I think there will be decent transfer of money from venture-funded NFT startups to Stripe for the next few years, followed by a dip in the market when the startups discover that selling digital art is less of a viable market than they realize.
I am personally skeptical about the end market, but Stripe seem well-insulated from the risks. I'm curious what people who are bullish on this think though – what might I be missing about the digital art market? I think paying 12 million pounds for a Renoir is bananas too, but people certainly do it [3]. I just expect digital stuff to be more volatile because it's hard to communicate that combination of artisanship and rarity.
On the topic of well-made shovels, I highly recommend the Voile Telepro in HN Orange [4] as a portable snow shovel to keep in your car if you live in a snowy climate. They will probably be on sale in spring and summer.
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[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150516061807/https://stripe.co...
[2] https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support
[3] https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-pierre-auguste-renoir-1...
Which is... even more evil? They're encouraging an externality which harms normal people but not them.
I think NFTs, along with the vast majority (but not all) crypto, are total bullshit, but I also accept (a) I could be totally wrong in this, in which case, my loss, and (b) offering rails to sell these items doesn't strike me as "evil" in the slightest.
Offering a product is not evil or immoral. It may be amoral but that's not the same as immoral. Ultimately the market decides what stays and goes except in extraordinary circumstances.
Now you can buy to maybe sell for a higher price in the future. That should increase engagement and the user base. It is still a very particular behavior that only a small fraction of society engages in.
But there is 6.6Bn smartphone users in this world. If a tiny 0.1% of the population buys/sells NFT for fun and addition, that's still 6.6 million user. That's billions of $$ pumped into the NFT economy and dozens of billions of "value" for these digital items.
The world is crazy once you go from the local scale to the global scale.
Try looking how many pages you need click through before you emerge from the minimum $0.03. The market for digital "art" is a hard one, because scarcity can only centrally be enforced.
https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?appid=730#p1_price_...
The regulatory hurdles of getting into or out of fiat from crypto make it nearly impossible for all but the biggest players due to Money Service Business laws in each of the 50 states let alone internationally.
As such this is a regulatory arbitrage play and one that will be welcomed by the industry as it is currently filled with extremely expensive options (Looking at you Prime Trust) and predatory actors.
Stripe can clean up here in the short term if their product offers fair and transparent pricing to industry as is their brand.
I do suspect they will stick around this time as the number of players has grown and the US government looks like it is finally ready to embrace the industry and bring some much needed regulatory clarity.
I’m also not interested in ideas on a shelf that could do this better in an alternate reality but aren’t active
I also recognize there are uphill battles conceptually for both adopters and builders, such as ownership models where access is not exclusive (which is also not without precedence outside crypto)
Not interested in discussing these distractions: the perceived quality of current art, what types of art are more deserving of their artists having a livable income off, ideas on a shelf for solving this at scale in an alternate reality, scam activity, or pretending proof of work chains are state of the art
I'd be curious to know what fraction of NFT enthusiasts had previously commissioned a piece of art, and of those how many were truly aghast at the dire state of payment systems without NFTs or at their inability to assert ownership via a blockchain. I suspect both are quite small.
The former is ludicrous, because Paypal/Kofi/Patreon/what have you offer a wide array of easy-to-use, feature-rich payment systems.
The latter maybe less inconceivable, but IMO it's driven by a desire to use blockchain tech for _something_, find something that it can conceivably do, and then deciding that that thing is therefore important. Personally, proving ownership and providence hasn't ever been a concern for any of my art purchases because they, like the vast majority of art, isn't worth selling a forgery of--nobody is coming to steal the forum avatar I commissioned or selling unauthorized prints of the obscure photographer I like.
This is just round three (or whatever) of blockchain being a solution in search of a problem: having failed to evangelize its wide use as a consumer payments system in general, its adherents moved on to hyping it as a solution to Enterprise IT problems (where selling bullshit is the name of the game anyway), failed to find traction (because everyone discovered it didn't actually solve any problems), and so we've circled back round to a consumer market, but now with more celebrity endorsements. It's still an effort to convince people that the blockchain version of something is much better and therefore worthwhile so that the worth of the tokens is tied to something other than transactions illegal goods and wild speculation. It's about supporting the livelihoods of people hoarding GPUs and wasting electricity to mine the tokens, not artists.
