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Misleading Title. Visa says it will allow for Bitcoin to be converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card in the same way debit cards already w
by purple_ferret 6y ago
Misleading Title. Visa says it will allow for Bitcoin to be converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card in the same way debit cards already work.
This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc
The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.
- notyourwork 6y agoIt's such an anti-pattern for the world to adopt this approach. Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved. Sadly, I'm less and less hopeful that crypto will be what the movement conveyed over last 10 years.
- hakfoo 6y agoFundamentally, we're stuck with conversion and middlemen until we have real products that are priced "natively" and stably in Bitcoin. People aren't willing to say "this load of bread costs .00004534 BTC" because tomorrow it could be significantly less or more. And conversely, that reinforces the volatility, as there's no anchoring of BTC to real-world purchasing power. So for the foreseeable future, we're looking at a conversion model and that requires someone to backstop. So how do we create products priced in BTC? We can't even get, for comparison, shops pricing their goods in grams of gold or silver, a more stable alternative.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoJust as with social media, convenience was more important than sovereignty via decentralization. Can’t change the wind, have to adjust your sails.
- BuyMyBitcoins 6y agoI don’t fault the average person for not wanting to be their own bank. I’ve been using bitcoin for years and I’m still terrified I’m going to mess up a transaction or lose access to my wallet.
- notyourwork 6y agoThis is the biggest problem that an average person need not ever want to deal with. How do you explain to someone sorry we cannot help you because it was your responsibility to manage that wallet.
- bpodgursky 6y agoThe tax treatment of crypto as an asset makes it hard to avoid, right? Otherwise, you have to note the current price of coin in USD each time you use coin to pay for something, because you owe capital gains or losses on whatever currency you liquidated to make the purchase.
- rawtxapp 6y agoPresumably there will be tools to automate that, but I agree with you it would be a pita.
- ketamine__ 6y agoThere are tax tools now. They cost $200+/year.
- cfcosta 6y agoIsn't cryptotrader.tax free, or at least freemium?
- ketamine__ 6y agoA convincing argument would be a javascript app or a mobile or desktop app. I don't think the average person should be giving their address and personal information to a third-party.
- imtringued 6y agoVisa has incentives to play by the tax rules and make it easy for the average consumer to spend Bitcoin in dollars. Most cryptocurrency credit card companies built on top of Visa aren't willing to get their feet wet, not even in the country they are operating in.
- fny 6y agoI mean... what do you expect with a currency with an annualized volatility of 100%. The risk is way too damn high.
- notyourwork 6y agoI don't expect anything other than businesses will do what businesses do. Its just sad that mainstream media consumers will interpret this very differently from reality.
- waheoo 6y agoI think you're the one messing with reality here. Bitcoin needs to be stable before it can be used widespread for transactions. Visa doing this increases its adoption, increased adoption, even if used in this way will stabilise the currency. That is huge. It's just a required stepping stone.
- throw0101a 6y agoI ran across the following observation a little while ago: the volatility of one's currency should be less than the volatility of the goods purchased by that currency.
- sebmellen 6y agoSounds good, but does it hold true in practice? Should the average price of a dozen eggs be more volatile than $USD? I don’t think that’s the case historically.
- throw0101a 6y agoSome goods are more volatile than others, and probably tend to be commodities (e.g., oil/WTI) rather than finished goods, but US$ (and the currencies of most developed economies) is less volatile than any good that I can think of.
- 6y ago
- KoftaBob 6y agoThink of it like the currency equivalent of backwards compatibility. It's meant to serve as a stopgap so that accepting bitcoin for a purchase doesn't require the friction/risk of only being able to use that bitcoin at other places that accept bitcoin.
- notyourwork 6y agoIf BTC could replace CC merchants in terms of their transaction volume than this would not be possible. However, because the transaction volume cannot be handled natively Visa is able to wrap the "decentralized" currency and profit by continuing to be a middleman.
- kajumix 6y agoBitcoin disrupts central bank, not payment networks. Lightning [1] as layer 2 on top of Bitcoin adheres to trustless and p2p ideals, and is actually the competition for Visa. [1]: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/ Edit: added link
- zionic 6y agoLightning, technically speaking, is garbage. 10k transactions per second ETH2 layer 1 + zk roll-ups providing throughout multiplication threatens VISA.
