Misleading Title. Visa says it will allow for Bitcoin to be converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card in the same way debit cards already work.
This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc
The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.
It's such an anti-pattern for the world to adopt this approach. Sadly most people don't care nor should have to but the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved. Sadly, I'm less and less hopeful that crypto will be what the movement conveyed over last 10 years.
The number of people commenting who completely misunderstand Bitcoin and crypto is astounding.
Bitcoin will never be used directly for payments, it's a value store. Immutable deflationary digital gold.
I wrote it off for years too because it was too slow and the fees were too expensive. That was the dream they had, but they couldn't realize it at the base layer. I was still walking around last year believing that's the scam they were still peddling, but once you take time to investigate you'll see it will become a major part of the world economy.
COVID helped push this over as bailouts and printing money in the US and the ECB is going to drive a massive movement of money out of the markets and fiat.
Normally you'd see momentum go to bonds when the stocks burst but the bonds situation is unsalvagable.
Also expect a ton of movement to crypto when wealth taxes get implemented to fix economies. They'll use it to hide assets, guaranteed. Form an LLC, siphon the money out that way and into crypto.
HN isn’t wrong about everything. It was extremely bearing on Groupon in 2011. It was another thing where true believers would say that skeptics “just don’t get it”, but the HN critics had extremely cogent critiques that went without response. Google “Groupon Stock”, HN was very correct.
VERY different from the anti-Dropbox sentiment of the famous Dropbox comment.
You also have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Roubini, all claiming Bitcoin is worthless. Some of the brightest minds in finance with impeccable and long track records.
Bitcoin has had 12 years and still has no real world use cases. By contrast the internet was instantly useful. Bitcoin has a monstrous cost in energy and money to maintain the network. The token backing BTC, Tether, is founded by con artists and was just revealed to not have had the backing they claim. BTC has been subjected to the same money money printing its advocates defy in fiat.
I've reached the doubly-cynical conclusion: the critics are right, but it will probably keep climbing in value in the medium term. Actual on-chain transaction volume will remain dwarfed by on-exchange volume.
Tether will get clobbered in the next few years. This ought to affect the bitcoin price, but won't.
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -Sagan
What sold me on Bitcoin wasn't the strength of bitcoin itself, but the weakness of gold.
Bitcoin is an incredible store of value (albeit volatile). Being able to store a huge amount of assets in an inflation resilient trust-free resource that can't be faked is incredibly useful.
The other thing that sells me on it is the institutional buy in. At this point, nough rich people are going to lose big if bitcoin doesn't succeed. So, I find it unlikely that politicians and bureaucracy will purposely limit it.
That being said, I wouldn't invest more than 20% of my portfolio into crypto. It is far too volatile to put in anymore than that.
The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.
It's so funny to watch the "smart kids" from HN miss out on the biggest opportunity in the past decade to create wealth through software. The cope is immense
There are so many people commenting here about Bitcoin holders who don't even have Bitcoin.
As a person living primary on Bitcoin, I would love what VISA is doing, the volatility is not a problem for me, lightning wallets would be perfect, but I don't want to do taxation for thousands of small payments with different Bitcoin prices (especially as I'm not from US, where there is specialized software for it), so I lend USD against my Bitcoin tax-free and use that money to buy stuff. My behaviour would change if Bitcoin could be used for buying things directly tax-free (just like with any other currency).
Maybe I don't understand it correctly, but after having recently done my taxes, it seems to me you'd generate a capital gain or loss that has to be captured on IRS Form 8949 every time such a thing triggered bitcoin to be converted to USD, goods or services.
Or is it some nudge-nudge-wink-wink situation where everyone, including the IRS, ignores such a thing unless the sums involved are large.
Because of the open nature of the blockchain, the IRS knows all your exact movements, so there's no nudge-nudge-wink-wink especially if you have tied your real identity to a Bitcoin address using a centralized exchange.
Presumably, tools like cointracker (maybe even Visa themselves), etc, will take care of reporting these taxes for you, still a pita, but doable.
That’s what I don’t get too. Here is France the law is similar, and I can’t imagine card holders calculating the capital gains on every transaction. Here it requires taking a snapshot of your portfolio every time because you have to know the total value of the portfolio to calculate the taxable gain.
What people do is take out a loan in USD against their bitcoin, and spend that. This is all done instantly and automatically by various wallet apps that let you spend you Bitcoin as USD.
The most sophisticated pyramid scheme ever, hidden in plain sight; so obvious that everyone second guesses themselves. “They all seem to be going along, I guess I must be wrong.”