I'm more interested in solutions that I expect to be stable and last. I do understand why artists are hoping to cash on the NFT wave; I just worry that a lot of people will come crashing down along with the hype.
Those that do include human art have a strong tendency to just lift uncredited art from Pinterest or deviantart. Supposedly the purpose of NFTs was to provide the provenance for art. But it seems that most NFT art is stolen from actual artists.
You should track down the New York Times article from this past weekend. From memory, it says that despite all the hype, almost no artists are making any money from NFTs. The average sale price is less than $400, which doesn't even cover materials.
Coinbase whole business is spreads.
Coinbase collects fees. Even if the spread is minimal (I think Bitcoin goes to something silly like 8 decimals but even for a book in USD, the bid/ask spread may be 39 842.54 vs 39 482.55, so a spread of one cent), Coinbase still takes a fee on every trade. And they take a fee from both the buyer and the seller.
I'm not sure their business is related to spreads.
Did they just update this after you pointed this out?
[1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cKDBTS...
When crypto proposes something that *is*, rather than something that *could be* people will stop considering it as a big casino.
The only news here is that Stripe is letting crypto companies use their various fiat processing services, now that they feel comfortable that they can legally do so. Confirmed by pc's comment [1]
Essentially, how are existing Stripe users protected from Stripe's reputational self-harm here?
My sense is it's more about the window shifting enough that it's palatable enough for a Stripe product team to stake their professional rep on now. "If Twitter and Square are doing it..."
To an extent, I wonder what the impact of the SEC ruling for BlockFi (crypto exchange) did to clarify the regs for larger companies like Stripe.
So, the timing of this Stripe announcement could be related to the Biden EO: https://apnews.com/article/biden-cryptocurrency-executive-or...
Businesses entering the crypto space always seem to tout carbon offsets and sidechains that use less energy, but offsets are insufficient, and NFTs minted on sidechains inevitably migrate to Mainnet, where they're just as environmentally destructive as any other NFT, or they fail.
Stripe's carbon recapture efforts seem to be in the same category. Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place. If Stripe's support of crypto increases the use of blockchains, the overall impact of extra carbon emissions could very easily outpace all the carbon recapture they'll ever achieve.
It's a shame. When Stripe announced their carbon recapture efforts, I was impressed by how sincere they seemed in finding solutions to climate problems. Next to Stripe Crypto, however, it appears to just be greenwashing.
(And to head off the replies, I know all about proof-of-stake, but it's not relevant here. I'm unconvinced it will work, and even if it does, the ecological damage done and being done in the meantime is massive. If Stripe really cared about carbon emissions, they'd wait to launch Stripe Crpyto only on proof-of-stake blockchains, and only after they proved that the energy usage at scale was similar to the energy use for transferring fiat currency.)
One of the problems with renewables is that they are spike-y and there's a limit to how much you can control the spike. When renewable sources peak, they can put more energy into the grid than the grid can safely handle (too much power can cause damage). Battery storage tech is currently lacking for dealing with this (though https://www.energyvault.com/ has an interesting take on this) and power degrades quickly when sent over power-lines, so that limits distribution over long distances.
In some scenarios, when energy becomes too plentiful, power companies may actually start charging negative costs - ie, they pay people to take more power out of the grid. When you combine these two factors, power producers have an economic incentive not to use renewables.
Enter Bitcoin - paying for power consumption is a huge component of operating costs. Mining rigs that are positioned near renewable power sources have an advantage in that they can just stop mining when energy prices get too high and start mining when energy prices are low enough. This provides a profitable way for miners and renewable power suppliers to operate together.
Deployed properly, Bitcoin mining actually improves the economics of renewables. Because doing so improves the profitability of mining, there is an economic incentive for miners to move toward renewables and build infrastructure that only mines when it is most profitable - ie, the times when not mining actually hurts renewable efforts.
