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It is a massive mistake that Stripe is offering anything in the crypto space as everyone and Stripe knows it is full of fraud, money laundering, scams and it is

It is a massive mistake that Stripe is offering anything in the crypto space as everyone and Stripe knows it is full of fraud, money laundering, scams and it is completely unregulated. I look forward to the day that Stripe will get investigated for all of the above with this and end up like Paypal, eventually freezing or banning these accounts. Crypto does not offer anything new at all. EDIT: It seems Stripe and Crypto apologists have downvoted & flagged my comment since Stripe is somehow a HN / YC darling that is immune from valid criticism even if they venture into crypto scamming, with no usecase that is better than the current financial system. Crypto is only used for speculating and will eventually collapse under regulation. @karaterobot Stripe is no exception here for regulation and will comply by banning accounts if these 'remittances' are fraudulent as the majority of them most likely are. Even in El Salvador, the country that has adopted bitcoin, merchants aren't using it for payments because they lose money extremely quickly due to volatility, so there isn't a usecase for cryptocurrencies or blockchain at all.

djohnston 4y ago
this is a real lazy take mate. i mean, i agree that the crypto industry is plauged by fraud and posers, but to say that blockchain offers nothing new is just showing ignorance of the technology. i recommend reading the original bitcoin whitepaper to understand what is new: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper
- colesantiago 4y ago
  What can crypto and blockchain legitimately offer that is better than what the current financial system offers? The Bitcoin whitepaper outlines a P2P payments system, today it isn't used as such, rather a store of value, not even Stripe is using Bitcoin for payments at all. So what use are these cryptocurrencies for, if not for scams and fraud?
  - datadata 4y ago
    From the article: > Speed is one advantage of crypto payouts. Reach is another. Millions of talented freelancers live in countries where it’s hard, if not impossible, to open a local bank account. For example, a majority of the people in Djibouti, El Salvador, and Bhutan don't have bank accounts. With Stripe, freelancers in those countries are now able to receive funds via USDC in minutes. With the addition of USDC, Stripe cross-border payouts extend to more than 4.4 billion people in more than 110 countries—a majority of the world’s population.
    - colesantiago 4y ago
      USDC is a completely centralised 'stablecoin' and has a blacklist function which means they can seize funds of people who they don't like. USDC again is not even regulated as I said with no proof backing this other than 'attestations' which is not a full audit of reserves. How is this decentralised money that was promised by crypto and blockchain? You may very well use Wise, Moneygram and other regulated alternatives which works better, is also relatively faster and is more stable and widely accepted than these USDC tokens.
      - dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
        USDC can be sent peer to peer with low fees. And I would be extremely surprised if Wise or Moneygram are cheaper or faster.
        toomuchtodo 4y ago
        Does it adhere to KYC and AML at exchanges and other fiat ramps? I think it’s a clever backdoor hack to instant cross border value movement without traditional banking (Wise and company), but the reach of government is always there. Curious what US Treasury, FinCEN, OFAC, etcs take on this is. The plumbing is easy, it’s the laws, regulation, and compliance that are the work. High level, Stripe is reaching for growth when there isn’t much innovation to be had in financial utilities besides reducing waste and inefficiencies by cannibalizing your business or someone else’s while the industry continues to commodify basic services like payments, cross border transfers, and deposit accounts (lending and data is the last bastion of profits for financial services). https://www.pymnts.com/news/fintech-investments/2022/stripe-valuation-marked-down-64-by-t-rowe-price-global-tech-fund/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/fintech-investments/2022/stripe-...
  - djohnston 4y ago
    absolute control of your own money. borderless currency. distributed applications/smart contracts outside the reach of any state. these are my personal faves
    - colesantiago 4y ago
      With Stripe and USDC you don't have control of your money at all and smart contracts don't work and are broken causing people to lose money in the millions. It is a fragile, brittle system that is highly likely to fail, you only need to look here to see why. [0] [0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
      - datadata 4y ago