- pshc 6y agoSorry, 10k tx/sec on sharded ETH2 sounds really high to me, is that really the goal or a typo?
- DennisP 6y agoZkrollups plus sharding will do more than that, without security or usability compromises. Rollups can handle a couple thousand tx/sec on Ethereum today and data sharding increases that by 23X initially. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
- rawtxapp 6y ago> Lightning, technically speaking, is garbage. Do you care to elaborate?
- kajumix 6y agoI will cheer for the success of ETH2 as well. The reason I like Lightning better is because the engineer in me wants to freeze the base layer and do the experimental layers in isolation. Internet infra is all layered for good reason.
- lupire 6y agoThe OSI layering model of internet infra is largely a myth, a simplification for students. It's similar to C is called "portable assembly" despite compilers being far more complex in practice.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoIt's impossible with current bitcoin transaction fees. Monero has a better chance at seeing real usage as currency.
- imtringued 6y agoThe only problem with Monero (and most other privacy/decentralized related projects) is that there is a big illegal industry that desperately needs such a product and it needs it much more than any legitimate user so it has gained a Tor like reputation. The only ones who need superior privacy are those who have something to "hide", at least according to governments.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoWhy do we have to "need" privacy? That's completely backwards. It boggles my mind how people keep insisting on this argument. It's the government who needs an incredibly good excuse to even consider violating anyone's privacy. Authorities think they're justified in everything they do and are developing increasingly entitled attitudes towards personal information. They can't be trusted so we absolutely should lock them out and make it impossible to violate our boundaries. Who cares if criminals use it? It doesn't matter at all. Technology doesn't choose its users. Governments wants to catch criminals? They need to send people out there to do real investigative and police work. We're not obligated to make it easy for them by making everything we do part of some public record.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved It's a deflationary currency. If it has a future as a store of value, and I think it very well may, it would have a net effect of concentrating wealth. And with wealth comes power. Whether that power is exercised through how the blockchain processes transactions or via some other vector seems something of a side show to me. The wealthy never wanted to abandon the gold standard. It was the populists and the bankers. The poor and the middlemen.
- adventured 6y ago> It's a deflationary currency. It's not a currency, that's a misnomer to a great degree. Which nations are supporting it as a currency? Essentially none. If something doesn't have the currency status backing of a single major economy, it plainly can't be considered a currency. It's a store of value. Sure, we could be pretend about it (any medium of exchange), be idealistic, and say that you don't need nations to back something for it to be considered a currency, however that's repudiated by every possible aspect of how things actually work (and will continue to) both locally within an economy and internationally in trade. Gold also is not a currency today, it's a store of value. I don't think anyone confuses gold for being a currency and there's no reason to confuse Bitcoin as being such.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> It's not a currency, that's a misnomer to a great degree I agree with you. The comment was made within the context of (a) Visa treating it like a currency and (b) OP referencing the original dream of Bitcoin supporting a decentralized financial system.
- pjc50 6y agoThe only people I see campaigning for the return of the gold standard are populists.
- tablespoon 6y ago> The only people I see campaigning for the return of the gold standard are populists. Many of the current crop "populists" don't really have a program that would actually help the people whose support they've gained through emotional appeals. They're mainly just trying to harness dissatisfaction with the current order to fuel personal ambition. IIRC, the original populists actually opposed the gold standard, when it was still actually a thing, and supported silver because it was more inflationary. They understood deflationary money helps the people who already have money, and inflationary money helps the people who are in debt to them.
- toomuchredbull 6y agoI have recently started learning about nano coin... have you looked into it? It seems to be what you are talking about but perhaps it is also doomed to failure.
- valzam 6y agoThe problem with almost all alternative crytpo currencies is that somewhere deep down non-decentralized skeletons are burried. Either the protocol doesn't scale to more than a dozen validators, or there is some key node hosted by the devs (I think this is the issue with stellar).