NOTE: in theory non-cryptocurrency applications could serve this same role to make renewables more economical, but many applications have an always-on requirement; you can't run a data center only when the sun shines, but you can mine crypto only then.
Even then, if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs.
That's not necessarily true -- it depends on the marginal costs of each. Right now carbon capture is pretty expensive, but I can see that potentially changing with more investment put into it, which is what Stripe is trying to do.
In a world without renewables, we'd never get to a place where the marginal costs of carbon capture would be lower than the marginal costs of burning fossil fuels for energy. The best hope for recapture is to be powered by cheap renewables. This requires having a lot more renewable capacity than we do now, which is absolutely something that's happening and should continue to happen, but it's not environmentally free. Mining and battery production/recycling/disposal have economic consequences.
In its best form carbon recapture is trading emissions today for the promise that they'll be mostly recaptured in the future using renewables. But renewables also have to serve our other needs. So all the carbon we burn in the meantime creates more demands for solar panels, wind farms, dams, wave farms, and batteries in the future.
Thus, it is better to not emit than to recapture. We recapture because we have ti.
The amount of waste necessary to support the network must always grow since any new efficiencies are immediately obviated by the incentive to bring on more miners, the total utility provided by the network (i.e. the rate of transactions it securely processes) has no relationship to the amount of energy that the network burns. With every other technology, new effeincies make the technology able to do more useful work while burning less energy, in this way anything based on PoW is fundamentally flawed. You could hook up a fusion reactor of the future to the bitcoin network and it would not provide any more utility, yet the network would eventually consume all the energy produced by the reactor given enough time to increase mining capacity.
I know the typical response to this is PoS, and I think a switch to PoS would be great since its impact on the environment is within the realm of normal software. Whether or not PoS can actually work for a large network is a different discussion.
ETH currently emits 7.4 million metric tons of CO2 a year. Bitcoin is much higher. I've seen estimates as low as 16 million and as high as 55. There are other chains as well. To keep the math simple, let's round it to 50 million, so crypto is contributing 0.1% of total carbon emissions. Like you said, a rounding error.
I think we're just going to have to disagree on mitigations. I don't think they're working very well.
Crucially, at the beginning of 2019, according to the source I linked, ETH was only at 2 million tons a year. It's more than tripled since then. In 2021, Carbon recapture removed an estimated 9 thousand tons of CO2. [2] The CO2 from the growth of ETH eclipses anything that carbon recapture is currently capable of. The technology will get better. The most optimistic estimate I've seen is that carbon recapture will hit 30 million tons a year in 2070. But this year, Stripe Crypto only has to increase crypto transactions, across all blockchains it supports, by 9,000 tons to completely offset all of the money it's putting into recapture efforts. Even if you remove all the other chains, Stripe only has to increase ETH transactions by 1.3% to achieve this own-goal.
Long term, Stripe alone could end up causing more CO2 emissions on the blockchains to grow faster than all of carbon recapture.
1: https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/ 2: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-...
Does anyone have any good resources for learning the building blocks/vocabulary of Crypto Currency?
For a book with more in the weeds details: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Technologies-C...
Somewhat sadly, I was quite involved in web3 several years ago when the web3.js project was very young - so I have mixed feelings about being glad "someone else is gonna handle it for me". I suppose in the last 5 years I've gone from "Not your keys, not your coins!" to "I just don't want to spend a ton of time on this". Does that mean crypto has failed to live up to the dream or does that mean it's finally boring enough for old-business-owner-me to make use of it? I can't quite decide!
I am a former Stripe employee, so I am quite biased, but I'll just say: In my experience, if the Collison brothers do anything - you'd be a fool to think it's not extremely well thought out. If I hear a rhyme I assume there is a damn good reason.
Am very sad to see this.
I suppose it is inevitable but it could even present problems for businesses in the UK where their banks are allergic to payment platforms that accept cryptocurrency.
It is bonkers to be downvoted for this, but I explained my reasoning in more detail in another comment if credulous people care to reflexively downvote me there too:
If you're serious about this, you should strongly consider Monero.
See: https://support.stripe.com/questions/crypto-supportability-a...
