Here's something I've never seen addressed by bitcoin apologists. Tell me why I should "adopt" BTC if I'm not:
(a) speculating
(b) interesting in buying drugs or circumventing regulations around international money transfers.
I see no utility in paying for software or coffee in BTC. Getting hold of bitcoin is not a straightforward process, and even once you acquire them, your coins are fluctuating in value all the time. What am I gaining in return for all this trouble? It simply doesn't make any sense to me.
You're doing well with your credit card because your bank allows you to do so.
Just a few days ago my debit card was blocked because I was traveling internationally and the bank suspected that it was stolen. That's great, they're trying to protect me. But then, the only way to get it unblocked was to visit the bank in person.. but I was 10,000 miles away! I tried to reason with them over the phone but they wouldn't listen. So here I was, far away from home, without access to my money because my bank was trying to protect me but had a retarded system in place for that. Eventually, I spent a few hours on the phone, got someone to pull some local stunts in my city (went to speak to the manager in person, etc.) and then got my card unblocked. You see the problem ? I don't own my money. I can't pay for my coffee with my debit card unless my bank lets me. I couldn't pay for anything, I had to apologize to my hotel and ask them to wait until this got sorted out.
I run a website that is sustained by online advertising. I usually have two options to get paid by advertisers. Paypal or Bank Wire. Paypal charges huge fees, so I opt for wire. Bank Wires take 5 days to clear (2 if I'm lucky..) and due to multiple different advertisers I end up paying over $200 in wire fees each month. I think of that as the 'cost of doing business' but really, it shouldn't be.
I used to live in Dubai two years ago and send money back home. Every time I transferred money, I would get hit with huge fees. This is a reality for immigrant workers all over the world. Western Union caters to this audience right now.
Yes, banks are good at what they do - to a certain extent. We all know them and use them. But that doesn't mean that I want to be at their mercy all the time. Things are always fine, until they are not. That's what happens to me with banks all the time.
Volatility isn't a feature of bitcoin, it's a market reality - for now. You don't have to pay for your coffee using bitcoin right now, you are right, bitcoin isn't ready for that yet.
But when it is, you'll be able to pay for your coffee, and no single 3rd party in the world (bank, western union, visa, mastercard, federal reserve, etc.) will have a say in it. Not a single entity in the world will stand between you and that delicious brew.
If this is all there is to it, I'm not sure I see the utility. I travel internationally somewhat often, not only has my credit card never been blocked, I also usually carry some amount of cash in the local currency so I wouldn't be screwed even if it were.
Transferring money internationally is a bit of pain, you're right about this. But it's also a regulatory minefield. I simply don't want to risk - (a) the IRS coming after me and (b) all the problems associated with bitcoin purchase and sale - just because I'm trying to save a few bucks in transfer charges.
This is the most interesting part of your comment.
I usually have two options to get paid by advertisers. Paypal or Bank Wire. Paypal charges huge fees, so I opt for wire.
Now, paypal are enormously profitable and they don't give a shit about small businesses which is probably why you end up getting screwed. Maybe bitcoin can help you there, but it's probably better if you could get dollars instead of bitcoin through a bitcoin like protocol. I think it's important to distinguish between the bitcoin protocol and the currency itself. I think the former has some good ideas which will almost surely make in to many many other protocols and applications. The latter, I suspect, is best avoided by "normal" people.
Not a single entity in the world will stand between you and that delicious brew.
Except the exchange rate. Your 1/300th of a coin might buy you coffee if it is a good day, but the next day it might cost 1/100th of a coin.
I just bought in because I'm hoping that what I can buy with 1/100th of a coin will only cost 1/300th by Christmas.
Bitcoin is having a bad day and I hope to capitalize on it. Having bought at $650 I will be sad if it turns out that the new price is $500, and happy if BAML was right and we are off to $1300.
But All of your arguments fall down in that you are either using an exchange to get from currency to BTC. Or you are keeping coins in a wallet and they could swing 50% in value in a day.