- throw0101a 6y ago> Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization […] "Decentralization"? Bank of America Global Research just released a report today that said: > 1. Concentrated Ownership: About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts. By comparison, the latest Fed data suggests that the top 1% of Americans control about 30.4% of all household wealth in the US. * Francisco Blanch, with Savita Subramanian, Philip Middleton, et. al. "Bitcoin’s dirty little secrets". BofA Global Research, 17 March 2021. Probably not even Russian oligarchs have that much control.
- tekproxy 6y agoWhat is a bitcoin account?
- chrisseaton 6y agoAn address that owns Bitcoins.
- ric2b 6y agoSo that metric is really bad because almost every Bitcoin wallet only uses each address once, for privacy reasons. Most of those bottom 98% of addresses probably have very small amounts and are just a small part of someones wallet.
- gruez 6y agoAn "address" can mean anything - a person can have a wallet with multiple addresses, or an address could belong to an exchange with holds it on behalf of multiple people.
- Kranar 6y agoMost BTC is held by an exchange, like Coinbase, Binance, etc... so this statistic is about as meaningful as pointing out that 95% of US dollars are stored at a bank.
- ilaksh 6y agoEth 2.0 has a lot of potential for high transaction thoroughput.
- alexfromapex 6y agoYeah it would be different if Visa didn’t already have a history of blocking merchants they don’t like
- bostonsre 6y agoIt's not really that decentralized now. The largest miner pools can be seen here[1]. All of the larger ones are from China. I would be more worried about authoritarian action over there than some by the book payment processor processing transactions in the US. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-mining-pools/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-m...
- heavyset_go 6y agoWhy would a book payment processor use Bitcoin when the average Bitcoin transaction fee is about the same price as many new books? With Bitcoin, you're looking at spending about $50 if you buy a $25 book.
- bostonsre 6y agoI meant the phrase "by the book" payment processor, not a book payment processor. I'm a lot less worried about the risk of centralization posed by visa than I am about over half of all bitcoins being mined in an authoritarian country. > by the book: > strictly according to the rules.
- heavyset_go 6y agoAh, sorry, I misread your post.
- p1necone 6y agoBitcoin literally wouldn't be able handle the transaction volume if individual transactions were being done in bitcoin. Even doing it this way I assume there's going to be delays and pretty big fees unless you load large amounts of bitcoin on to your card at once.
- Geee 6y agoThe layer 1 of bitcoin is decentralized. Adding multiple layer 2 solutions isn't centralization. People have choice.
- stephen_g 6y agoWell, I mean, bitcoin isn't really decentralised... Not just because most of the circulation is held by a small number of accounts, and not just because most mining is heavily concentrated too. The real centralisation is the development of the client software. As long as that team can keep at least 51% of the network on their software, they can change the rules and control things as much as they want. Past experience has shown that trying to fork it doesn't get much traction, so the network remains basically entirely centrally controlled by the official bitcoin client's dev team...
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoThat's quite a stretch. There are plenty of things beyond their control, like issuing new bitcoins
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoBitcoin for every day purchases is dead, it's averaging over 20 a tx these days and you need to open a LN channel which means maintaining that channel. Bitcoin has been extremely resistant to any L1 scaling, so that's just the state of things.
- harikb 6y agoVisa is doing what any decent $500B company will do because of FOMO
- lupire 6y agoIt says they are using USDC stablecoin for the conversion.
- tiborsaas 6y ago> converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card That's an accounting detail most people won't care about. Perception matters more than technicalities.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoWhat does this mean for exchanges like coinbase? Will they lose out new customers to visa?
- joering2 6y agoAbsolutely. Unsure how far Visa execution is but it could derail Coinbase IPO. Coinbase charges enormous amount to buy or sale (convert) my cash to digital coins. Its all digital anyways. If I could eliminate middle man and use cards I already have - including debit cards that Visa oversees, Coinbase would literally lose 99% of wallet holders. I mean only idiot would want to pay more to buy or sell digital currency. Besides Visa has much better and more sophisticated fraud and abuse detection network than Coinbase could ever imagine because only in USA they sit on everyones social security number that is already verified thru reporting burreaus. It will be game changer - one button in my bank online profile to hold bitcoins/other wallets all branded and protected by Visa. Coinbase needs to IPO yesterday to offload stock to the last person to turn the lights off. Disclaimer: I am long V holder since $48/share.