        > smart contracts don't work and are broken This absolute statement is asserting that ALL smart contracts don't work. There is overwhelming evidence of some smart contracts working just fine, and of course a lot of smart contracts also have problems. It is wild to just drop all of the nuance of such a complicated issue. What new technology has been flawless without any failures along the way?
        colesantiago 4y ago
        This 'flawless argument' is an irrelevant statement, we have given blockchain technologies over 15 years to improve, but the scams have been getting bigger in an unregulated environment. I also don't recall any regulated bank accounts getting automatically drained or losing everybody's money due to a single scammer or a bad actor. One single error or exploit in these smart contracts results in millions being drained. This happens on a weekly basis with a giant lack of consumer protection, unaccountability or any chance of getting your money back (which that is a huge unsolved problem). So yes, these smart contracts do not work. It's a system designed to fail with thousands of disasters, rug pulls and scams just waiting to happen.
        datadata 4y ago
  - madsbuch 4y ago
    transparent algorithmic governance. I think it is easy to dismiss as a value proposition. In the end, the future will show, so we probably should not spend too much time speculating.
  - tenpies 4y ago
    > What can crypto and blockchain legitimately offer that is better than what the current financial system offers? Cancellation resistance. Protection from oppressive governments trying to squash freedom. Protection from retroactive laws targeting previously legal transactions. Asset protection. And look I agree with you. And everything I posted above carries a huge cost given the volatility of most cryptocurrencies, but unfortunately we live in times where if you truly care about freedom from tyranny, your behaviour is going to overlap heavily with criminal behaviour.
    - colesantiago 4y ago
      I don't think evading sanction laws and taxes with crypto is a great use case and Stripe will be investigated and ordered to ban accounts doing this behaviour. So you're back to the current regulated system that works, is stable and is the best we have.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - imtringued 4y ago
    >What can crypto and blockchain legitimately offer that is better than what the current financial system offers? They don't deny the existence of negative rates.
karaterobot 4y ago
Crypto is very popular among people working in rich countries who send remittances back to their families in other countries. That's a legitimate use, a very popular use, and is obviously what Stripe is going for here.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Isn't that what Western Union is doing, rather well and gobally?
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    I don't know if this product will successfully compete with Western Union.
- jfghi 4y ago
  Once the remittance is received, how is it then exchanged for the currency the recipient needs?
  - rafaelm 4y ago
    From my own experience, you can use a very popular exchange that has a huge P2P marketplace, precisely for this.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      What is this marketplace named?
      - refsab 4y ago
        It's Binance P2P. You can transfer crypto directly into local currency. It uses local residents as liquidity providers.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
jejeyyy77 4y ago
Lol, feels like some people never see trends until it literally steam rolls over them.
- imtringued 4y ago
  You mean negative interest rates? Most cryptocurrencies have died as expected. Some of them are still alive but nobody really uses them as a medium of exchange.
gfodor 4y ago
these comments get increasingly funny to read as time goes on
x-complexity 4y ago
> EDIT: It seems Stripe and Crypto apologists have downvoted & flagged my comment since Stripe is somehow a HN / YC darling that is immune from valid criticism even if they venture into crypto scamming, with no usecase that is better than the current financial system. > It is a massive mistake that Stripe is offering anything in the crypto space as everyone and Stripe knows it is full of fraud, money laundering, scams and it is completely unregulated. The argument is engaging in "everything is X" talk by blanketing an entire space as only engaging in negative impacts. It should be noted that the percentage of crypto used in illicit activity is significantly less than 1%, compared to the estimated 2-5% of global GDP that is involved in money laundering alone within traditional financial ecosystems. https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-report-introduction/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor... https://blog.chainalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/chart-2-shares-1024x589.png https://blog.chainalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/char... https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10873/3 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10873/3 (page 1) Using the same argument, it could be said that cash should be banned because its private & semi-anonymous nature allows for its use in transactions for gambling, drug use, child porngraphy, assasinations, & slave trafficking.