If the text says one thing, the opposite is suggested by the screenshots in the page.
I do not expect it to be clear to the people reviewing transactions at crypto-phobic banks.
I would prefer a payments provider that will have absolutely nothing to do with these businesses, but either way, the way this is being communicated looks like an attempt to split a hair too finely.
- Three employees on LinkedIn, none with a background in finance, security, accounting, etc. - No audited security certifications (PCI DSS doesn't directly apply, but there should be _something_ that shows that _someone_ checked their processes/code/infrastructure for reasonable best practices) - No fraud protection or anything like that.
This could be nice for a crypto-only side-business that someone is running, but it can't be used by a serious company that needs to supplement their non-crypto payments with a crypto payments option.
I would hesitate building any business on Stripe. However, if you are considering using Stripe Crypto, build the integration it in a way that you can easily migrate away.
We built our credit card processing and invoicing on Stripe. We've only processed $2.5m and now we are migrating away. We are 2 months into the migration.
It's worth the migration cost, working with Stripe has been an absolute nightmare. Really wish we had built our billing system differently... and not with Stripe.
I worked for a company which is selling a tool that allows windows users to spoof unique identifiers of their computer. A lot of software these days grabs MAC addresses, disk and monitor serials in order to identify users. So, this tool just hooks into the windows kernel, and returns made up identifiers when a program requests them via the windows API. It does not change any files on the user's disk, and it does not modify any other programs in RAM. Literally the only thing it does is hooking the kernel like a 3rd party anti-virus. It is basically like the "randomize MAC address" and "change advertising identifier" on modern smartphones. Just for windows.
Well, one day I woke up with this email in my inbox: https://i.imgur.com/g91KDqE.png
They stopped the payouts, as this tool was deemed as a "restricted product". The cited point as the reason of the termination is the following:
> Compliance with Applicable Laws: You must use the Services in a lawful manner, and must obey all laws, rules, and regulations (“Laws”) applicable to your use of the Services and to Transactions. As applicable, this may include compliance with domestic and international Laws related to the use or provision of financial services, notification and consumer protection, unfair competition, privacy, and false advertising, and any other Laws relevant to Transactions.
As it came to light, a 70bn company namely Activision filed a lawsuit and subpoena against us as the tool is used to bypass their (poorly) implemented anti-cheat. Nothing had been decided in court yet (whether the product is unfair competition or piracy), but stripe still chose to just kill the account for our core product.
I'm glad that they didn't lock away the money for 180 days minimum like PayPal usually does. Employees need to be paid, and this just sucks for everyone.
Basically can sell crypto for KYC backed cash in the US. No credit cards. No paying in crypto?
As a former believer in the original goal of private p2p digital cash, I am saddened by what crypto has become in practice.
Crypto is just centralized as the traditional financial system.
Oh and nobody actually uses it as a currency. I feel like I’m one of few who’s actually purchased goods/services.
I think the "dream" of truly private transactions was always unrealistic. Governments have many tools at their disposal to get what they want.
Even cash is only so private. In the USA cash purchases over $10,000 require a report to the IRS.
> I think the "dream" of truly private transactions was always unrealistic. Governments have many tools at their disposal to get what they want.
Unfortunately you may be right. I sure hope not.
Last time I check they won’t even accept any other business.
Couldn't you turn that off ?
The whole thing was a pure toy. Way more than doge coin or NFTs are today. I got 2K btc with the money I usually put to vanguard monthly.
Through out the years I’ve kept my view that the whole thing is a joke, but not so funny anymore. Going mainstream did nothing good to the scene and rising price created this current eco-catastrophe.
Yet this year is the first I actually used crypto as it was intended to transfer value instead of just cashing out. Defi and NFTs are not yet useful for me but the discussions around ethereum development are super interesting and keep pushing forward regardles of cryptobro scene.
I used to think that maybe this is similar to early web era, but now I shifted to think that we are possibly in the vacuum tube era of cryptocurrencies.
At least now it looks like this thing will outlive me. It sure didn’t look that way earlier. When price crashed it somehow felt right, but it never stayed there.
