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Mastercard ends Binance card partnership in latest blow to crypto giant
- Animats 3y agoIt took this long for MasterCard to do that?
- katella 3y agoWhy does hacker news hate crypto?
- birdyrooster 3y agoBecause it's a playground for scammers, rotten up to its Andreesen-Horowitz (and others) underwriters
- TekMol 3y agoBecause it's a playground for scammers So is the internet. My theory is that HN (like people in general) simply hates change.
- birdyrooster 3y agoThe internet has universal value, it's not at all like crypto in this way.
- riffraff 3y agoIn its first ten years, the internet had proven extremely valuable to most people using it. The same for the web. There were and are scams, but there was value. The cryptocurrency space, 15 years in, has failed to do that.
- iepathos 3y agoA single bitcoin is currently valued over 25,000 USD and has shown to go up to over 60,000 USD. It has literally made tons of crypto million and billionaires. Ethereum has shown it's able to replace a lot of middleman banking with smart contracts but being turing complete is difficult to make secure. There are many profitable and successfully operating DAOs exclusively managed via smart contracts. Saying cryptocurrency space has failed to provide value is provably false.
- Zaofy 3y agoI'm happy for the couple of people that got tangible financial benefits out of it and that weren't already wealthy beforehand, but this isn't exactly a benefit for society as a whole. All the rest has simply failed to materialise in any meaningful way.
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- zaphirplane 3y agoWhat I don’t get about smart contracts is how the conditions are validated I have a contract that Brad Pitt wins the Oscar in the next 3 years how is that validated ? Is there some widely accepted source of truth ? Couldn’t the provider be hacked or be tempted to be fraudulent. I’m assuming the source of truth isn’t the Oscar academy cause web scraping could break easily. Still it’s a lot of faith in human honesty and site security for automatic execution worth millions
- newswasboring 3y agoThe keyword you are looking for is Oracle. Oracle blockchains/coins are services which consolidate real world data into the block chain. Of course you then have to trust the oracle chain
- bantunes 3y agoI think cryptobros just have a different perception of what "providing value" is. Bitcoin's fiat value or the fact that it has made millionaires is hardly an indication of it, since the same can be said of cocaine. Smart contracts keep having bugs. And all I hear from DAOs is that they're cornered by the agents with the most tokens - how is that an innovation over the current state of affairs in society?
- d-lisp 3y agoThe internet main purpose is sharing content through a network. Crypto is a currency.
- colesantiago 3y ago> Crypto is a currency. It is laughably not a currency. Something that has sporadic price fluctuations, is used as a gambling token for speculation, and cannot send value instantly to another person (crypto waiting times are over 9 hours) is not a currency. Little to nobody in the world uses crypto at all.
- d-lisp 3y ago> Crypto is
- mcpackieh 3y ago> simply hates change. Nonsensical cope. If that were true, HN would not love solar, wind, fission, fusion, room temperature superconductors, etc. HN is hype about potential/new technologies that might make sense and have real applications. Cryptocurrencies aren't that.
- throwbadubadu 3y agoChange to scam more people more efficiently? (:
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- mk89 3y agoI think it's because it was promised or sold as something beyond national currencies, that offers some sort of anonymity, a way to make money relatively fast (or at least not lose any), etc. Finally, most of it turned out to be just plain marketing made by those who needed more and more people in the system/scheme. At least this is what my take is on this.
- unixhero 3y agoBitcoin is still this
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- 2muchcoffeeman 3y agoI’m no economist. But even without any training, all crypto including Bitcoin sounds like a scam. No regulation. Waste all that effort solving nothing of value. Can’t do refunds. And it wasn’t just Luddites or the uneducated not understanding what was going on, but really smart people weren’t convinced and the benefits of the technology never solidified. In fact, turns out everything really was a scam. There’s probably a bit of smugness from Making correct predictions, and there’s also probably a bit of regret that we didn’t jump on the gravy train and sell at the peak even though we didn’t believe in it.
- roenxi 3y agoSo far there is no evidence that it is a scam. The cryptographic promises are rock solid, it has on average done a better job of preserving value than the USD [0]. There is a brief window (2021-2022) where it was a bad time to buy and even that might not be the final word. The last time this happened was in 2018 where the price of bitcoin peaked at half it'd current value. If anything, it is starting to look like Bitcoin is a respectable asset. It has outlasted several allegedly-reputable banks and is weathering a difficult credit environment quite solidly. It is still very risky, but it is hard to dismiss it. [0] Over the last decade, say. Not much to hang an argument on, but it is the opposite of a scam.
