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Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar stable coin
- kvam 1y agoWhy would cloudflare be the company to do this?
- Cupprum 1y agoAt least its not facebook or microsoft. But the better question would be, who should be the company (or entity) we should trust to do such a thing?
- unglaublich 1y agoBecause they are establishing themselves as "the gatekeeper of the internet".
- SXX 1y agoMiTM is their business. Obviously mitming of financial transactions is the most profitable business of all.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoI dunno, running for president of the US and launching a crypto coin seems pretty profitable.
- noir_lord 1y agoRent seeking probably. Cloudflare sits in the middle of a vast amount of web traffic now, offering easy global payments and skimming off the top of that is going to be very profitable potentially. I don't trust Cloudflare, the larger they get the bigger the abuse potential becomes.
- deadbabe 1y agoBut of all the players, Cloudflare is the best one for this kind of thing.
- rozenmd 1y agoCurious: how do you feel about AWS, Azure, GCP?
- octo888 1y agoYou work for Cloudflare, so is your comment more a "we're no different" statement than genuine curiosity about their opinion?
- rozenmd 1y agoGenuinely curious.
- noir_lord 1y agoSame way I do about any large corporation, I don't trust them.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoYou mean Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet?
- willtemperley 1y agoCF: No criminal convictions I know about. No reason to distrust yet. Most controversies seem to be about providing services to political organisations. GCP: Earth Engine is quite good, but Google have multiple criminal convictions. As a repeat offender they should be avoided at all costs. They are just so exceptionally good at manipulating people, markets and academia it's genuinely terrifying. Azure: Microsoft still don't take security seriously. They're just a bit bumbly, not really smart enough to be as terrifying as Google. AWS: Pretty useful, annoying to use, distrust because I can't bear Amazon's use of dark patterns in consumer products.
- mapmeld 1y agoI agree this makes little sense for Cloudflare to jump on the crypto bandwagon now. Maybe they want to retain some talent by turning this into an official project. Is the premise that it makes more sense for an AI agent to pay in prepurchased stablecoin tokens instead of direct access to a credit card?
- rjh29 1y agoThey are the moat between AI content crawlers and websites. They will probably start charging a fee and a stablecoin is a good way to do that globally.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoSo they can directly monetize page views with their own token and fully embrace the role of internet gatekeeper / tax man.
- spwa4 1y ago... which will then be immediately destroyed by law because it gives the actual tax man a single target, along with a money flow that comes from within the control of the tax man. PLUS just imagine how many corrupt politicians will be tempted to force these payments to go through their company.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agorule of law no longer exists in the US and their large corporations are filling the gap.
- Spivak 1y agoBut then why do a blockchain thing? Why not just make CloudflareBucks they centrally control? Surely that is much easier to monetize and cheaper to implement.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoLess regulation to get in the way of the blatant corruption.
- h33t-l4x0r 1y agoTheir customers are hit the hardest by the shift away from google search to AI. They probably are the right company to try to help them monetize their content.
- aiisthefiture 1y agoGoogle search is used more now than ever…
- ACCount37 1y agoWhat does the traffic from Google Search look like though? I can't imagine all the low effort content farms that were providing things like dictionary definitions or ridiculously elongated ad-stuffed versions of kitchen recipes are doing too hot under the pressure from AI Overviews. And they can't be the only ones impacted.
- jbverschoor 1y agoFinally build an infrastructure for real micro transactions. First for AI agents to access paid content, then for consumer to access content.
- miohtama 1y agoBecause their customers want to monetize AI crawlers
- acdha 1y agoTheir customers pay them to be the front door to their websites. Customers want a way to reduce the massive traffic from AI crawling, to block malicious traffic, and to be compensated for access. That leaves Cloudflare well positioned to implement a pay-for-access check along with all of the existing bot services they offer. AI crawling goes from a threat to a win if I can serve OpenAI a demand to pay for each request. Bot abuse goes down if traffic isn’t free. Businesses like journalism become stable again if readers pay for content rather than relying on advertisers to subsidize it.
- tkel 1y ago[flagged]
- Min0taur 1y agoThe grift never sleeps.
- anon191928 1y agothese grifts brings billions to SV and tech startups, so
- thrown-0825-1 1y ago[flagged]
- ares623 1y ago“We can’t do AI but we’ll try crypto! That’s a good trick!”