Writing post like this is probably the final top signal X)
Bitcoins original goal was to be an online currency, this has not transpired nor do I think it ever will which is why I (unfortunately!) got out. Talking to random people on the street the main feeling I'm getting now is as some sort of gold analogue, which I also think is doomed to fail. I just don't see Bitcoin growing out of it's main use which is criminality and unregulated gambling.
First, it is the store-of-value phase. Anticipation of future value, based on past and present value, will cause people to hoard a good as a savings technique. Bitcoin is still in this phase. Usually when you say this on the internet, someone will come in and say "Oh, but Bitcoin's volatility makes it a poor store-of-value!" But again, it's short-sighted. Looking at the 200 WMA will easily demonstrate the store-of-value aspect of Bitcoin.
Second phase is "medium of exchange". This is the thing people always point to and say that Bitcoin has failed. But it hasn't failed, it just hasn't reached it yet. This phase is started when a good becomes valuable enough that merchants begin to demand or incentivize payments in the good. As you mentioned, there are accounting, tax and technological impediments currently that make it less convenient to accept Bitcoin payments. These will be overcome with time, however, as the impediments are eliminated, or the value of Bitcoin makes it economically worthwhile to transact anyway.
The final phase will be "unit of account". Once a Bitcoin circular economy starts, people will begin to think of prices in Bitcoin, instead of dollars, euros, etc.
This may sound far-fetched to skeptics, but I consider this to be a near guarantee to happen eventually. Bitcoin's network effects and unique balance of incentives more or less ensures that it can't be killed, that everyone is better off participating in the network or they will be worse off in the long run.
Are you guys CCP agents trying to censor the people against this scam?
You want the news but not the concerns? c'mon lol
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That's very sad, this should be banned Why should people accept money created out of thin air and speculation?
Why let that kind of criminal money into the economy?
Now america amassed ton of stock (coinbase, paypal and the plethora of other services), who really owns crypto coins nowadays?
This stuff smells bad, and yes, it should be banned
Shame on anyone who participate into this giant, state organized crime against the economy
Poor people won't realize they became even poorer because someone's random NFT picturing a $5 pixel art picture from Fiver, is worth more than their house
I don’t expect this to have a lot of volume from the start, but it’s important that payment platforms like Stripe start accepting cryptocurrency so this can get bigger.
I don't think I've ever gotten that kind of rude sarcasm/passive aggression from a simple support inquiry, and I vowed never to use their services again.
Their competitors to this specific API were much nicer to work with and onboarded us after some basic introductions, so part of me wonders what other fronts Stripe has better but less well known competitors on.
I replied saying I'd be interested in knowing what they're looking for in potential beta partners:
> That is good to hear. All you need to do is follow the instructions listed in my previous email and wait on contact from the Treasury team. I am happy I was able to assist you.
> Thank you for choosing Stripe!
Keep in mind the "instructions" are to fill out the form that got me into this email chain in the first place: in other words there's nothing about what I asked there.
There's the whole "That's good to hear" reply to a question I asked...
And I was especially taken aback by the whole facetious "happy I was able to assist you" bit after completely ignoring my question.
-
The entire interaction felt like "why are you bothering us", which is honestly would be a fair position if they're looking for established players for example... but why not be direct?
We had other companies flat out say their partners want X million in funding before they'll work with you, and that was fine.
It'd actually take less work than writing out a non-answer like that
All companies that actually spoke to us and assisted when Stripe Treasury essentially said "why are you bothering us?"
Also, all smaller cryptocurrency on ramp businesses are doomed.
Is stripe adding crypto support to the existing API (USD, EUR, and now some crypto coins). Or are they just allowing crypto businesses to accept fiat?
It's a bit concerning.
It's the opposite of the crypto dream. But that's not Stripe's fault; it's Bitcoin's, for not creating a product which is actually capable of living up to its goals, and instead requiring all this 'glue business' to make it work. I hope someone else creates a new radically-different cryptocurrency which can be truly new, and not just a novelty stuck on top of Visa/Mastercard.
