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Stories like this have been appearing pretty regularly on HN ("Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business"). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528 h

by yuan43 4y ago

Stories like this have been appearing pretty regularly on HN ("Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business"). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528 Considering that a USD payment company can literally destroy a business without a reason, how confident are you about that "little or no guaranteed demand" part?

adventured 4y ago
Very. The premise you're floating is the size of a mountain and you're attempting to rest it on top of an egg. A $25 trillion economy, a massive payments ecosystem, a large payments company in Stripe, and you're talking about isolated examples. Even if there are ten examples, it's ten in tens of thousands of counter examples where businesses aren't having that problem. The obvious point being: all those other businesses aren't worried because your premise is so rare. And for the small number of businesses that end up in the negative scenario, they're not prominent enough to matter as a warning sign to everybody else. You'd need a very big, very common problem to spur the kind of adoption premise you're suggesting. It doesn't exist at present. A big share of Stripe's customers (along with other processors) would need to be suffering like that example.
_uhtu 4y ago
And a company like OpenSea can arbitrarily destroy the value of blockhain assets on a whim as well. It turns out that the problem isn't that companies like Stripe are evil and looking to screw people over, the real truth is that money is complicated and dealing with things like fraud cause myriad edge and corner cases which have real financial effects. Blockchain, for all it's promises of decentralization, has rapidly centralized on a few players who's interpretation of the chain are practically law, and thus, is subject to the same problems as any other centrally governed system. The many differences include that stripe (and it's competitors) can handle millions of transactions whereas bitcoin struggles on a few thousand.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > the real truth is that money is complicated and dealing with things like fraud cause myriad edge and corner cases which have real financial effects. More specifically, policies like "know your customer" are great in theory but very hard to implement in practice, which is why companies like Stripe tend to be ruthless with their merchants. Crypto tries to sidestep this entirely by arguing that it's trustless from the ground up. The problem with this is that it facilitates the creation of an unstable marketplace full of interconnected players and nobody knows who is legit and who is a complete crook. Projects like Terra show that when the crypto market recedes, entire segments of the blockchain ecosystem are at risk of being wiped out because there is no transparency to their underlying operation. It's all gravy in a boom cycle, but the bust always happens. Crypto and its derivative products can only truly thrive in an environment that is free of market downturns because there's absolutely nobody at the wheel making sure that these companies are actually doing what they claim to be doing.
- sph 4y ago
  Can we stop conflating one cryptocurrency with the other? Using the argument of what happened to one coin as a proof that blockchain is necessarily bad is like saying the Internet is useless because there are scams that happen online. OpenSea and NFTs have nothing to do with Bitcoin nor blockchain, the technology.
- yuan43 4y ago
  OpenSea? Who said anything about NFTs? You're talking about something that has nothing to do with the Bitcoin protocol or its use. Those who use centralized custody services are not using Bitcoin. They are aping. They are posing. They have no clue what they are doing.
ajross 4y ago
> Stories like this have been appearing pretty regularly on HN This is literally extrapolating from outliers (notable news stories about fraud or mishaps) to make predictions about whole data sets (reliability of transactions using the US Dollar). No one can prove to you that dollars are safe if you don't believe it. But no one has come up with a more reliable alternative yet, and BTC is laughably far down the list of challengers.

by yuan43 4y ago

adventured 4y ago

Very. The premise you're floating is the size of a mountain and you're attempting to rest it on top of an egg. A $25 trillion economy, a massive payments ecosystem, a large payments company in Stripe, and you're talking about isolated examples. Even if there are ten examples, it's ten in tens of thousands of counter examples where businesses aren't having that problem. The obvious point being: all those other businesses aren't worried because your premise is so rare. And for the small number of businesses that end up in the negative scenario, they're not prominent enough to matter as a warning sign to everybody else. You'd need a very big, very common problem to spur the kind of adoption premise you're suggesting. It doesn't exist at present. A big share of Stripe's customers (along with other processors) would need to be suffering like that example.

_uhtu 4y ago

And a company like OpenSea can arbitrarily destroy the value of blockhain assets on a whim as well. It turns out that the problem isn't that companies like Stripe are evil and looking to screw people over, the real truth is that money is complicated and dealing with things like fraud cause myriad edge and corner cases which have real financial effects. Blockchain, for all it's promises of decentralization, has rapidly centralized on a few players who's interpretation of the chain are practically law, and thus, is subject to the same problems as any other centrally governed system. The many differences include that stripe (and it's competitors) can handle millions of transactions whereas bitcoin struggles on a few thousand.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> the real truth is that money is complicated and dealing with things like fraud cause myriad edge and corner cases which have real financial effects. More specifically, policies like "know your customer" are great in theory but very hard to implement in practice, which is why companies like Stripe tend to be ruthless with their merchants. Crypto tries to sidestep this entirely by arguing that it's trustless from the ground up. The problem with this is that it facilitates the creation of an unstable marketplace full of interconnected players and nobody knows who is legit and who is a complete crook. Projects like Terra show that when the crypto market recedes, entire segments of the blockchain ecosystem are at risk of being wiped out because there is no transparency to their underlying operation. It's all gravy in a boom cycle, but the bust always happens. Crypto and its derivative products can only truly thrive in an environment that is free of market downturns because there's absolutely nobody at the wheel making sure that these companies are actually doing what they claim to be doing.
sph 4y ago
Can we stop conflating one cryptocurrency with the other? Using the argument of what happened to one coin as a proof that blockchain is necessarily bad is like saying the Internet is useless because there are scams that happen online. OpenSea and NFTs have nothing to do with Bitcoin nor blockchain, the technology.
yuan43 4y ago
OpenSea? Who said anything about NFTs? You're talking about something that has nothing to do with the Bitcoin protocol or its use. Those who use centralized custody services are not using Bitcoin. They are aping. They are posing. They have no clue what they are doing.

ajross 4y ago

> Stories like this have been appearing pretty regularly on HN This is literally extrapolating from outliers (notable news stories about fraud or mishaps) to make predictions about whole data sets (reliability of transactions using the US Dollar). No one can prove to you that dollars are safe if you don't believe it. But no one has come up with a more reliable alternative yet, and BTC is laughably far down the list of challengers.