- bantunes 3y agoCrypto is trying to fix a social problem (currency) with technology, with obvious outcomes. It's not about empowering a new generation of solutions or allowing the unbanked access to financial services. It's about replacing the current money masters with techbros. Thankfully, they've mostly shifted to AI scams now.
- choppaface 3y agoIf there's herd behavior, it's because it's so easy to cite examples of crypto fraud and false promises, and for many (but not all) in the tech sector fraud is verboten. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
- PoignardAzur 3y agoDan Olson's video "Line goes up" is a pretty good summary of why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
- mschuster91 3y agoHN as a whole used to love anything crypto/NFT... the tide shifted as more and more ICOs, token offerings, exchanges and whatnot turned out to be pure rug pulls and at the same time, none of the promised benefits of cryptocurrencies failed to materialize.
- pgsandstrom 3y ago> none of the promised benefits of cryptocurrencies failed to materialize But that sounds awesome?
- Terr_ 3y agoI think the parent poster accidentally made a double negative.
- mschuster91 3y agoIndeed, and it's too late to edit now. Sigh.
- mbwgh 3y agoThis is subjective, but my impression was rather the tide shifted when ChatGPT came out. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37290356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37290356 As I am writing this, three comments. One by the author, the other two about ChatGPT.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoShifted when ChatGPT came out? HN comments has been borderline trolling flamewars in every cryptocurrency related post for years now.
- mcny 3y agoIn my case, I became anti cryptocurrency when it became clear to me that transaction cost will never approach zero and we will never use cryptocurrency for normal everyday transactions because the price of cryptocurrency is too volatile. Most of the people who bought and sold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency are speculators. My interests don't align with their interests. I want a stable currency (whose value doesn't fluctuate) with close to zero, if not zero, transaction costs. That was the whole point of cryptocurrency for me. If it can't do that, I have no interest.
- anon-3988 3y agoMinus using it in countries that have shitty government, no one has provided a use case for it. And no, just because it is useful for some people in some shitty country doesn't make it generally useful. If carrying knifes and guns to a bank is considered normal in some shithole it doesn't mean that the rest of the world need to adopt this insane idea. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if many companies are using crypto as a simple and unregulated way to suck money from unsophisticated traders. I wonder how many people lost money on crypto, and where most of the wins are at. I am also curious how much portion of crypto is actually used for "goods" out in the wild versus simply used for trading. Simple metrics like volume on all exchanges / volume outside of exchanges should suffice.
- anonzzzies 3y agoIt is abused a lot, but for instance, for us, an honest b2b saas company, we get flagged like common criminals way too often when paying people who work for us in ‘shitty countries’. It’s always unblocked but it’s a huge strain with sending in paperwork, talking to idiots etc. Our main account has been blocked for 3 weeks and our account manager keeps apologising as the regulatory department is handling it and they don’t really talk to eachother. I understand the criminal abuse, but it is just an easy way of paying out like you say to countries that banks flag (not sanctioned ones; just one that ‘normal people don’t send money to’).
- pennaMan 3y agoSo just because it helps some people with hard lives survive, you still hate it because some shitty traders talk too much about it?
- anon-3988 3y agoYes, I don't condone crypto the same way I don't condone carrying guns to a bank (because you can't trust anyone), or building nuclear shelters on the off chance of a nuclear fallout, or building EM bombs in the escalating nature of warring nations in deadlock. Whether you like it or not, things have external cost to them. "Let's spend a trillion dollar building a bunker for every citizen in the event that a nuclear fallout do happen". "Let's give everyone AC because its getting hot...and will keep getting hotter because we keep installing ACs". All of these things are "good" but people very rarely talk about their externalities. There's a thing called "opportunity cost", "externalities" that no crypto bros ever brought up when discussing how bad their system compared to the current system. Should we sacrifice the relatively very efficient global financial with one that can barely handle a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its precursor? What about user protection? Correct me if I am wrong, but it is perfectly possible to lose all of your coins due to fraud and there would be no way to recover it back. How is this even a reasonable financial system?
