27 ms·

imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a regulatory one in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts of btc/eth for instance might take a minute. For

imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a regulatory one in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts of btc/eth for instance might take a minute. For lower value point of sale transactions you don't really have to wait. And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at a US bank. Paying capital gains on transactions and constantly changing value dampens adoption quite a bit though

shuntress 3y ago
You could maybe call it a technical issue or an issue of adoption but the fact is that no one is scanning Monero wallet QR codes to buy coffee.
- evantbyrne 3y ago
  Capital gains tax is not a technical issue per se. People also don't buy coffee with wire transfers, but nobody says wire transfers are a failure. btc/eth are better at doing what wire transfers were designed to do. The point is the tech is much better than people who have been sleeping on crypto seem to realize
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hunter-gatherer 3y ago
    This was my use case for bitcoin years ago when my wife and I had just got married. She is a foreigner and was finishing school, so I'd sometimes send her bitcoin instead of wire. Back then bitcoin was only worth a few hundred, and sending her a 1-3 hundred a month is what she needed. To wire 300 dollars is simply not worth it, at least back then. I'm not sure if it has changed at all now though.
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    Something that has likely slowed down adoption: Current payment methods (CC, debit, tap, chip, etc) artificially appear faster than they are. When someone taps, 99% of the time the payment processor is not waiting for the funds. It’s all trust and calculations of acceptable risk (that’s why the tap limit). Crypto can adopt that approach as well. Yes, CCs/debit went through a period (as did cheques) where that trust was wildly abused and it’s likely any trust layer on top of crypto would have to go through the same period of abuse, but solutions [c|w]ould be implemented fairly quickly since it’s all tech.
    - evantbyrne 3y ago
      Yup. eth transactions could happen in the time it takes to run a credit card if you wait for just a couple confirmations, which should be acceptable risk for point of sale. Bitcoin has lightning. As to your last point: credit card fraud is still rampant and hardly anyone accepts checks outside of contractual b2b transactions. The issues with those technologies are technical in nature. Sending a crypto transaction doesn't allow someone to fraudulently charge your account like those technologies do. Whether chargebacks should even exist in a secure transaction system by default is debatable. I personally don't think that kangaroo court service is worth the fraud + global ~3% fees. Think about all the chargebacks you've made in your life that weren't related to credit cards just being insecure. I'm certain they are not worth 3% of your total spending.
  - shuntress 3y ago
    Wire Transfers are a logistic service you may have someone perform for you in exchange for cash. Half the point of a digital cash is that you never need a wire transfer because you can just exchange the digital cash directly. Effectively the same as handing someone an envelope full of physical cash. The currency exchange step needed to convert that BTC back into real money is probably more annoying than just dealing with a wire transfer. And that is essentially my point. If you send someone USD, they can use that directly to pay for expenses like food or rent. If you send someone BTC, they need to first convert that into a real currency before they can use it. That is what I am referencing when I say "The 'Killer App' for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency".
threeseed 3y ago
> And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at a US bank In Australia, we have instant transfers between bank accounts. I imagine the US will get to that point soon in which case there is no benefit to crypto for this use case.
- govg 3y ago
  It exists in the US as well (Zelle), except due to the super high number of banks, not all will have feature parity / have it enabled. The major banks like Chase support QR code scanning for instant transfers, smaller ones might require a phone number or email input via keyboard.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Venmo is probably even more popular than zelle
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    It will exist soon in the US since FedPay was rolled out this year. It will take a while for banks to support it, but my guess is everyone will support it as replacement to ACH. I don't think Venmo will die since there is a need for app to provide nice interface. But Zelle has been lobbying against FedPay since it will destroy them.
godelski 3y ago
I don't want instant transactions. Clawbacks are very useful. Now the trick is to get that decentralized which means things like smart contracts? But still I haven't seen a good solution.
- evantbyrne 3y ago
  Well everyone pays an extra ~3% on all of their transactions for that privilege, plus whatever costs retailers factor in for rampant credit card fraud. I wouldn't consider Visa the gold standard of how financial transactions should work the whole system is very clunky and prone to abuse.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > Well everyone pays an extra ~3% You do realize crypto currencies have transaction fees, right? Yes, I'm willing to pay for goods and services.
    - evantbyrne 3y ago
      Not 3%! That's a lot of lost spending power for the privilege of having your insecure cc number stolen at a gas pump.
zachmu 3y ago
The article boasts of ethereum L2 being able to support 500 TPS thanks to blobs. That's at least two decimal orders of magnitude away from being a global payment solution. It's a joke.
- chrispeel 3y ago
  Where did you get that number? Vitalik gave goals of 1.33 MB per second in blob space, and a compressed tx size of 25 bytes. This gives around 50,000 transactions per second, which seems like a worthy goal.
  - zachmu 3y ago
    I would have sworn I read it in the linked article, but it's sure not there when I read it again. And it's not in the oldest archive.org copy either. I can only conclude I hallucinated it, which makes me uncomfortable.
    - chrispeel 3y ago
      Thanks for responding
  - Terretta 3y ago
    I'm curious what you think the latencies of 50,000 distributed transactions becoming a consistent chain add up to?
    - TimJRobinson 3y ago
      The reason L2s can scale that high is every machine doesn't have to process every transaction. Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.