Many of the crypto businesses in the ecosystem talk about removing financial friction and control, but it seems they are only interested in introducing their own versions of them, and building their own little Wall Street while they can still get in on the ground floor.
Here's a great example: how are you going to "reach the unbanked" in the third world if you have transaction fees, paid by the user, inherent in your architecture? That's just nonsense. It's a step down from cash in every way. Cryptos which aren't feeless but talk about the "unbanked" are full of hot air. And this pattern of false promises is all over this space.
it sounds like you have only attempted to acquire it by a combination of
1) Purchasing it
2) with a credit or debit card
All it comes down to is that its a $2 trillion market with an extremely high volume of transactions, at all and when compared to the capitalization of the market
so service providers cater to that, and fortunately for the end users, a very large portion of that $2 trillion did not require people to pay once to convert their existing cash into crypto.
It's becoming a predictable story - something with potential arises, with a community of mostly true believers. The true believers make money, but they're not optimizing for profit, they're optimizing for making the ecosystem better. The grifters, optimizing only for profit, not only start to take the lion's share of the profit, but also attract more grifters. The grifters eventually outnumber the true believers, because:
1. true believers are hard to make; grifters already exist
2. grifting as a skill can be applied anywhere; true believers need relevant skills
3. lower profits and higher burnout leads to attrition among the true believers; some of them even convert to grifters
So the grifters completely dominate the market. They then siphon the market dry, offering essentially nothing in return, and then move onto the next grift, flush with the proceeds from the last one.
Further, I know a few small businesses that have had large sums of money locked up by services like paypal without any communication. Crypto also provides far more protection from issues like that.
> Stripe currently does not support users located in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. While users with direct or indirect activities involving Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are not broadly considered prohibited by Stripe at this time, all major credit card networks have announced that they are ceasing services to Russian financial institutions. Additionally, Stripe will not process transactions involving sanctioned Russian financial institutions and does not support Mir. This means transactions involving Russian-issued cards are likely to be unsuccessful. We encourage you to ensure compliance with relevant sanctions regulations in your jurisdiction.
https://support.stripe.com/questions/impact-of-sanctions-on-...
Nothing else has this capability to the same extent.
Today we store most of our wealth in assets (market index funds, stocks, real estate, etc.) and some (typically very little, and rarely outside of a bank account) in cash.
Most of this is not actually controlled by you.
With BTC (and cryptocurrency more generally) you have the capability of having your private key in a hardware wallet under your control and retain the capability to transact independently of other institutions.
If you keep some percentage of your wealth here you retain certain advantages that you can't get elsewhere. The closest alternative would be having cash (in cash form), but it's hard to have that much, hard to travel with it (you can memorize your wallet seed words and recreate your wallet on the other side of a border), and cash is vulnerable to government stupidity (see: Russia).
I'm not sympathetic to the Canadian truck protests, but whether or not you care about what they're protesting - it's the capability wielded by the Canadian government over their private finances that's alarming.
All this is to say the focus on middleman and paying with crypto in the general case is kind of missing the forest for the trees.
The capability of a global self-custody capable store of value that can be trivially moved anywhere is a big deal and puts power back in the hands of individuals.
... How is nabbing a gold ingot and different than nabbing a storage device? If anything, the threat surface of a digital wallet is much greater (you could steal it remotely if the user doesn't have good cybersecurity practices, unlike a gold ingot).
Maybe you can ask people who get their funds randomly blocked and restricted by PayPal and seized for months/years while an "investigation" takes place if there's any use-case for crypto.
Maybe you can ask ordinary Russian citizens what their legal protections are worth once they've been un-personed by the world.
Or perhaps you can ask Canadian mandate protesters what their legal protections in their currency are worth at their bank middlemen.
Or the people who will inevitably be fleeced when the main settlement token is an outright fraud which implodes?
Their own government will "un-person" them for converting Rubles into crypto too.
2 weeks ago I left all but one discord, unfollowed all Web3 specific accounts on Twitter and stopped looking at Binance etc.
My life has improved considerably. I’m sure someone is getting rich in there but I can’t work out who or how amongst the hype, pumps, grifters, scams and outright criminals.
