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It's just bizarre. You end up paying your cut twice: once to convert it into crypto (paying the exact same card fees you'd pay for a direct card payment), and t

by samhw 5y ago

It's just bizarre. You end up paying your cut twice: once to convert it into crypto (paying the exact same card fees you'd pay for a direct card payment), and then once again to pay someone like Stripe for this. For either a business owner or a customer, that's a loss - increased infrastructure fees just to do business. It's the opposite of the crypto dream. But that's not Stripe's fault; it's Bitcoin's, for not creating a product which is actually capable of living up to its goals, and instead requiring all this 'glue business' to make it work. I hope someone else creates a new radically-different cryptocurrency which can be truly new, and not just a novelty stuck on top of Visa/Mastercard.

ordinaryradical 5y ago
I think this is exactly right. The implementation of the technology has necessitated all of these different layers, each of which create new opportunities to take a cut. Many of the crypto businesses in the ecosystem talk about removing financial friction and control, but it seems they are only interested in introducing their own versions of them, and building their own little Wall Street while they can still get in on the ground floor. Here's a great example: how are you going to "reach the unbanked" in the third world if you have transaction fees, paid by the user, inherent in your architecture? That's just nonsense. It's a step down from cash in every way. Cryptos which aren't feeless but talk about the "unbanked" are full of hot air. And this pattern of false promises is all over this space.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  transaction fees on L2s are in fractions of a cent, certainly lower than the fees paid to PayPal or Stripe on regular international payments. a feeless public ledger seems unlikely to ever work at scale; it would immediately be polluted by spam.
  - ordinaryradical 5y ago
    A feeless public ledger already exists, is transacting around the world, and has overcome spam attacks multiple times at this point: Nano, from one of the original developers of Bitcoin.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      thanks, hadn’t heard of Nano before, it looks interesting. I should correct to say a decentralized public ledger “free of transaction costs” is hard if not impossible. Nano seems to remove fees by having users engage in PoW (ie: cost of energy expenditure), so it is feeless but not free.
vmception 5y ago
there are many many more ways to acquire crypto, which many many people have done already it sounds like you have only attempted to acquire it by a combination of 1) Purchasing it 2) with a credit or debit card All it comes down to is that its a $2 trillion market with an extremely high volume of transactions, at all and when compared to the capitalization of the market so service providers cater to that, and fortunately for the end users, a very large portion of that $2 trillion did not require people to pay once to convert their existing cash into crypto.
- the_gastropod 5y ago
  So liquid, in fact, that it needs a host of very opaque and questionable stable coins to maintain some semblance of liquidity. A $2T market cap doesn't mean a whole lot. It's unclear how much money actually changes hands in this system. You and I could make a $2T market cap system today, right now. I'll start an excel spreadsheet and sell you a cell for ~$40. BAM! $2T market cap excel spreadsheet, even though only $40 has changed hands! Neat, eh? I've argued with crypto enthusiasts long enough to anticipate the requisite "WHAT ABOUT STOCKS" retort. Yes. Stock market caps are also a sloppy measure, though significantly less so in magnitude. Businesses are regularly purchased outright at their market caps. There are, of course, exceptions, like Gamestop, Tesla, AMC, and many other meme stocks. But these are the exception to the rule.
  - vmception 5y ago
    The questionable stable coins are 10% of the total market capitalization ($180bn) and even the worst, most fear addled estimates are that 90% of that is paid up capital, where dollars were exchanged directly to create an equivalent stablecoin, and a large portion of it is overcollateralized. The people just wish that was 100%, in the case of Tether. Strawman arguments are interesting, because usually it involves creating an argument nobody had offered just to discredit that argument, hoping to discredit the thing people actually were talking about. But in your case, your argument isn't a problem? The crypto ecosystem doesn't need to host stablecoins, it just does because people launched them and others found utility in that. They contribute to the market capitalization, and the liquidity, bolstering my observation. Is there a term for that? Reverse strawman?

by samhw 5y ago

ordinaryradical 5y ago

I think this is exactly right. The implementation of the technology has necessitated all of these different layers, each of which create new opportunities to take a cut. Many of the crypto businesses in the ecosystem talk about removing financial friction and control, but it seems they are only interested in introducing their own versions of them, and building their own little Wall Street while they can still get in on the ground floor. Here's a great example: how are you going to "reach the unbanked" in the third world if you have transaction fees, paid by the user, inherent in your architecture? That's just nonsense. It's a step down from cash in every way. Cryptos which aren't feeless but talk about the "unbanked" are full of hot air. And this pattern of false promises is all over this space.

mattdesl 5y ago
transaction fees on L2s are in fractions of a cent, certainly lower than the fees paid to PayPal or Stripe on regular international payments. a feeless public ledger seems unlikely to ever work at scale; it would immediately be polluted by spam.
- ordinaryradical 5y ago
  A feeless public ledger already exists, is transacting around the world, and has overcome spam attacks multiple times at this point: Nano, from one of the original developers of Bitcoin.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    thanks, hadn’t heard of Nano before, it looks interesting. I should correct to say a decentralized public ledger “free of transaction costs” is hard if not impossible. Nano seems to remove fees by having users engage in PoW (ie: cost of energy expenditure), so it is feeless but not free.

vmception 5y ago

there are many many more ways to acquire crypto, which many many people have done already it sounds like you have only attempted to acquire it by a combination of 1) Purchasing it 2) with a credit or debit card All it comes down to is that its a $2 trillion market with an extremely high volume of transactions, at all and when compared to the capitalization of the market so service providers cater to that, and fortunately for the end users, a very large portion of that $2 trillion did not require people to pay once to convert their existing cash into crypto.

the_gastropod 5y ago
So liquid, in fact, that it needs a host of very opaque and questionable stable coins to maintain some semblance of liquidity. A $2T market cap doesn't mean a whole lot. It's unclear how much money actually changes hands in this system. You and I could make a $2T market cap system today, right now. I'll start an excel spreadsheet and sell you a cell for ~$40. BAM! $2T market cap excel spreadsheet, even though only $40 has changed hands! Neat, eh? I've argued with crypto enthusiasts long enough to anticipate the requisite "WHAT ABOUT STOCKS" retort. Yes. Stock market caps are also a sloppy measure, though significantly less so in magnitude. Businesses are regularly purchased outright at their market caps. There are, of course, exceptions, like Gamestop, Tesla, AMC, and many other meme stocks. But these are the exception to the rule.
- vmception 5y ago
  The questionable stable coins are 10% of the total market capitalization ($180bn) and even the worst, most fear addled estimates are that 90% of that is paid up capital, where dollars were exchanged directly to create an equivalent stablecoin, and a large portion of it is overcollateralized. The people just wish that was 100%, in the case of Tether. Strawman arguments are interesting, because usually it involves creating an argument nobody had offered just to discredit that argument, hoping to discredit the thing people actually were talking about. But in your case, your argument isn't a problem? The crypto ecosystem doesn't need to host stablecoins, it just does because people launched them and others found utility in that. They contribute to the market capitalization, and the liquidity, bolstering my observation. Is there a term for that? Reverse strawman?