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Square had been trying to do Bitcoin stuff for years. When I left in 2016 they had built accepting Bitcoin into Square's Online Store product a few years ago, b

by tdeck 5y ago

Square had been trying to do Bitcoin stuff for years. When I left in 2016 they had built accepting Bitcoin into Square's Online Store product a few years ago, because it was shiny. I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off. I guess the popularity of BTC speculation among retail investors brought the whole thing back.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off. Accepting Bitcoin as payments has never been about facilitating payments. It's not rational to go through all the trouble of transferring Bitcoin, paying transaction fees, waiting for the transaction to clear (took over an hour when I tried it a few months ago), and then surrendering all of the protections you'd normally get when using a credit card. Accepting Bitcoin is about propelling the Bitcoin narrative: The more you can put "Bitcoin accepted here" on everyone's website, the more you can convince other people that Bitcoin is going mainstream and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  > and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend). I disagree with this part of the paragraph. Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    > Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less. I mean the "pay for starbucks using bitcoin" ship sailed, what, 10 years ago? Bitcoin is absolutely nothing more than a giant pump & dump scam. Of course pedants will say "technically it isn't a pump & dump" just like "technically it isn't a pyramid scheme"... Bitcoin might not meet the technical definition of any of those... but it is a scam none the less.
    - tata71 5y ago
      Then why aren't the majority of the miners or large wallets selling at all-time highs?
      - divs1210 5y ago
        I used to hold similar views before life-changing events that now have me firmly on the side of BTC and crypto in general. You can't convince them - in their mind, you are part of the "scam", and hence not trustworthy. No point in debating, they will buy in when it clicks for them.
        suriyaG 5y ago
        I'd love to hear the life-changing events, if possible. Because I've been trying to convince myself that BTC might be good. But I really couldn't find a reason. The "pump and dump" thing is the one that makes most sense right now. I'm open to contrarian ideas.
        stann 5y ago
        Some things are a little more appealing when you are in a country without a competent Federal Reserve
        tablespoon 5y ago
        > Some things are a little more appealing when you are in a country without a competent Federal Reserve Why bother with Bitcoin, when you can just use money from a country with a competent Federal Reserve? IIRC many countries have "dollarized" (either de jure or de facto).
        bradwood 5y ago
        Simple: there is no country with a competent Federal Reserve (Central Bank)
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    This was largely based on an implicit technical promise that did not pan out. Bitcoin simply doesn't scale well enough to ever be a functional payment system, certainly not a commonly used one. I doubt any digital currency will ever be performant enough to work like a credit card while being widely adopted, not without some level of centralization, but then why bother?
    - imaginator 5y ago
      You might want to look into the Lightning Network - this enables instant payments on top of Bitcoin.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        It's just a talking point. Only about 2x as many people are using it as 3 years ago, and due to being boat-anchored to the molasses slow L1, it would take 75 years, $500,000,000,000 worth of electricity and all the remaining block reward to open a lightning channel for everyone on earth. Even then its quadratic routing complexity would likely render it completely ineffective long before that many people tried to onboard. It's like a Soviet phone line, if you apply now, you might get a channel before you shuffle off this mortal coil.
        CallMeJim 5y ago
        So you're against the lightning network because it can't be scaled infinitely? The overall system is just software, and it can be improved. L1 is capable of 4.6 transactions per second. L2 is capable of 25 million per second currently. L3 will be in existence long before getting a channel to every human on Earth becomes a problem (please note that this is something the traditional financial system has also failed to do, despite hundreds of years and legislative support).
        arcticbull 5y ago
        I’m against it because it’s physically impossible to sign up people in any quantity and doesn’t offer the same guarantees as the L1. We can talk about an L3 when there is one. I've not even got anything against LN per se, what I'm pushing back on is the marketing that it's some sort of panacea, that it makes BTC a viable payment mechanism, or even that its particularly interesting.
  - roughly 5y ago
    > the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services Unfortunately, they built the currency to be deflationary, so it’s only used for speculation.
    - throwaway248329 5y ago
      It's not deflationary, it's inflating at a predetermined rate, gradually getting closer to the 21M cap. The governments are unable to rebase it to fund their wars and propaganda though, so naturally they don't like it.
      - imtringued 5y ago
        Due to technical reasons Bitcoins are lost every day though. There is nothing that keeps the dead Bitcoins moving. So the supply is shrinking over the long term.
        throwaway248329 5y ago
        Bitcoin custody is getting better every day, so the supply shrinking is not a real, fundamental problem.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - roughly 5y ago
        Presuming population continues to rise, any currency whose volume does not rise at the same rate is de facto deflationary. Similarly, assuming an increasing supply of goods and services in the market, the same logic applies. It’s possible to have a currency that’s neither deflationary nor inflationary, but Bitcoin is not that.
  - base698 5y ago
    2010: > While this view of Bitcoin might sound like it is a betrayal of Bitcoin's original vision of fully peer‐to‐peer cash, it is not a new vision. Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto, wrote this on the Bitcoin forum in 2010: Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin‐backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases. Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others. George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and self‐regulating.
PascLeRasc 5y ago
All their hardware engineering positions say they’re working on a mining ASIC, but it just seems like a huge stretch how that’s part of their business.
- wmf 5y ago
  The purpose of the ASIC is to make Bitcoin (look) more decentralized and thus more legit.