No, my arguments do not fall down. You are making the terribly flawed assumption that bitcoin will always be this volatile. Bitcoin is less volatile than it used to be, and with greater adoption will continue to decrease in volatility.
The volatility in bitcoin today is nothing compared to 2011. Is it still bad ? Yes. Will it continue being bad ? Probably not. The long term trend supports the assumption that volatility will decrease with greater adoption.
Furthermore volatility has little effect on the 'money transmission' element of bitcoin as long as transfers and conversions take place immediately. It's still a viable way to legally move USD from the USA to Singapore with very low fees.
Another example, I'd like to add is that I had a large part of my savings in Indian Rupees. They depreciated by 30% over the past 2 years. That's definitely pretty bad but it didn't prevent me from buying coffee. Euros have also swung around by 15-20% over the past 2-3 years. The Brazilian Real lost 25% of it's value last year. Does that make them as bad as bitcoin ?
Your motivation for getting into bitcoin is your personal choice and I certainly hope that you profit from it. However, don't forget that bitcoin is an emerging technology going through fairly rapid adoption, as such, volatility, crashing exchanges, bubbles, bubble pops, etc. will be a part of it. And of course, I have to convert money from USD to BTC. Or from Marks to Euros. Or from escudos to Euros. That's just how it works.
Euros have also swung around by 15-20% over the past 2-3 years.
In relation to the dollar. Which is totally irrelevant for day to day transactions inside the Euro zone. I still pay the same price for a coffee I did 2-3 years ago.
But at the moment Bitcoin volatility is still huge: It's currently not reasonable to offer coffee for a fixed number of Bitcoins, that, say, stay stable over a year.
Your analogy between debit cards and Bitcoins seems a bit flawed too: For the purposes of international transfers it might be apt, but for small day to day business like buying coffee, it may be better to compare it to cash. And then there's no bank stopping you from transacting in cash.
You pay the same price for coffee but you will certainly pay more for coffee beans, the market will only absorb the difference for a while.
I wasn't drawing an analogy between bitcoins and debit cards. I was taking about how a bank lets me access my money vs me having direct access to it. I cannot get cash in a foreign country without my bank cooperating unless I carry a world recognized currency (USD, Euro) in cash and try to exchange it somewhere.
The problem is that you read a comparison as an analogy. It's a comparison of our current dependency on the banking system vs bitcoins relative independence from the same.
It's about 5 business days for coinbase to enable your account, not to mention the risk of giving a vendor access to your bank out. And I think each buy/sell transaction also takes a few days to apply?
transactions are nearly instant; confirmations take a few minutes
This is true for my credit card too.
payments are irrevocable - no chargeback issues
As a customer, I prefer the ability to make a chargeback.
you can pay anyone anywhere at anytime - no bank holidays, no paying Western Union fees to send money oversees and have it still take days
I specifically excluded international transfers in my question. Anyway, these are heavily regulated and risk and volatility of bitcoin simply aren't worthwhile in comparison to the few dollars I would save.
pseudo anonymous - you don't have to provide personal information to a financial organization to make payments
Could possibly be an advantage but isn't really true because coinbase would know all about me and all my transactions could be traced back to them by just traversing the block chain.
many vendors give a discounts for users willing to pay in bitcoin vs. dollars
I would think about using bitcoin for this reason if I could convert USD -> BTC and quickly buy whatever I needed using BTC. But again this is something that takes days and who knows what the USD->BTC rate would be when I eventually do get my bitcoin. It's simply not worth it.
You can send a single satoshi* to an address that cannot spend said satoshi with the cryptographic signature of a document as the notation on it. Once the transaction is validated in the blockchain, you can prove mathematically that the document (while keeping secret the contents of the document) was published (created) on a given datetime.
*1 satoshi = 5.8e-6 USD @ current coinbase exchange, Sat Dec 07 2013 02:59:12 GMT-0500
Your (b) sounds suspiciously similar to "if you've got nothing to hide, then why do you want privacy?" Having control over your money is valuable on its own merits for a lot of people.