- deadbabe 1y agoWhat’s the grift here exactly?
- cluckindan 1y ago”There’s no bubble!”
- ares623 1y agoIn the words of J Jonah Jameson: “You serious?”
- oldpersonintx2 1y ago[dead]
- phartenfeller 1y agoThat's probably their strategy of handling 402 Payment Required[1]. They want to become the platform over which auctions for AI crawlers buying rights to use content take place. Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an even bigger giant. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Sta...
- Orochikaku 1y agoEnglish version of the docs[1] since the version linked above is in German. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
- NicoJuicy 1y agoCloudflare only has a market cap of ~75 b. So there a plenty of bigger giants out there.
- thunfischbrot 1y agoI am trying to understand the direction of your comment. It seems to respond to > Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an even bigger giant. Are you proposing that you do not share OPs sentiment, since there are larger companies?
- NicoJuicy 1y ago2 sided. - Cloudflare is smaller in market cap than you would think, they are not "big tech" as to how I would consider it - have been them following for years and there is nothing atm. that would indicate of them being "evil"
- whatshisface 1y agoCloudflare is creating a massive single nexus for future corruption at the hands of an oppressive government or "active investors" to impact almost everyone.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoFor those wondering, its a stablecoin. So you put in a dollar, you get back a dollar. This makes sense, especially for Cloudflare. It also makes a lot of sense to a degree, I don't imagine anyone trusting an AI to just hand over stablecoins for transactions.
- thrown-0825-1 1y ago"So you put in a dollar, you get back a dollar." Until you don't. There are dozens of examples of failed stable coins, to the point that they are now a meme in the crypto community.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoSure, but this is a very well established firm, not some off-shoot crypto startup.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agolmao, never heard that before.
- TZubiri 1y agoIt's worth noting that there's nothing different between a stablecoin with a 1-to-1 ratio, and any entity that holds deposits. Like a bank Paypal, Stripe. Whether you call them Dollars or BrandDollars, if it has a 1to1 ratio, it's actually a dollar. People are confused because they usually can't distinguish between net emission and gross emission, if you hold a deposit or a loan, you have increased the gross amount of dollars in the economy, but of course you have created an equivalent liability. There's no semantic or technical difference between loaning a dollar, holding a dollar in deposit, or issuing a dollar-equivalent token.
- thrown-0825-1 1y ago[dead]
- shubhamjain 1y agoThis are zero details on how it's supposed to work, or how it avoids the problem traditional crypto. “Instant global transactions” sound good in theory, but it has never been a technological problem, purely a regulatory one. Govts. don't like this happening. They want oversight, especially for cross border transactions.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoEvery crypto project runs head first into this problem. Layers and layers of technical bullshit that never addresses the fact that no government in the world wants to allow frictionless peer to peer payments across borders. CF is likely building this to service an internal need to collect micropayments for some kind of pay to view "captcha", and all the rest is just highly paid PR spin.
- garbthetill 1y agoregulation from the US side sounds open with the genius act, plus the current admin is pro crypto. Regulations from other govs dont matter as they will just "geo block" countries that dont allow it and users will just bounce into the service with a vpn or proxy at their own risk, other crypto like btc , xrp has been used to cross border trade for a decade now even in countries with outright bans, the entities using it just work around it e.g have an operation in a country were its allowed or in the case of weak enforcement just dont care Im not fully knowledgeable about banks, but i always thought the reason why regulation was so hard was because no one could agree on a common ground obvs each country wants to keep their moat with their own currency, but with crypto anyone can opt in at their own risk
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoCurrent US admin is pro grift, bribery, and embezzlement. Crypto is a just a tool that enables that. They have no interest whatsoever in democratization, self-custodial finance, or frictionless payments across borders for anyone but themselves. Direct p2p payments a "hard problem" because it directly contradicts what we consider to be one of the central pillars of national sovereignty, control over your national currency. Crypto as a whole is in denial about this because there is no path forward without expecting nations to either give up one of their most effective levers of control, or expecting them to turn a blind eye to external actors eroding that control in real time.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoWell time to move my DNS off of CF again.
- kleene_op 1y ago[flagged]
- randerson 1y agoI’d actually prefer spending a few pennies to read an article vs. the status quo of being inundated with ads and trackers.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoThis argument is the endgame of the chef slowly boiling the frog.