The problem with using Bitcoin for payments is volatility. Bitcoin's price is volatile. Bitcoin supporters say volatility will go down "at some point". The logic is pretty silly. Bitcoin is money for the people. But when the super rich people adopt it, volatility will go down. They have more money. The Bitcoin money "tank" will be bigger. Its volatile flow will go down.
Bitcoin is digital gold, God's money. When it comes to volatility, it's up to humans to "fix" it. The fix means we all have to "buy" into it, that is, blindly believe the problem will be fixed somehow. Stop selling, keep holding. Maybe, forever. :)
It's probably not going to be fixed. Volatility is likely an inherent property due to its limited supply.
How the heck would bitcoin volatility go down when there's no fixed reason to use it? USD has value despite fiat status because it's required to pay US taxes and oil markets are priced in USD (by force and trade agreement). Bitcoin is totally unteathered from reality (and deflationary which is another story entirely).
This means Bitcoin's value is based on completely ephemeral feelings, and the size of its network -- both things that can disappear overnight. The most solid thing you can say about it is that you can use it to get around government sanctions, which is not exactly high praise.
If BTC does catch up, the current inequality of the world will look like an anthill in comparison to the inequality that BTC will create. I can't imagine the world letting that happen..
Bitcoin transaction costs are very high so I’m assuming all these payment processor transactions will be off-chain. Do you think that having so many off-chain transactions that are essentially converting USD reduces the perceived value of BTC or raises it?
All trading within exchanges already happens outside the blockchain. This allows them to offer low or zero fees since transactions only cost money when users withdraw their cryptocurrencies.
It's just on-chain layer 1 transactions that are somewhat expensive. The lightning network solves this and works great, can do thousands of transactions per second and has close to 0 fees. Feels like magic to use it :)
This might be a scheme to increase taxation on bitcoin revenue.
Besides being a revenue source based on volatility and scarcity, bitcoin's real value is being a tax free wealth exchange between people and generations.
Bitcoin has been following internet's, especially start-up scene's trajectory. Like internet, Bitcoin started as a technological adventure and garnered the attention of first movers. Those first movers gained a lot of wealth through bitcoin and general population got interested. The surge in interest created a bubble. We are riding that bubble.
Bank of America's research shows that we passed the monopolization stage. Report mentions "About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts." There might be a burst, and bitcoin might not survive that.
I believe, the NFT and DeFi are projects to keep the bubble going, or create some value after the burst so like internet companies, the bitcoin sector can recover.
In its current situation, I don't believe the bitcoin can recover from a burst, but I would love to hear differing opinions especially from people who understand finance.
1) Title is somewhat misleading ... They are trying to help wallet to convert to fiat to pay in fiat.
2) I think Visa is terrified of the competitive nature of crypto (not only bitcoin but any stablecoin). By essence, a trustless network for digital payment is a direct competitor to Visa.
Full disclosure. I am the CEO of carbon payment, a global payment solution leveraging stablecoins for global payments.
Not sure if this was the first year for tax returns to have it, but I was asked to document every single time I spent bitcoin to purchase something. Because you have to pay capital gains on the value above when you bought it. I wonder if this is true here but either way it's a massive pain in the ass.
This de facto duopoly for electronic payments is very concerning, but there seems to be no incentive to break it up. Why do you think that is?
Ideally people should be able to create their own banks and issue their own cards provided they talk the same open source protocol. We have all technology available that could enable this, but there needs to be a political will to make this happen. This could me nationalisation of the infrastructure of both payment processors or forcing them to open it up for 3rd parties - for example a private small bank should have no worse fees than a big whale bank. As long as these corporations can gatekeep our money (and time), we are not free.
Now that crypto is being more socially accepted, of course Visa and others will want to collect all the data on the products people are purchasing with it, just like they do with our fiat currency.
[+] [-] purple_ferret|5 years ago|reply
This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc
The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.
[+] [-] notyourwork|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiborsaas|5 years ago|reply
That's an accounting detail most people won't care about. Perception matters more than technicalities.
[+] [-] harikb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lupire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 67868018|5 years ago|reply
Bitcoin will never be used directly for payments, it's a value store. Immutable deflationary digital gold.
I wrote it off for years too because it was too slow and the fees were too expensive. That was the dream they had, but they couldn't realize it at the base layer. I was still walking around last year believing that's the scam they were still peddling, but once you take time to investigate you'll see it will become a major part of the world economy.
COVID helped push this over as bailouts and printing money in the US and the ECB is going to drive a massive movement of money out of the markets and fiat.
Normally you'd see momentum go to bonds when the stocks burst but the bonds situation is unsalvagable.
Also expect a ton of movement to crypto when wealth taxes get implemented to fix economies. They'll use it to hide assets, guaranteed. Form an LLC, siphon the money out that way and into crypto.