Actually that is a perfectly good argument except the people who make it are always being dishonest.
When Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft or the NSA say "why do you want privacy?", they specifically mean us and not them. It's not like we can look into Apple's servers and make sure they aren't abusing all the the private data they store about us. It's not like we're allowed to analyze the NSA's hitlist to determine if there's racial profiling going on there. These companies won't let us look at their source code to see if there are backdoors in supposedly secure products. And we're never going to be able determine exactly where a politician's campaign funding is coming from.
I would buy the argument "if you've got nothing to hide, then why do you want privacy?" if people making that argument were willing to apply those standards to themselves. They never want to do that, so I'm forced to conclude it's just a rhetorical device used to trick the naive into giving up their information for free.
currently, sending money over the internet without getting charged fees is non-trivial. with the number of players in the payment space, i don't expect that to be the case for very much longer, and i don't think it will be bitcoin that solves this problem.
Unfortunately the barrier to this has been counterparty risk management. The players in the payment space are limited by their contracts with Visa/Mastercard/etc. and therefore have to manage risk accordingly. This is what increases the fees. (chargebacks almost always honored, etc. etc.)
Paypal offers micropayments and their rates are by far the most competitive. You know what happens ? I get paid $2 per subscription and Paypal pays me $1.83. That's an 8.5% commission! It's the best rate in the industry! (right now..)
It's just that the more middle men you add, the more fees you're going to need. The current financial system is a truckload of middlemen and yes, they do have their utility and run immensely large networks (visa/mastercard/etc.). The only way to lower fees is to cut them out, whether that's going to be bitcoin or someone else is anyone's guess. But bitcoin is definitely a viable prototype.
This is exactly what Ripple is attempting to solve, acting as a open, global payment network where transactions are nearly free and you can use any currency (including bitcoin) you want. More at https://ripple.com/about-ripple/.
Ripple is a petty scam. Please don't advertise that horse dung to HN, we are smarter than that. Ripple generated 10 billion coins, they call them XRP. Of course this amount and even XRP aren't mentioned on that page you linked, an obvious bait. Ripple started giving away millions to generate buzz and use, they've yet to even give away 10% though, and the idea is to create enough value that they can eventually dump all their "genesis" currency and reap the rewards. They recently started giving away a few thousand a day with their ComputingForGood campaign, a pittance to create buzz for their scamware.
Mastercoin's done the same thing with no real benefits over Bitcoin itself. Seriously getting tired of these fiat fiascos. I guess creating derivative cryptocurrencies is the new version of the classic pyramid scheme.
Some people call Bitcoin a pyramid scheme because of the speculative bubble, fair enough. But these currencies, Ripple and Mastercoin, are true pyramid schemes. Founders plan to get mega-rich based on the illicit adoption of their scamware.
* there's no mining in Ripple, so Ripple isn't pre-minded and there's no "genesis" currency
* they created 100 billion XRP, not 10 billion as you wrote
* they're committed to give away 55 billion XRP to non-profits, users and business partners for the foreseeable future: https://ripple.com/ripple_primer.pdf
* Apparently you don't actually know what a pyramid scheme is or how one works, otherwise you would know that Ripple isn't one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme.
What Ripple is: a company, an approach and a currency you don't like and you clearly have an agenda to spread misinformation about it for reasons that are not clear.
I have no affiliation with Ripple Labs, other than being impressed with their approach of addressing our archaic, fragmented payment system that works almost exactly the same as it did 20 years ago. I also have received XRP in a couple of giveaways.
Don't get me wrong—I think Bitcoin is an incredible technology that changed the way we think about money, in ways we're just starting to grok.
What Ripple enables—being able to pay anyone anywhere anytime with whatever currency you wish to use for essentially for free--is the killer app right now.
* they're committed to give away 55 billion XRP to non-profits, users and business partners for the foreseeable future: https://ripple.com/ripple_primer.pdf
'Committed' Heh.
I guess Ripple is a religion, because you've got to have ulterior motives or faith in demons..