shuntress 3y ago

You could maybe call it a technical issue or an issue of adoption but the fact is that no one is scanning Monero wallet QR codes to buy coffee.

evantbyrne 3y ago
Capital gains tax is not a technical issue per se. People also don't buy coffee with wire transfers, but nobody says wire transfers are a failure. btc/eth are better at doing what wire transfers were designed to do. The point is the tech is much better than people who have been sleeping on crypto seem to realize
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hunter-gatherer 3y ago
  This was my use case for bitcoin years ago when my wife and I had just got married. She is a foreigner and was finishing school, so I'd sometimes send her bitcoin instead of wire. Back then bitcoin was only worth a few hundred, and sending her a 1-3 hundred a month is what she needed. To wire 300 dollars is simply not worth it, at least back then. I'm not sure if it has changed at all now though.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Something that has likely slowed down adoption: Current payment methods (CC, debit, tap, chip, etc) artificially appear faster than they are. When someone taps, 99% of the time the payment processor is not waiting for the funds. It’s all trust and calculations of acceptable risk (that’s why the tap limit). Crypto can adopt that approach as well. Yes, CCs/debit went through a period (as did cheques) where that trust was wildly abused and it’s likely any trust layer on top of crypto would have to go through the same period of abuse, but solutions [c|w]ould be implemented fairly quickly since it’s all tech.
  - evantbyrne 3y ago
    Yup. eth transactions could happen in the time it takes to run a credit card if you wait for just a couple confirmations, which should be acceptable risk for point of sale. Bitcoin has lightning. As to your last point: credit card fraud is still rampant and hardly anyone accepts checks outside of contractual b2b transactions. The issues with those technologies are technical in nature. Sending a crypto transaction doesn't allow someone to fraudulently charge your account like those technologies do. Whether chargebacks should even exist in a secure transaction system by default is debatable. I personally don't think that kangaroo court service is worth the fraud + global ~3% fees. Think about all the chargebacks you've made in your life that weren't related to credit cards just being insecure. I'm certain they are not worth 3% of your total spending.
- shuntress 3y ago
  Wire Transfers are a logistic service you may have someone perform for you in exchange for cash. Half the point of a digital cash is that you never need a wire transfer because you can just exchange the digital cash directly. Effectively the same as handing someone an envelope full of physical cash. The currency exchange step needed to convert that BTC back into real money is probably more annoying than just dealing with a wire transfer. And that is essentially my point. If you send someone USD, they can use that directly to pay for expenses like food or rent. If you send someone BTC, they need to first convert that into a real currency before they can use it. That is what I am referencing when I say "The 'Killer App' for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency".

threeseed 3y ago

> And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at a US bank In Australia, we have instant transfers between bank accounts. I imagine the US will get to that point soon in which case there is no benefit to crypto for this use case.

govg 3y ago
It exists in the US as well (Zelle), except due to the super high number of banks, not all will have feature parity / have it enabled. The major banks like Chase support QR code scanning for instant transfers, smaller ones might require a phone number or email input via keyboard.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Venmo is probably even more popular than zelle
- ianburrell 3y ago
  It will exist soon in the US since FedPay was rolled out this year. It will take a while for banks to support it, but my guess is everyone will support it as replacement to ACH. I don't think Venmo will die since there is a need for app to provide nice interface. But Zelle has been lobbying against FedPay since it will destroy them.

godelski 3y ago

I don't want instant transactions. Clawbacks are very useful. Now the trick is to get that decentralized which means things like smart contracts? But still I haven't seen a good solution.

evantbyrne 3y ago
Well everyone pays an extra ~3% on all of their transactions for that privilege, plus whatever costs retailers factor in for rampant credit card fraud. I wouldn't consider Visa the gold standard of how financial transactions should work the whole system is very clunky and prone to abuse.
- godelski 3y ago
  > Well everyone pays an extra ~3% You do realize crypto currencies have transaction fees, right? Yes, I'm willing to pay for goods and services.
  - evantbyrne 3y ago
    Not 3%! That's a lot of lost spending power for the privilege of having your insecure cc number stolen at a gas pump.

zachmu 3y ago

The article boasts of ethereum L2 being able to support 500 TPS thanks to blobs. That's at least two decimal orders of magnitude away from being a global payment solution. It's a joke.

chrispeel 3y ago
Where did you get that number? Vitalik gave goals of 1.33 MB per second in blob space, and a compressed tx size of 25 bytes. This gives around 50,000 transactions per second, which seems like a worthy goal.
- zachmu 3y ago
  I would have sworn I read it in the linked article, but it's sure not there when I read it again. And it's not in the oldest archive.org copy either. I can only conclude I hallucinated it, which makes me uncomfortable.
  - chrispeel 3y ago
    Thanks for responding
- Terretta 3y ago
  I'm curious what you think the latencies of 50,000 distributed transactions becoming a consistent chain add up to?
  - TimJRobinson 3y ago
    The reason L2s can scale that high is every machine doesn't have to process every transaction. Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.