[+] [-] hnrodey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graeme|5 years ago|reply
VERY different from the anti-Dropbox sentiment of the famous Dropbox comment.
You also have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Roubini, all claiming Bitcoin is worthless. Some of the brightest minds in finance with impeccable and long track records.
Bitcoin has had 12 years and still has no real world use cases. By contrast the internet was instantly useful. Bitcoin has a monstrous cost in energy and money to maintain the network. The token backing BTC, Tether, is founded by con artists and was just revealed to not have had the backing they claim. BTC has been subjected to the same money money printing its advocates defy in fiat.
——
Check the results for Groupon: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=7H1SYMDVJKiYwbkPvqiEg...
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
Tether will get clobbered in the next few years. This ought to affect the bitcoin price, but won't.
[+] [-] SigmundA|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rawtxapp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] screye|5 years ago|reply
Bitcoin is an incredible store of value (albeit volatile). Being able to store a huge amount of assets in an inflation resilient trust-free resource that can't be faked is incredibly useful.
The other thing that sells me on it is the institutional buy in. At this point, nough rich people are going to lose big if bitcoin doesn't succeed. So, I find it unlikely that politicians and bureaucracy will purposely limit it.
That being said, I wouldn't invest more than 20% of my portfolio into crypto. It is far too volatile to put in anymore than that.
[+] [-] kajumix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnrodey|5 years ago|reply
The entire crypto market goes to infinity or zero. I don't readily know which is more likely; only that I'm betting on infinity.
[+] [-] zionic|5 years ago|reply
“Expensive, less TPS than my SQL server. Meh”
[+] [-] LAMike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiphias2|5 years ago|reply
As a person living primary on Bitcoin, I would love what VISA is doing, the volatility is not a problem for me, lightning wallets would be perfect, but I don't want to do taxation for thousands of small payments with different Bitcoin prices (especially as I'm not from US, where there is specialized software for it), so I lend USD against my Bitcoin tax-free and use that money to buy stuff. My behaviour would change if Bitcoin could be used for buying things directly tax-free (just like with any other currency).
[+] [-] iijj|5 years ago|reply
Or is it some nudge-nudge-wink-wink situation where everyone, including the IRS, ignores such a thing unless the sums involved are large.
[+] [-] rawtxapp|5 years ago|reply
Presumably, tools like cointracker (maybe even Visa themselves), etc, will take care of reporting these taxes for you, still a pita, but doable.
[+] [-] tarsinge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexmingoia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dankerr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boring_twenties|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luxuryballs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Priem19|5 years ago|reply
Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely: https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html.
[+] [-] asinoastuto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _7fvc|5 years ago|reply
Bitcoin is digital gold, God's money. When it comes to volatility, it's up to humans to "fix" it. The fix means we all have to "buy" into it, that is, blindly believe the problem will be fixed somehow. Stop selling, keep holding. Maybe, forever. :)
It's probably not going to be fixed. Volatility is likely an inherent property due to its limited supply.
https://bitflate.org/post/2020/05/10/bitcoin-volatility.html
[+] [-] tehjoker|5 years ago|reply
This means Bitcoin's value is based on completely ephemeral feelings, and the size of its network -- both things that can disappear overnight. The most solid thing you can say about it is that you can use it to get around government sanctions, which is not exactly high praise.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kajumix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Black101|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tw600040|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanShook|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebean11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|5 years ago|reply
I'd say it adds a lot of value.
[+] [-] freeone3000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fearface|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imglorp|5 years ago|reply
For big items maybe?
[+] [-] yigitcakar|5 years ago|reply
Besides being a revenue source based on volatility and scarcity, bitcoin's real value is being a tax free wealth exchange between people and generations.
Bitcoin has been following internet's, especially start-up scene's trajectory. Like internet, Bitcoin started as a technological adventure and garnered the attention of first movers. Those first movers gained a lot of wealth through bitcoin and general population got interested. The surge in interest created a bubble. We are riding that bubble.
Bank of America's research shows that we passed the monopolization stage. Report mentions "About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts." There might be a burst, and bitcoin might not survive that.
I believe, the NFT and DeFi are projects to keep the bubble going, or create some value after the burst so like internet companies, the bitcoin sector can recover.
In its current situation, I don't believe the bitcoin can recover from a burst, but I would love to hear differing opinions especially from people who understand finance.
[+] [-] tiffanyh|5 years ago|reply
The HN discussion with 800+ comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102030
[+] [-] helen___keller|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elietoubi|5 years ago|reply
Full disclosure. I am the CEO of carbon payment, a global payment solution leveraging stablecoins for global payments.
[+] [-] monkeydust|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pawelduda|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dencodev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cronix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|5 years ago|reply
I’m thinking that this is more about a proof of concept to get into the space.