Enough said. It's a friggin' scam. Enjoy that free XRP that OpenCoin started you off with, like a baby nursing on a milk bag.
I guess Ripple is a religion, because you've got to have ulterior motives or faith in demons..
I don't have any ulterior motive or interest in demons.
Enough said. It's a friggin' scam. Enjoy that free XRP that OpenCoin started you off with, like a baby nursing on a milk bag.
It's kind of cool to get XRP a while ago and have the value of then increase quadruple in value in a short time.
If Ripple Labs is performing fraudulent activities, I would love to hear all about it; what would be even better: if you had some facts to back up your claims.
Fact: XRP is a fiat currency created by Ripple so they can profit off of when it increases in value. They control a majority share of it and can pretty much destroy/affect the value of XRP by market manipulation. It is a scam, through and through. You have stated no counter-facts to their motives and their iron-grip on XRP.
Fact: XRP is a fiat currency created by Ripple so they can profit off of when it increases in value. They control a majority share of it and can pretty much destroy/affect the value of XRP by market manipulation.
I'm sorry, I thought you wanted to discuss facts. XRP is not a fiat currency—only a government can create a fiat currency—you know, fiat currency exists because of government decree.
Yes, Ripple Labs hopes to benefit from the increase in value of XRP over time; they've been quite public about that. Unlike you, I have no problem if these guys get rich for disrupting and fixing our broken and fragmented payment system.
The flip side is that all of us with XRP stand to do pretty well too, which is also okay.
The fact that Ripple Labs holding the majority of XRP now is no different than when a company goes public and holds on to shares. Sergey Brin has over 27 million shares in Google, but nobody believes Google is a scam.
You thinking that Ripple Labs would destroy the value of XRP is conjecture and speculation. Unless you have any proof otherwise—which you don't—there's not really much more to say.
They have started publicly that they are going to give away 55 billion XRP; only a tiny fraction so far have been distributed. Again, unless you have proof otherwise, why should we listen to or believe you? You're just making shit up.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to benefit from using the Ripple payment network and the increasing value of XRP.
A fiat currency is
any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[1]
state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to
any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[2]
money without intrinsic value.[3][4]
Fiat is latin for "it shall be." Ripple XRP was basically conjured up, it has no value, it has no origin except for the Ripple corp. Now keep sucking on that Ripple currency milk bag. Maybe the ponzi scheme will peel out for you and you'll be able to fund that storybook startup of yours.
main ones that come to mind: clinkle, dwolla, venmo. but the particular company doesn't matter so much as the clear market trend: fees are in a race-to-the-bottom mode right now, and within 10 years i fully expect them to be effectively 0, if not actually 0.
Comments
Here's something I've never seen addressed by bitcoin apologists. Tell me why I should "adopt" BTC if I'm not:
(a) speculating (b) interesting in buying drugs or circumventing regulations around international money transfers.
I see no utility in paying for software or coffee in BTC. Getting hold of bitcoin is not a straightforward process, and even once you acquire them, your coins are fluctuating in value all the time. What am I gaining in return for all this trouble? It simply doesn't make any sense to me.
You're doing well with your credit card because your bank allows you to do so.
Just a few days ago my debit card was blocked because I was traveling internationally and the bank suspected that it was stolen. That's great, they're trying to protect me. But then, the only way to get it unblocked was to visit the bank in person.. but I was 10,000 miles away! I tried to reason with them over the phone but they wouldn't listen. So here I was, far away from home, without access to my money because my bank was trying to protect me but had a retarded system in place for that. Eventually, I spent a few hours on the phone, got someone to pull some local stunts in my city (went to speak to the manager in person, etc.) and then got my card unblocked. You see the problem ? I don't own my money. I can't pay for my coffee with my debit card unless my bank lets me. I couldn't pay for anything, I had to apologize to my hotel and ask them to wait until this got sorted out.
I run a website that is sustained by online advertising. I usually have two options to get paid by advertisers. Paypal or Bank Wire. Paypal charges huge fees, so I opt for wire. Bank Wires take 5 days to clear (2 if I'm lucky..) and due to multiple different advertisers I end up paying over $200 in wire fees each month. I think of that as the 'cost of doing business' but really, it shouldn't be.
