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The Dark Future Where Payments Are Politicized and Bitcoin Wins
- notRobot 6y agoUnfortunately, I can totally see this happening in the next decade or so. :(
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- notRobot 6y agoActually. Maybe not. Idk.
- OneGuy123 6y agoPaypal canceled people just because they were thought criminals. At the point where you become a global payment processor (Paypal, Mastercard,...) a different ruleset should apply to you: no banning unless directly criminaly charged. Because as it is now Paypal can ban you for whatever reason you want. When you become global and directly affect people's livelyhoods it should be illegal to cancel people just like that. The "it's a private business it can do whatever it wants" argument simply doesn't apply anymore (unless you want to end up with corporations for nations since you now have to bow down to private corporations if your opinions are not acceptable. In other words: corporations own your mouth, they own your speech, you cannot go against privot corps. Nightmare fuel. Well you can go against them but you will then lose all of your income which is centralized in a few global corps who also most likely share data on dissidents).
- woodruffw 6y agoOr, you know, you could just pay people with cash and checks. Every country in the world has analog public financial instruments, and most have or are developing digital instruments. We don't really need to use a Switzerland's worth of electricity to move money around.
- j0ba 6y agoA few years ago, I hired an African (I forget the country) on Upwork to do some image editing. When I tried to pay via PayPal, it wouldn't work for him. Instead, I sent him bitcoin. Your solution would have been to mail a check? Maybe if your imagination was better, you could see more use cases.
- woodruffw 6y agoMy imagination is just fine, thanks. I see a use for Bitcoin as a speculative instrument, which is how people are using it. I just don't care for that use case, and I'd rather people speculate on cold pieces of yellow rock than on proving that they can do the digital equivalent of burning car tires.
- mindslight 6y agoEnergy is the real measure of value, but it's hard to transact with. Both gold and bitcoin are ultimately just fungible representations of wasted energy. The question is whether bitcoin can rise to the level of thousands of years of tradition with gold, or if we'll have forgotten about it in a few decades. I'm guessing the latter because without the key property of untraceability, bitcoin isn't actually fungible.
- alwillis 6y agoBitcoin is a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized digital store of value. It’s an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoWiretransfer solves it much cheaper/faster
- dang 6y agoPlease don't stoop to personal swipes on HN. Your comment would be just fine with just the first part. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tylerhou 6y ago> Paypal canceled people just because they were thought criminals. No, PayPal cancelled Gab because a verified, active user murdered 11 people and injured 6 others in a synagogue shooting. The same user constantly posted neo-Nazi and anti-semitic hate speech. "Thought-crime" is a bit too charitable for a neo-Nazi murderer, don't you think? Before you argue that Gab did nothing wrong — 100% they did. They gave the shooter a platform and credibility for ideas that should have died with WWII.
- eat_veggies 6y agoCryptocurrency enthusiasts cannot find a legitimate use for bitcoins, so they dream up hellscapes where "both sides" are bad and apolitical bitcoin saves the day
- doggosphere 6y agoMaintaining privacy from government/corporate surveillance.
- klodolph 6y agoIsn't Bitcoin structured so that all transactions are recorded for everyone to see in the ledger? Doesn't that make surveillance easier?
- doggosphere 6y agoThey are. Monero and other privacy coins have features built in. But the ability for anyone to generate addresses anywhere adds for some level of privacy. The only way to identify the owner of an address is to have concrete information linking a person to an address.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoSo, when you are actually using it, then your privacy is revealed ( since you'll use that "anonymous" ledger to convert to USD/Eur). Every cloud application for doing this literally requires you to send your ID to them.
- Forbo 6y agoOne could mine it directly and never involve KYC. Or they could use a coin that has privacy features built-in, such that once it leaves the exchange they no long know what was done with it. There are also decentralized exchanges.
- ffghhhg 6y agoCan you imagine the amount of stupid people falling for the crypto scam? Adding those to hordes of anti vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, woke trash, supremacists and trumpers i imagine there is a market for anything out there and billions of currency laying around waiting to spent on just about anything.
- sputknick 6y agoI find the HN attitude to cryptocurrency to be fascinating. This is the site where I first learned about Bitcoin in 2011. At the time it was treated enthusiastically. People would "Show HN" projects they made that used BTC, people were intellectually curious about it. Then somewhere around 2014 it turned negative. I'm not sure what drove this change. IS it that engineers liked experimenting with it, and when those experiments didn't bear fruit they moved on? Is it that the engineers were replaced with marketers and financial analysts in the cryptocurrency community?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> Then somewhere around 2014 it turned negative. I'm not sure what drove this change. That is around when Bitcoin dropped its currency aspirations and went whole hog into being a vehicle for speculation.
