger.
The additional assumption vs simply holding your own funds is a throughput requirement: that miners not censor your transactions for some (up-front-chosen) period of time.
With normal funds there is a non-censoring requirement, but it's more vague since the miners may have to censor you forever to make your funds useless.
And related to censorship, I'm not sure what is the point you are trying to make. Still, censoring forever is not hard (you just add some wallet address in a list, and look those up before choosing which transactions to include in a block), and is completely equivalent to how payments censorship works in regular banks as well.
Ordinals wouldn’t even exist without Segwit.
0-conf worked just fine for immediate transactions.
Wild, isn't it ?
Visa and Mastercard have 1+% fee, so it's lower for some transactions than bitcoin but higher for others.
That system will allow people to buy their coffee with electronic cash, but Bitcoin will never carry every coffee purchase on-chain. Those who make the Visa-analogy either don’t understand how Visa works, or don’t understand how Bitcoin works.»
Whether bitcoin is used for direct payments or payment channel settlements is irrelevant. What is important is self-custody. Cash works and has the properties it does because it is a (mostly) fungible bearer bond. Bitcoin is also a (mostly) fungible bearer bond regardless of whether you transact on chain or through lightning.
Cash was the gold that you used to be able to redeem said liabilities for. These days, you can simply transfer the bank's liability to you to someone else, as a way to offset your own liability.
Just because the bank has no intention of ever paying cash at this point ever since Nixon left behind specie payments doesn't change the fact that these notes are still issued as liabilities.
And when I say issued by the central bank, I do mean only the paper bills that are issued. Most money that exists in bank accounts is issued by the various commercial banks that operate within the banking system (when they issue you a loan, they don't go out and find other money; they simply credit your account with the amount of the loan, and that money was simply loaned into existence as a liability of that bank).
There is intrinsically no difference between deciding gold is the scarce thing that we all accept as money, or some specific hard to duplicate paper money. They both serve th same purpose.
1. When will the value become relatively stable? This flies in the face of the store of value argument.
2. How is Monero-like fungibility going to be added? Good cash needs to be fungible.
You could call that historical aggregation, but normally when people talk about aggregation (as I assume you do) it refers to aggregating transactions before they're included in a block.
In other CT blockchains, that data stays around forever, hurting scalability.
In my experience when people talk about on-chain scalability, they mean transactions per second of real-time validation. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think anyone in this thread was talking about IBD / validation of historical data.
It is for full nodes (fully verifying nodes). They don't trust the UTXO set to be correct just because miners keep building on it.
Huge chain size is exactly the reason why there are so few Ethereum full nodes, which makes it less decentralized.
While technically SPV, this ends up being exactly the same security model overall, since an attacker that can invent (say) a full year's worth of alternate history to fool you can already perform arbitrary double-spends on main net. In addition, although this is not required, for most of bitcoin's history the last year or two of mining represents almost all of the proof of work anyway, so someone who serve you a more-work forked off false chain with a false UTXO set commitment could have also rewritten the block chain since genesis.
Bitcoin's security model already assumes this is not possible. So with UTXO set commitments (which bitcoin will eventually get in some form), you only need to IBD a few months worth of blocks, or maybe a year or so if you are truly paranoid.
Cash (and Bitcoin) are just as vulnerable to inflation as traditional currencies. If oil is more scarce, the cost of all oil-based goods will increase, regardless of whether you can mint more BTC or not. Not that it would be any serious difficulty to increase the supply of BTC either - it's ultimately just a number in some program.
Counterfeiting is fixed by all digital payment systems protect against it. Visa cards are just as secure from counterfeiting as BTC wallets.
Capital controls are much more easily enforced when you have a public ledger.
High costs are inherent to BTC, at least as the community exists today. And the network itself is completely impossible to scale to anything like a full payments system, as you yourself admit.