- swarnie 1y agoBig business: Why not both?
- lifty 1y agoIsn’t that better than advertising? Of course, there’s the cognitive burden of micro payments (https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/the-mental-accounting-barrier-to-micropayments/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/the-mental-accounting-...) so not sure it will catch on. But for agents it might.
- spwa4 1y agoNo. It isn't. Here's what happened to all the micropayments network platforms that competed with the internet: The gatekeepers (telecoms) first decided they were going to publish things themselves too, which had zero success, then to pay themselves more than anyone on the platform, then when that still didn't work they kicked everyone else off the platform with various excuses (porn, crime, getting money from outside the platform, promoting non-sanctioned shows, ... the big thing that was successful were mail and chatrooms) The problem is that these companies were always willing (after a short while) to damage the economics of the infrastructure as a whole, just to increase their own share (for example per-email charges). Eventually they had close to 100% ... of nothing. And the irony is that because of these companies constantly trying to move into content and apps, destroying their own system more and more by crude attempts to force people into their content the only thing that remains of these systems ... is publishers. They couldn't really improve their apps, since that cost them money. They quickly discovered to use money as a way to avoid friction on their apps ... and then no business leader ever approved removing friction anywhere. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL
- viraptor 1y agoAt least they could've used one of the many existing systems... Brave attention token for example is right there and there's a few other similar projects. They didn't even acknowledge alternative efforts.
- garbthetill 1y agoik alot of people on here hate crypto, tether has been making billions each quarter for the last few years. I dont think there's any more real thought to this, than the genius act providing a framework and cf trying to get easy money The genius act will change how fintech and neobanks operate, so expect to see more companies offering similar services
- dpc_01234 1y agoAverage HN commenter is a solid counter signal for investors. Kind of like Cramer just for tech.
- Orochikaku 1y agoCould someone perhaps provide a steelman argument for this? My own personal read on this is really cynical... As per NIST's recommendations[1] it seems like a blockchain doesn't make sense for this use case. From where I stand it seems like Cloudflare is side-stepping the scrutiny, regulations and perhaps most pertinently the cost that would govern a similar offering using traditional financial instruments. [1] https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distributed-ledger-technology/images-media/dlt-need.png https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distribut...
- factorialboy 1y agoThe only good thing about Blockchain today is Bitcoin's scarcity. Almost every other project out there would be better off as a centralized project — heck, many of them are centralized, while claiming to hold on to the decentralized cyberpunk ethos — if not being outright scams.
- Orochikaku 1y agoI've personally found one compelling use case, decentralised DNS, I'm sure there are other projects attempting this but the one I'm familiar with is Namecoin[1] [1] https://www.namecoin.org/ https://www.namecoin.org/
- ameliaquining 1y agoNamecoin would make sense on a technical level if anyone were actually using it, but nobody is.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoENS has existed for a while and has very little traction.
- pstuart 1y agoI'm working on a project that is based on blockchain for the key purpose of making the data on it effectively available to all to add to and to consume -- basically providing a public utility for the data hosting. It's not a path to riches (I can see a possible lifestyle business out of it), it's about giving people new opportunities. I've been chewing on this for years and only now that Claude has shown up do I have a partner to help me make this work. I do have some experience working on blockchain for a startup (non-ICO) that helped inspire me, but the experience itself bordered on being PTSD-inducing. The people I worked with were True Believers of Crypto, but the product we were building used crypto solely to tell their investors it was a blockchain company -- not that their product leveraged it at all.
- pelorat 1y agoGood luck with the regulatory process in Europe. Cloudflare is going to have to register as a financial institution. There's no way they will be able to roll this out globally.
- slipperybeluga 1y ago[dead]
- alphabettsy 1y agoFor some reason, I thought this was an off-season April fools joke.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45380382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45380382
- greatgib 1y agoLook what is going on with Google and Android apps. You let Cloudflare do things like that, and in a few years you will have to register with them using your passport to have the right to browse website. "For your safety".
- parlortricks 1y agoSeems like i should be concerned that the company running our edge infastructure decided to expand into crypto...how is this not the signal to jump ship...
- kotaKat 1y agoCloudflare suddenly getting into the money laundering business?