- ardy42 6y ago> That is around when Bitcoin dropped its currency aspirations and went whole hog into being a vehicle for speculation. Was that when we started to see all the scammy pump and dump schemes around random new cryptocurrencies as well?
- qualityonly 6y agoI think many of us have tried our best to teach people about "shitcoins", but the greed and fantasy of riches has caused lots of people to buy Bitcoin copypastes. The most recent round of dissapointment comes from blockchains being too expensive to use as write only databases, yet people using it for trivial means like crypto kitties. I predict the next issue will again be unrelated to Bitcoin, but rather non POW coins getting hacked.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoThere's no actual use-case for bitcoin anymore. The enthusiasm got diverted to blockchain aka. the technology. Except speculation.
- tylerhou 6y agoPayment processors already deplatform sexually explicit content that features minors. (They also don't process payments for digital-only sexual content, likely because of high fraud and chargeback rates.) But I haven't seen PayPal fall down the slippery slope of banning kinky/less mainstream sexual content. Right now, these payment processors are deplatforming racists and neo-Nazis who openly advocate for the creation of a white ethnostate. To assume that eventually these payment processors will be successfully pressured into deplatforming moderately-right publications like the WSJ is classic slippery-slope fallacy. There is a huge difference between believing conservative ideas and advocating for violence against ethnic minorities. > social network Gab, which describes itself as pro-free speech but has high concentrations of toxicity. Give me a break. Gab is a haven for white-supremacists and neo-Nazis. PayPal deplatformed Gab after a verified neo-Nazi user posted anti-semitism on the site, then shot up a synagogue killing 11 and injuring 6 [0]. "Toxicity" is terribly bad faith argument. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#2018_Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#2018_Pitt...
- rvense 6y agoI really think it would be good for America to enact some sort of electoral reform to allow for more than two parties to have a reasonable chance at influence. It really seems to distort your politics that everything is binary.
- tylerhou 6y agoI would appreciate if you could explain to me how my political viewpoint is distorted inc. how I view things as "binary." My viewpoint is: calling for ethnic cleansing through violence creates real harm (people have been murdered!), so private citizens and organizations should not support people who advocate for ethnic cleansing. Also, blaming the two party system misunderstands US politics. Most Democratic politicians have not called for deplatforming of white supremacists — it's mostly a leftist idea.
- rvense 6y ago
- jancsika 6y agoThe users in the author's fantasy have get some Bitcoin in the first place. And either they or the person who would supply it to them are going to have to get over their fear of going rogue, just like a tax avoider does currently. Given the author is a fan and won't even risk writing about a more convincing example like sci-hub (I'm assuming out of fear that the publishing industry would come after them for advocating for their illegal competitor), what makes them thing regular folks would take an even bigger risk?
- alexmingoia 6y agoI see a different future. As layer 2 comes online, and capital continues to flood into Bitcoin, I imagine people having a layer 2 “checking” account which consists of Liquid or Lightning funds for instant low-fee transactions, and a “savings” account of Bitcoin. When they earn money or get paid large amounts, they will put it in savings to preserve the value, instead of losing it to inflation. Periodically they will transfer some to their checking account to pay for goods and services.
- qualityonly 6y agoThis is how I use coinbase. I have some Bitcoin for free and instant payments. I'm not saying where most of my Bitcoin is.
- tent3n3 6y agoEverything of scale in society is political as laws box it in. What is fraud, defective, resource management, value stores, technology... all the investment and debate are ultimately scoped within some law(s). Trying to emotionally separate oneself and agency from literal reality to no avail seems to be a serious psychological affliction in America. Society is a political standoff. We haven’t had to deal with that truth in our faces as division of labor rules. Though Adam Smith warned division of labor would lead to humans so stupid as to be indistinct from animal. There’s more to learning than memorizing facts of a contemporary economics or computers. Real world, hands on experience, re-invention, abandonment of old ha or. Tech addicted “disrupters” fail to disrupt self and expand in a very important way.
- justapassenger 6y agoThis reads like a fan fiction that’s written by 13 year old, who was 0 idea his economy works, and is just trying to exploit and deepen political dive for personal gain. Cutting ties with racist militia means that in the future I won’t be able to buy cupcakes across the street, because owner supports different party? That’s classic “where does it stop” argument, used to justify inaction to obviously wrong things, because it could be abused in the future. Omission bias at its best.
- doonesbury 6y agoBy advancing vapid imagination only to take the whole thing back at the end (writing paraphrasing OK that dystopian future won't happen) ... Coindesk tries to ... oh, never mind I can't pretend: OP's link is a giant waste of time, another too political emotion saber rattling rag. Move-on.