by tdeck 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off. Accepting Bitcoin as payments has never been about facilitating payments. It's not rational to go through all the trouble of transferring Bitcoin, paying transaction fees, waiting for the transaction to clear (took over an hour when I tried it a few months ago), and then surrendering all of the protections you'd normally get when using a credit card. Accepting Bitcoin is about propelling the Bitcoin narrative: The more you can put "Bitcoin accepted here" on everyone's website, the more you can convince other people that Bitcoin is going mainstream and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).

selfhoster11 5y ago
> and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend). I disagree with this part of the paragraph. Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less. I mean the "pay for starbucks using bitcoin" ship sailed, what, 10 years ago? Bitcoin is absolutely nothing more than a giant pump & dump scam. Of course pedants will say "technically it isn't a pump & dump" just like "technically it isn't a pyramid scheme"... Bitcoin might not meet the technical definition of any of those... but it is a scam none the less.
  - tata71 5y ago
    Then why aren't the majority of the miners or large wallets selling at all-time highs?
    - divs1210 5y ago
      I used to hold similar views before life-changing events that now have me firmly on the side of BTC and crypto in general. You can't convince them - in their mind, you are part of the "scam", and hence not trustworthy. No point in debating, they will buy in when it clicks for them.
      - suriyaG 5y ago
        I'd love to hear the life-changing events, if possible. Because I've been trying to convince myself that BTC might be good. But I really couldn't find a reason. The "pump and dump" thing is the one that makes most sense right now. I'm open to contrarian ideas.
        stann 5y ago
        Some things are a little more appealing when you are in a country without a competent Federal Reserve
        tablespoon 5y ago
        > Some things are a little more appealing when you are in a country without a competent Federal Reserve Why bother with Bitcoin, when you can just use money from a country with a competent Federal Reserve? IIRC many countries have "dollarized" (either de jure or de facto).
        bradwood 5y ago
        Simple: there is no country with a competent Federal Reserve (Central Bank)
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  This was largely based on an implicit technical promise that did not pan out. Bitcoin simply doesn't scale well enough to ever be a functional payment system, certainly not a commonly used one. I doubt any digital currency will ever be performant enough to work like a credit card while being widely adopted, not without some level of centralization, but then why bother?
  - imaginator 5y ago
    You might want to look into the Lightning Network - this enables instant payments on top of Bitcoin.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      It's just a talking point. Only about 2x as many people are using it as 3 years ago, and due to being boat-anchored to the molasses slow L1, it would take 75 years, $500,000,000,000 worth of electricity and all the remaining block reward to open a lightning channel for everyone on earth. Even then its quadratic routing complexity would likely render it completely ineffective long before that many people tried to onboard. It's like a Soviet phone line, if you apply now, you might get a channel before you shuffle off this mortal coil.
      - CallMeJim 5y ago
        So you're against the lightning network because it can't be scaled infinitely? The overall system is just software, and it can be improved. L1 is capable of 4.6 transactions per second. L2 is capable of 25 million per second currently. L3 will be in existence long before getting a channel to every human on Earth becomes a problem (please note that this is something the traditional financial system has also failed to do, despite hundreds of years and legislative support).
        arcticbull 5y ago
        I’m against it because it’s physically impossible to sign up people in any quantity and doesn’t offer the same guarantees as the L1. We can talk about an L3 when there is one. I've not even got anything against LN per se, what I'm pushing back on is the marketing that it's some sort of panacea, that it makes BTC a viable payment mechanism, or even that its particularly interesting.
- roughly 5y ago
  > the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services Unfortunately, they built the currency to be deflationary, so it’s only used for speculation.
  - throwaway248329 5y ago
    It's not deflationary, it's inflating at a predetermined rate, gradually getting closer to the 21M cap. The governments are unable to rebase it to fund their wars and propaganda though, so naturally they don't like it.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Due to technical reasons Bitcoins are lost every day though. There is nothing that keeps the dead Bitcoins moving. So the supply is shrinking over the long term.
      - throwaway248329 5y ago
        Bitcoin custody is getting better every day, so the supply shrinking is not a real, fundamental problem.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - roughly 5y ago
      Presuming population continues to rise, any currency whose volume does not rise at the same rate is de facto deflationary. Similarly, assuming an increasing supply of goods and services in the market, the same logic applies. It’s possible to have a currency that’s neither deflationary nor inflationary, but Bitcoin is not that.
- base698 5y ago
  2010: > While this view of Bitcoin might sound like it is a betrayal of Bitcoin's original vision of fully peer‐to‐peer cash, it is not a new vision. Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto, wrote this on the Bitcoin forum in 2010: Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoin‐backed banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases. Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others. George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and self‐regulating.

PascLeRasc 5y ago

All their hardware engineering positions say they’re working on a mining ASIC, but it just seems like a huge stretch how that’s part of their business.

wmf 5y ago
The purpose of the ASIC is to make Bitcoin (look) more decentralized and thus more legit.