Also, censorship is easy to implement on top of BTC: just require miners to be licensed, require licensed miners not to validate transactions from certain wallets, and to ignore blocks proposed by non-licensed miners. Since mining is an extremely centralized and high-capex + high-opex operation, it's easy for a a powerful government to shut down any significant miners who aren't licensed. So, if BTC payments ever become a significant way of circumventing sanctions and censorship, the ban hammer will come down swiftly. Of course, so far BTC is both too low in scale for major governments to care, and too convenient as a honeypot to find sanctions breakers.
Plus, trying to generally replace fiat and the monetary standard.
To be clear, when I say "bitcoin", I mean the L1.
Bitcoin, and all the other "crypto"-tokens, have been looking for a problem to solve for 14 years.
Soon they will find something it is reaaaally good at. Might solve some prime number conjecture by accident if they solve enough sudokus, I mean hashes.
I used it quite a few times lately to pay open source contributors in countries that don't have access to Paypal. Paid my rent when Venmo blocked my account temporarily and I had to wait 2 weeks for checks to come in the mail. Used it for Mullvad VPN. Used it to get MJ on a market at far higher quality and better price than locally in Cali. Was super useful.
Paypal in and of itself makes the case, no need for any more.
I am sad to hear that. I was mocking the crypto attempts to legitimise their business proporisiton. All of them have failed, because fundamentally their product does not solve any real problem and once it interacts with the real world it has the same problems as those industries have.
Essentially crypto is like most libertarian communities, they eventually end up inventing regulations, governance and many of the same systems that we currently have, but only after fucking up themselves.
> Even capturing a fraction of a fraction of those would be a massive.
The risk of fraud outstrips any of the advantages, also the risk of lack of regulation on the financial system has brought us great hits like the 2008 banking crisis.
Giving VC access to anyone based on crypto is gonna be a gold rush of fraud, To the Moon tm slogans and other nonsense that will bankrupt as many people as possible before imploding.
Do you have a source for that number?
And even forgetting that "crypto" comes with both delays and transaction fees, it is also known to be able to lose most of it's value basically overnight. So unless companies want to wake up bankrupt, they'd have to constantly change real money into tokens and back again for their transactions. I wonder how efficient that would be.
crypto delays are minutes to hours. banking delays are a matter of days. just this week i needed to do a significant transfer with my bank. because i did the transfer after 16:30 (in branch!) i needed to wait until 06:00 for the transfer to happen because it was outside transfer hours. if some crypto coin functioned like this it would be laughed at
Another use case is domains and servers. When big companies like Porkbun, namecheap and vultr offer their services to be bought via Bitcoin there is probably some demand.
I heard someone used USD for a domain, and it turns out USD is used by scammers!
Do you know anyone using Bitcoin as a currency daily? How many people do you think are using Bitcoin as a currency for legal business VS the number of people using it to speculate on its price and/or shady activities?
I'd love to be proved wrong but unfortunately neither of us will be able to collect this information so I guess we have to agree to disagree and live inside our little bubbles.
I am only challenging the usefulness of a statement like "BTC is a criminal currency" that is fully applicable to USD just the same.
For something to be an actual currency in our world, one minimum requirement would for it to be legal tender. "FIAT" money is legal tender. If I have a 100 dollars in USD, and a debt of 50 dollars, I can settle that debt, period.
If I have a 100 dollars in BTC, and a debt of 50 dollars, my ability to settle that debt relies completely on the creditor to accept BTC as a form of payment. Which is entirely up to the creditor, as he isn't legally required to do so, unless we have an enforceable contract that says he has to.
As long as that doesn't change, and given the fact that the entire value backing of crypto tokens is based on the money invested into them, it is highly unlikely to happen in relevant economies, crypto tokens will not become a widespread currency.
A lot of people laud the fact that crypto is free of government influence. The problem with that is, that this government influence is exactly what makes money work as currency.
Imagine if your Visa card became hundreds of times more expensive to use during the Christmas shopping period.