- colesantiago 4y ago
  At least cash is accepted everywhere in domestic countries, and even it's online it's card. Crypto isn't widely accepted or even used as a form of payment in the real world and has no useful legitimate usecase. We don't need more unregulated tokens that have no intrinsic value other than speculation, gambling and fraud. Sure we have issues in the current financial system, but augmenting (and dare I say) replacing it with an entirely worse unregulated system which loses people money through scams, increases and emboldens ransomware and exposes people to huge volatility is not the way to go. > The argument is engaging in "everything is X" talk by blanketing an entire space as only engaging in negative impacts. The negative impacts are FAR greater than the positive impacts of crypto.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    Cash is not accepted everywhere. Lots of countries are nearly cashless, with small merchants already unable to accept cash.
telephone2 4y ago
People seem to forget that 6 trillion dollars of liquidity was injected into the US monetary supply in 2020 (close to a 50% increase in the total USD monetary supply). The 2008 financial bailout popularized by "The Big Short" pales in comparison to what happened in 2020. While there are situations where creating liquidity via monetary policy is necessary - it sucks that it directly impacts the savings and wages of everyday people through inflation. Total bitcoinization would be dystopian but as a lifeboat against the inexorable spread of the negative side effects of inflation and the skyrocketing price of assets due to the cantillon effect - it is remarkably effective. Hate to be a parrot but... "zoom out".
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Can you find any article anywhere which quantifies the magnitude of the Cantillon effect because I certainly have looked and found absolutely nothing. Crypto is hardly inflation-proof, with major cryptos having fallen 80% or more in the last 6 months putting it on pace with the Lira - if you then adjust it for inflation you lose another 10%. It's somehow managed to do all that in the single most inflationary period in 50+ years. I was pretty sure we'd given up on that silly narrative. Crypto is a high-beta speculative play on US dollar liquidity in the global financial system, not a hedge on inflation. Wanna save money from inflation? Buy some I-bonds. So uh, zoom back in ;) [edit] Also, liquidity per (as defined by the size of the Fed's asset book) se isn't really correlated with asset prices, which is why we're doing interest rates. I recommend listening to the Odd Lots podcast with Kashkari in re: inflation.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Honestly, the cantillon effect is a red herring because any form of spending, it doesn't matter if the money is physically printed as a bank note with no debt backing it or simply spent from savings in a gold standard. If you divide the economy into two sectors, your bank account and the rest of the economy, then spending off your bank account will create a net increase in the money supply in the rest of the economy, this will raise prices in close proximity to you. Or in other words, the cantillon effect describes how price signals propagate through the economy. The strange thing is that people have this fixation on "printed" money causing inflation but as I mentioned, the cantillon effect also applies to normal spending of money that was received via taxes. If you ban the "printing" of money as we have already done by establishing central banks the cantillon effect remains. Where do we find proof of the cantillon effect then? Government spending as a percentage of GDP and subsequent public sector employment but then again, this isn't something new, it is boring and obvious, not some conspiracy of the government scheming against you.
houstonn 4y ago
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
notatrader 4y ago
Crypto is very trackable and especially when cashing out. Only countries without kyc/aml protections allow individuals to cash out illicit crypto and that's only a small fraction. Most of crypto is built on speculation which results in direct losses to consumers. And extensive and endless hacks, which is just another tax on consumers. Very little of bitcoin or any cryptocurrency is used for drugs, terrorism or other serious crimes. Real world money laundering (trade based etc) is 500x that of bitcoin and real world drug dealing is at least 1000x greater than darknet markets.
imtringued 4y ago
RAI offers something new.