I’m ok missing the boat if it turns out to be any more than a raft. My sanity and concentration is worth far more than whatever rubbish they are all peddling.
I know some friends who made good money from NFTs and some crypto pumps but most have either stayed flat or lost money.
So, I'm in the same place as you, I'll put my money on less "cool" investments and continue to watch the space.
I think you figured out exactly who is profiting from it.
So much of crypto is about being early to the bull run, finding the few coins that are going to outpace everything else, and just putting a few thousand into each.
Once the first big pump happens there are maybe a few other 5-10x opportunities, but certainly 2 years in everything is dried up. Exit pumps have already started and most major CT personalities are selling, regardless of what they’re saying publicly.
The good news is that you’ll have another opportunity in another 2-3 years.
Because if it can, then crypto market cap is 5-10x undervalued.
> Prohibited Businesses
> You must not use Stripe’s services for the following activities:
> * Pyramid schemes
> * ‘Get rich quick’ schemes
> * No value added services
> * Predatory investment opportunities
Should Stripe ban businesses that deal in Dollars, Euros, Pounds, etc?
is it one of those things?
I hear talent exodus to “anything crypto, web3“ is getting real
Money? They are a business
with poor ethics
Some businesses in the UK have banks that say they will close their accounts if they accept cryptocurrency payments. Mine does! I would without hesitation lose my business bank account if I did, because I am a trifling small customer.
Stripe was safe and reputable, but now it is a place where you can accept cryptocurrencies.
Edit: see note below.
I'm not currently clearing payments via Stripe for my own business, but the way I understand it, it's now likely to mean increased scrutiny from my bank about those payments when I do.
I'm not sure if it has rolled out in the UK yet. But if it has, will my bank be clearly informed when a payout was *not* the result of a cryptocurrency transaction? I've not read that far yet.
Either way it's reputational damage hassle people do not need.
And before you ask: I am of course comfortable with that bank policy. Because cryptocurrency is consistently crime-adjacent and fraud-adjacent. And it's not like banks are that well-equipped at dealing with old-fashioned frauds that have been around a century, let alone new frauds that have been around mere days.
--
Edit to add: apparently this document is not meant to communicate that cryptocurrency payments can be accepted. Which is not what the screenshots in the page do, IMO.
Though the fact that Stripe will allow NFT exchanges is more than enough to create reputational risk.
I still expect to have more difficulty when I add Stripe payments.
So are banks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering#Notable_cases
Crypto right now, while being used by under 1% of population use, uses 40% of the energy of the global banking system[1].
In other words, if it were to increase to even 10% of the population using it, it would use over 4x the energy of the global banking system. If that increased to 50%, it would be 20x.
This would be somewhat mitigated in the case of Proof of Stake, but would simultaneously give major players in the market complete control of said market. Y'know, like a government.
1. Research report from Galaxy Digital, a decidedly pro-crypto source, page 8: https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2
Are you serious? Are you joking?
Crypto means internet money. Cryptography is how it's built.
I've learned to just accept the new meaning and imo it's better that way (otherwise you'll end up being the person correcting everyone who writes linux to write gnu/linux for the rest of your life).
Crypto implies cryptocurrency now (especially in public facing writing), cryptography is the less common usage.
Looking back at the initial whitepaper, Satoshi actually uses the word just once: “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” [1] The remainder of the paper uses terms like ‘hash’ and ‘digital signature’.
* "Crypto" means "cryptography"
* "Cryptocurrency" is a subset of "cryptography"
* Using "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" is valid as a synecdoche
So basically I use it both ways. That also makes more sense to me because "currency" feels like an overly narrow description of the current crypto ecosystem.
but tbh, some of the most exciting cryptographic problems are being worked on in the cryptocurrency industry (zk tech, for example).
The leadership at stripe should be utterly ashamed.
Of course, that just means replacing those CEXs with Stripe as the fully centralized service on the backend, and you can bet they'll be taking their cut! But anything that moves more money into crypto is good for the Web3 ecosystem. Which would, of course, only be a good thing if you considered growth of the Web3 ecosystem a good thing :)