- colesantiago 3y ago> Why does hacker news hate crypto? Because crypto and its industry is a complete scam and nothing that it has produced is of any value. Crypto is a complete grift and there is not a single person in it for the technology. The only reason it exists is because of the regulatory arbitrage and loopholes that needs to be closed which will shut crypto all down. All in all, crypto is full of greed, scamming, grifting and completely the lawless shady behaviour of evading regulations. That is why we hate it and it needs to be extinguished by drafting crypto laws in every country.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoMost governments around the world are against crypto because it undermines KYC and AML efforts. No amount of wall street lobbying will change that because the bureaucrats believe that "national security" is at risk if crypto is allowed to proliferate. Central bank digital currencies are popular among regulators and the national security apparatus precisely because they centralize control. It's also why Circle and USDC are widely accepted - all the advantages of being decentralized have been neutered to the point of uselessness.
- pennaMan 3y agoExactly. That's the whole ideea to begin with - destroy the state monopoly. Of course the state sees it as an existential threat, because it is.
- glimshe 3y agoI don't think HN hates crypto in particular. HN hates fraud.
- mrweasel 3y agoWhy did they think it was a good idea to begin with? It seems likely that MasterCard and Binance signed a two year contract and that has now expired and the "less than 1% of customers" simply is covering the cost of operation. Existing the contract early might have been rather expensive though. While I don't know it could also be that the cards are issue with a two year lifetime and MasterCard didn't want to close cards early.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoProbably contractual stuff. multi-year contracts. no way you'd enter into a long term finance offering without guarantees it'll still be a thing in 5 years. Either the contracts expired or they reached a situation where they could break it. ninja edit: looks like further down someone made the point that the Russians were using Binanace to move cash with BTC, which violated sanctions. Mastercard is at risk of violating those sanctions and it sounds like they just tapped out rather then risking staying in crypto.
- seydor 3y agoI wonder how CBDCs will treat binance
- mypastself 3y agoI’ve said this before here, but I wonder if the blockchain’s most lasting contribution will be, ironically, forcing the world’s governments’ hand to create their own form of digital, easily trackable and controllable money. Something like CBDCs always seemed inevitable, given how much more of their privacy citizens are willing to give away with each passing year. But I wonder if the crypto space has accelerated the implementation.
- raydiatian 3y agoI’m sure eventually we’ll see that Wall Street and Big accredit as well as other elite institutions were behind the collapse of crypto.
- tsimionescu 3y agoI think the opposite is true - they were very much behind the rise of crypto, and now they're just divesting and it's naturally collapsing back to a niche technology.
- paulpauper 3y agothey are agnostic. they make money from fees either way, up or down.
- Ekaros 3y agoI think two aspects are rather important in viewing Wall Street. They are agnostics so only want to make money. And they are not monolithic. So there is plenty of players are in their own sub-fields and products. Some might want to extract money with crypto from public. And some might. And they might not care if someone else also makes some money as long as they make enough of it themselvs.
- qwytw 3y ago> elite Are you implying that basic understanding of finance and economics makes you a part of some 'elite' these days?
- mrweasel 3y agoMaybe, but I don't think directly as in they orchestrated a collapse. Wall Street have probably extract most of all the lower risk capital available in the crypto-markets and the bailed once things got to heated. Sort of like the gold market, leaving individuals and smaller investors with the toxic investments and all the high risk stuff. What crypto would have need, was for the larger institutions to have stayed long term, but that's not how "Wall Street" works. It's no different from dropping shares in a company once the risk gets to high. The future for crypto, if one exists, is beyond the horizon for Wall Street in terms of a payout. Their lack of support may very well have contributed to the collapse, but I don't think they've actively made plans to destroy crypto-currencies. Crypto mostly collapsed because it failed to be useful. The MasterCard deal was the most useful part and only because it could convert funny money to real money, and very few people used that. MasterCard is likely begin generous when they say "less than 1% of customers". There's no way that close to 1% of MasterCards customers had a crypto-backed card.
- colesantiago 3y agoGood. The crypto bro fools thinking this was a use case need their heads corrected by regulation. Binance and the like are inherently not fit for the financial system. And I'm going to make an on the record bet that you can quote me on: Crypto will all completely collapse before they will find any possible use case that hasn't already been solved by the current financial system. The collapse will be even bigger than FTX.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- anonzzzies 3y agoOff-topic; what happened to this thread? For me most comments disappeared. It says 36 comments; I see only 7. Maybe this is a thing, but I never noticed before.
- notpushkin 3y agoYep, and showdead didn't help either. (Maybe it takes time to apply?) UPD: okay, it did work and there's a whole hidden thread now.
- anonzzzies 3y agoYep, I guess something with cache. It works now.
- daft_pink 3y agoThis article fails to mention the front page wsj article last week about binance allowing Russian users to avoid sanctions. Clearly Mastercard doesn’t want to be associated with this.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoBurying the lede, indeed