djohnston 4y ago

this is a real lazy take mate. i mean, i agree that the crypto industry is plauged by fraud and posers, but to say that blockchain offers nothing new is just showing ignorance of the technology. i recommend reading the original bitcoin whitepaper to understand what is new: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper

colesantiago 4y ago
What can crypto and blockchain legitimately offer that is better than what the current financial system offers? The Bitcoin whitepaper outlines a P2P payments system, today it isn't used as such, rather a store of value, not even Stripe is using Bitcoin for payments at all. So what use are these cryptocurrencies for, if not for scams and fraud?
- datadata 4y ago
  From the article: > Speed is one advantage of crypto payouts. Reach is another. Millions of talented freelancers live in countries where it’s hard, if not impossible, to open a local bank account. For example, a majority of the people in Djibouti, El Salvador, and Bhutan don't have bank accounts. With Stripe, freelancers in those countries are now able to receive funds via USDC in minutes. With the addition of USDC, Stripe cross-border payouts extend to more than 4.4 billion people in more than 110 countries—a majority of the world’s population.
  - colesantiago 4y ago
    USDC is a completely centralised 'stablecoin' and has a blacklist function which means they can seize funds of people who they don't like. USDC again is not even regulated as I said with no proof backing this other than 'attestations' which is not a full audit of reserves. How is this decentralised money that was promised by crypto and blockchain? You may very well use Wise, Moneygram and other regulated alternatives which works better, is also relatively faster and is more stable and widely accepted than these USDC tokens.
    - dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
      USDC can be sent peer to peer with low fees. And I would be extremely surprised if Wise or Moneygram are cheaper or faster.
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
        Does it adhere to KYC and AML at exchanges and other fiat ramps? I think it’s a clever backdoor hack to instant cross border value movement without traditional banking (Wise and company), but the reach of government is always there. Curious what US Treasury, FinCEN, OFAC, etcs take on this is. The plumbing is easy, it’s the laws, regulation, and compliance that are the work. High level, Stripe is reaching for growth when there isn’t much innovation to be had in financial utilities besides reducing waste and inefficiencies by cannibalizing your business or someone else’s while the industry continues to commodify basic services like payments, cross border transfers, and deposit accounts (lending and data is the last bastion of profits for financial services). https://www.pymnts.com/news/fintech-investments/2022/stripe-valuation-marked-down-64-by-t-rowe-price-global-tech-fund/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/fintech-investments/2022/stripe-...
- djohnston 4y ago
  absolute control of your own money. borderless currency. distributed applications/smart contracts outside the reach of any state. these are my personal faves
  - colesantiago 4y ago
    With Stripe and USDC you don't have control of your money at all and smart contracts don't work and are broken causing people to lose money in the millions. It is a fragile, brittle system that is highly likely to fail, you only need to look here to see why. [0] [0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
    - datadata 4y ago
      > smart contracts don't work and are broken This absolute statement is asserting that ALL smart contracts don't work. There is overwhelming evidence of some smart contracts working just fine, and of course a lot of smart contracts also have problems. It is wild to just drop all of the nuance of such a complicated issue. What new technology has been flawless without any failures along the way?
      - colesantiago 4y ago
        This 'flawless argument' is an irrelevant statement, we have given blockchain technologies over 15 years to improve, but the scams have been getting bigger in an unregulated environment. I also don't recall any regulated bank accounts getting automatically drained or losing everybody's money due to a single scammer or a bad actor. One single error or exploit in these smart contracts results in millions being drained. This happens on a weekly basis with a giant lack of consumer protection, unaccountability or any chance of getting your money back (which that is a huge unsolved problem). So yes, these smart contracts do not work. It's a system designed to fail with thousands of disasters, rug pulls and scams just waiting to happen.
        datadata 4y ago
- madsbuch 4y ago
  transparent algorithmic governance. I think it is easy to dismiss as a value proposition. In the end, the future will show, so we probably should not spend too much time speculating.
- tenpies 4y ago
  > What can crypto and blockchain legitimately offer that is better than what the current financial system offers? Cancellation resistance. Protection from oppressive governments trying to squash freedom. Protection from retroactive laws targeting previously legal transactions. Asset protection. And look I agree with you. And everything I posted above carries a huge cost given the volatility of most cryptocurrencies, but unfortunately we live in times where if you truly care about freedom from tyranny, your behaviour is going to overlap heavily with criminal behaviour.
  - colesantiago 4y ago
    I don't think evading sanction laws and taxes with crypto is a great use case and Stripe will be investigated and ordered to ban accounts doing this behaviour. So you're back to the current regulated system that works, is stable and is the best we have.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- imtringued 4y ago
  >What can crypto and blockchain legitimately offer that is better than what the current financial system offers? They don't deny the existence of negative rates.

karaterobot 4y ago

Crypto is very popular among people working in rich countries who send remittances back to their families in other countries. That's a legitimate use, a very popular use, and is obviously what Stripe is going for here.

hef19898 4y ago
Isn't that what Western Union is doing, rather well and gobally?
- karaterobot 4y ago
  I don't know if this product will successfully compete with Western Union.
jfghi 4y ago
Once the remittance is received, how is it then exchanged for the currency the recipient needs?
- rafaelm 4y ago
  From my own experience, you can use a very popular exchange that has a huge P2P marketplace, precisely for this.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    What is this marketplace named?
    - refsab 4y ago
      It's Binance P2P. You can transfer crypto directly into local currency. It uses local residents as liquidity providers.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

jejeyyy77 4y ago

Lol, feels like some people never see trends until it literally steam rolls over them.

imtringued 4y ago
You mean negative interest rates? Most cryptocurrencies have died as expected. Some of them are still alive but nobody really uses them as a medium of exchange.

