4 ms·

To those who continue to think that cryptocurrencies are a waste of time, or stupid, or a fad, or tulips, or whatever: What do you know that visa doesn't know?

• shados 6y ago
  That while it may be a good idea financially for them, the resources poured into cryptocurrency mining operations are an amazing waste. It likely wouldn't convince anyone in that position, but damn is that crap a waste we don't need right now.
  • suikadayo 6y ago
    USDC is on Ethereum (currently PoW but will be on PoS within this year or so) and other PoS chains. Ethereum PoS will be about 99% more environmentally friendly than Bitcoin.
• mywittyname 6y ago
  They might be opening the gates to more onerous reporting requirements per the IRS. People are required to pay capital gains tax on crypto gains, and if people are servicing debts with crypto, then visa will probably need to issue some sort of tax document detailing the price of the currency at time of payment. I'm sure their lawyers and accountants understand this and are fine with such a system. From an investors perspective. There is the risk of extreme fluctuation in prices on exchanges. If people are paying their bills at one rate, but Visa is getting a different, lower exchange rate, then that could potentially cost the company dearly. This is probably something they've also thought about and presumably they are scheming to make additional cash from arbitrage. One could think that cryptcurrencies are foolish, while simultaneously thinking of ways a business could make money off of crypto or their holders.
• wrs 6y ago
  Visa settling dollar-denominated accounts with member banks seems like it must be very much a solved problem, that furthermore doesn’t need any kind of decentralized ledger or smart contract processing to accomplish. So either that’s exactly why it’s a bad idea, or my understanding of how this works today has huge gaps. (Which wouldn’t surprise me a bit.) Can you clarify what’s in this for Visa?
• pwinnski 6y ago
  Visa is making an option available to settlement partners, which sounds more like marketing than anything else. I wouldn't want to convince Visa decision makers of anything; they can market however they like! Settlement partners, on the other hand... I'll be very curious to see if any take them up on this.
• skybrian 6y ago
  Predicting the future is hard. It's not clear that Visa knows anything either; they could just be hedging their bets with a pilot program that could be discontinued. They do a lot of other currency conversions and charge for it too. Maybe they're hoping to get some good fees for this from some merchants who want it? I don't expect a lot of demand, but I'll speculate that perhaps there are some merchants who might prefer USDC over other kinds of currency conversion, depending which way has higher fees? https://www.investopedia.com/foreign-transaction-fee-vs-currency-conversion-fee-know-the-difference-4768955 https://www.investopedia.com/foreign-transaction-fee-vs-curr...