8 ms·
> they pushed up fees for everyone else (there is limited block space, so miners take the highest bids) Imagine if your Visa card became hundreds of times more
by mvdtnz 3y ago
> they pushed up fees for everyone else (there is limited block space, so miners take the highest bids)
Imagine if your Visa card became hundreds of times more expensive to use during the Christmas shopping period.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoMy Visa card doesn't cost me anything to use, because I don't carry a balance. It costs the merchant money to process the transaction, which would get passed on to consumers in general as higher prices. So, if this happened, what you'd see is people complaining about "inflation."
- foogazi 3y ago>> Imagine if your Visa card became hundreds of times more expensive to use during the Christmas shopping period. > My Visa card doesn't cost me anything to use Gp said imagine
- Paul-Craft 3y ago0 * 1000 = 0 Actually, my card costs me negative money to use. I get cash back with no annual fee.
- cirrus3 3y agoThe explanation isn't about how this effects any single person. It also says to "imagine".
- Paul-Craft 3y agoI actually profit via cash back from my cards. They pay me. Imagine that.
- rideontime 3y agoDisregarding the irrelevance of this comment, in your example, aren't you the consumer who is paying the fee via the increased price?
- vkou 3y agoI get that fee right back in cashback + fraud protection + peace of mind from not having to carry cash + money saved by the merchant due to not having to deal with physical cash/getting robbed/etc. Visa keeps a very narrow margin, for providing... A pretty damn good service.
- landemva 3y agoThose without rewards cards, and those who pay with cash, are the economic losers. Generally those living paycheck to paycheck - poor people.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoThat's right: > We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023007pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023007pap...
- hgsgm 3y agoThat's almost nothing compared to the rich people spending far more money at shops in the first place, which pays the fixed costs that makes it affordable to even sell to the poor people.
- vkou 3y agoIf that's what you think the problem with credit cards is, there's a simple solution to it. Ban usury. They'll still exist, and they'll still work in nearly the same way they do today, the cashback rate will drop by half a percent, and the credit score cutoff for getting one will go up a couple hundred points. The working poor using them today will just end up using debit cards, instead.
- smashem 3y agoThat's why there's layer 2 solutions like Lightning to scale bitcoin's usability. And application-level solutions like Cash App.
- iHeartVLC 3y ago[dead]
- simiones 3y agoLighntning, also known as not-Bitcoin. Lightning does away with Bitcoin's guarantees, unless you close the channel after each transaction, at which point it costs more than sending BTC directly. And something like CashApp is even worse - it only uses BTC as a way to circumvent banking regulations, and for name recognition. Otherwise, it could just as easily work on top of regular banking, or do away with BTC entirely and simply work with their own centralized ledger.
- RustyRussell 3y agoThis first paragraph is simply untrue. You are always holding a valid signature to spend the latest funds. The additional assumption vs simply holding your own funds is a throughput requirement: that miners not censor your transactions for some (up-front-chosen) period of time. With normal funds there is a non-censoring requirement, but it's more vague since the miners may have to censor you forever to make your funds useless.
- simiones 3y agoIt is not. If we have an open channel and I send a payment to you and confirm that you have received it (and perhaps that you sent some good my way), I can then close my channel on the BTC network claiming that no transaction happened. Lightning does allow you to punish this, but only if you find out in time - otherwise, the transaction is essentially rolled back - but the goods you sent are obviously not. This way, I can double-spend my BTC and roll back arbitrarily late into the future (assuming the channel stays open). And related to censorship, I'm not sure what is the point you are trying to make. Still, censoring forever is not hard (you just add some wallet address in a list, and look those up before choosing which transactions to include in a block), and is completely equivalent to how payments censorship works in regular banks as well.
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoImagine if Visa and Mastercard formed a duopoly and used their market power to extract fees from merchants to the point of warranting government action to cap the fees.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway290 3y agoImagine if government couldn't cap those fees.
- ilyt 3y ago...and that still got to lower prices than bitcoin transactions Wild, isn't it ?
- TheDudeMan 3y agoWow, imagine. However, bitcoin isn't trying to be Visa.
- AlexandrB 3y agoNo, it's trying to be much more fundamental than Visa. The new cash. Isn't the goal to replace all the prone-to-inflation fiat with Bitcoin?
- adastra22 3y agoWhere did you get this impression? I've been involved with bitcoin since 2010, and replacing Visa has absolutely been the goal since the very beginning.
- quickthrower2 3y agoSatoshi called it digital cash. Turns out it is not a great cash alternative. Therefore it is now an asset. And we can revise history so that Satoshi meant asset all along. I didn’t say ponzi did I? No. good.
- andhans 3y ago« The “electronic cash” envisioned by Satoshi is cash; it is not notes, scrip or bank credits. We have come to think of bank notes as cash, but they are actually contracts for debt. The note holder is owed something by the issuer. Cash is a commodity with certain properties that make it useful as money. Cash is largely gone from the world, and people cannot return to physical commodity money, as it cannot be moved online. Bitcoin is really our only option to guard against inflation, counterfeit, capital controls and high costs in general. Some might take issue with this vision, but that's because they imagine existing banks, financial institutions, and – most importantly – censorship. A global censorship-resistant settlement network is not like anything we've ever seen before. It is, indeed, the goal many people are working towards. That system will allow people to buy their coffee with electronic cash, but Bitcoin will never carry every coffee purchase on-chain. Those who make the Visa-analogy either don’t understand how Visa works, or don’t understand how Bitcoin works.»