gfodor 4y ago

these comments get increasingly funny to read as time goes on

x-complexity 4y ago

> EDIT: It seems Stripe and Crypto apologists have downvoted & flagged my comment since Stripe is somehow a HN / YC darling that is immune from valid criticism even if they venture into crypto scamming, with no usecase that is better than the current financial system. > It is a massive mistake that Stripe is offering anything in the crypto space as everyone and Stripe knows it is full of fraud, money laundering, scams and it is completely unregulated. The argument is engaging in "everything is X" talk by blanketing an entire space as only engaging in negative impacts. It should be noted that the percentage of crypto used in illicit activity is significantly less than 1%, compared to the estimated 2-5% of global GDP that is involved in money laundering alone within traditional financial ecosystems. https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-report-introduction/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor... https://blog.chainalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/chart-2-shares-1024x589.png https://blog.chainalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/char... https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10873/3 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10873/3 (page 1) Using the same argument, it could be said that cash should be banned because its private & semi-anonymous nature allows for its use in transactions for gambling, drug use, child porngraphy, assasinations, & slave trafficking.

colesantiago 4y ago
At least cash is accepted everywhere in domestic countries, and even it's online it's card. Crypto isn't widely accepted or even used as a form of payment in the real world and has no useful legitimate usecase. We don't need more unregulated tokens that have no intrinsic value other than speculation, gambling and fraud. Sure we have issues in the current financial system, but augmenting (and dare I say) replacing it with an entirely worse unregulated system which loses people money through scams, increases and emboldens ransomware and exposes people to huge volatility is not the way to go. > The argument is engaging in "everything is X" talk by blanketing an entire space as only engaging in negative impacts. The negative impacts are FAR greater than the positive impacts of crypto.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  Cash is not accepted everywhere. Lots of countries are nearly cashless, with small merchants already unable to accept cash.

telephone2 4y ago

People seem to forget that 6 trillion dollars of liquidity was injected into the US monetary supply in 2020 (close to a 50% increase in the total USD monetary supply). The 2008 financial bailout popularized by "The Big Short" pales in comparison to what happened in 2020. While there are situations where creating liquidity via monetary policy is necessary - it sucks that it directly impacts the savings and wages of everyday people through inflation. Total bitcoinization would be dystopian but as a lifeboat against the inexorable spread of the negative side effects of inflation and the skyrocketing price of assets due to the cantillon effect - it is remarkably effective. Hate to be a parrot but... "zoom out".

arcticbull 4y ago
Can you find any article anywhere which quantifies the magnitude of the Cantillon effect because I certainly have looked and found absolutely nothing. Crypto is hardly inflation-proof, with major cryptos having fallen 80% or more in the last 6 months putting it on pace with the Lira - if you then adjust it for inflation you lose another 10%. It's somehow managed to do all that in the single most inflationary period in 50+ years. I was pretty sure we'd given up on that silly narrative. Crypto is a high-beta speculative play on US dollar liquidity in the global financial system, not a hedge on inflation. Wanna save money from inflation? Buy some I-bonds. So uh, zoom back in ;) [edit] Also, liquidity per (as defined by the size of the Fed's asset book) se isn't really correlated with asset prices, which is why we're doing interest rates. I recommend listening to the Odd Lots podcast with Kashkari in re: inflation.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Honestly, the cantillon effect is a red herring because any form of spending, it doesn't matter if the money is physically printed as a bank note with no debt backing it or simply spent from savings in a gold standard. If you divide the economy into two sectors, your bank account and the rest of the economy, then spending off your bank account will create a net increase in the money supply in the rest of the economy, this will raise prices in close proximity to you. Or in other words, the cantillon effect describes how price signals propagate through the economy. The strange thing is that people have this fixation on "printed" money causing inflation but as I mentioned, the cantillon effect also applies to normal spending of money that was received via taxes. If you ban the "printing" of money as we have already done by establishing central banks the cantillon effect remains. Where do we find proof of the cantillon effect then? Government spending as a percentage of GDP and subsequent public sector employment but then again, this isn't something new, it is boring and obvious, not some conspiracy of the government scheming against you.

houstonn 4y ago

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

notatrader 4y ago

Crypto is very trackable and especially when cashing out. Only countries without kyc/aml protections allow individuals to cash out illicit crypto and that's only a small fraction. Most of crypto is built on speculation which results in direct losses to consumers. And extensive and endless hacks, which is just another tax on consumers. Very little of bitcoin or any cryptocurrency is used for drugs, terrorism or other serious crimes. Real world money laundering (trade based etc) is 500x that of bitcoin and real world drug dealing is at least 1000x greater than darknet markets.

imtringued 4y ago

RAI offers something new.