I used to live in Dubai two years ago and send money back home. Every time I transferred money, I would get hit with huge fees. This is a reality for immigrant workers all over the world. Western Union caters to this audience right now.
Yes, banks are good at what they do - to a certain extent. We all know them and use them. But that doesn't mean that I want to be at their mercy all the time. Things are always fine, until they are not. That's what happens to me with banks all the time.
Volatility isn't a feature of bitcoin, it's a market reality - for now. You don't have to pay for your coffee using bitcoin right now, you are right, bitcoin isn't ready for that yet.
But when it is, you'll be able to pay for your coffee, and no single 3rd party in the world (bank, western union, visa, mastercard, federal reserve, etc.) will have a say in it. Not a single entity in the world will stand between you and that delicious brew.
If this is all there is to it, I'm not sure I see the utility. I travel internationally somewhat often, not only has my credit card never been blocked, I also usually carry some amount of cash in the local currency so I wouldn't be screwed even if it were.
Transferring money internationally is a bit of pain, you're right about this. But it's also a regulatory minefield. I simply don't want to risk - (a) the IRS coming after me and (b) all the problems associated with bitcoin purchase and sale - just because I'm trying to save a few bucks in transfer charges.
This is the most interesting part of your comment.
Now, paypal are enormously profitable and they don't give a shit about small businesses which is probably why you end up getting screwed. Maybe bitcoin can help you there, but it's probably better if you could get dollars instead of bitcoin through a bitcoin like protocol. I think it's important to distinguish between the bitcoin protocol and the currency itself. I think the former has some good ideas which will almost surely make in to many many other protocols and applications. The latter, I suspect, is best avoided by "normal" people.
Except the exchange rate. Your 1/300th of a coin might buy you coffee if it is a good day, but the next day it might cost 1/100th of a coin.
I just bought in because I'm hoping that what I can buy with 1/100th of a coin will only cost 1/300th by Christmas.
Bitcoin is having a bad day and I hope to capitalize on it. Having bought at $650 I will be sad if it turns out that the new price is $500, and happy if BAML was right and we are off to $1300.
But All of your arguments fall down in that you are either using an exchange to get from currency to BTC. Or you are keeping coins in a wallet and they could swing 50% in value in a day.
No, my arguments do not fall down. You are making the terribly flawed assumption that bitcoin will always be this volatile. Bitcoin is less volatile than it used to be, and with greater adoption will continue to decrease in volatility.
The volatility in bitcoin today is nothing compared to 2011. Is it still bad ? Yes. Will it continue being bad ? Probably not. The long term trend supports the assumption that volatility will decrease with greater adoption.
Furthermore volatility has little effect on the 'money transmission' element of bitcoin as long as transfers and conversions take place immediately. It's still a viable way to legally move USD from the USA to Singapore with very low fees.
Another example, I'd like to add is that I had a large part of my savings in Indian Rupees. They depreciated by 30% over the past 2 years. That's definitely pretty bad but it didn't prevent me from buying coffee. Euros have also swung around by 15-20% over the past 2-3 years. The Brazilian Real lost 25% of it's value last year. Does that make them as bad as bitcoin ?
Your motivation for getting into bitcoin is your personal choice and I certainly hope that you profit from it. However, don't forget that bitcoin is an emerging technology going through fairly rapid adoption, as such, volatility, crashing exchanges, bubbles, bubble pops, etc. will be a part of it. And of course, I have to convert money from USD to BTC. Or from Marks to Euros. Or from escudos to Euros. That's just how it works.
In relation to the dollar. Which is totally irrelevant for day to day transactions inside the Euro zone. I still pay the same price for a coffee I did 2-3 years ago.
But at the moment Bitcoin volatility is still huge: It's currently not reasonable to offer coffee for a fixed number of Bitcoins, that, say, stay stable over a year.
Your analogy between debit cards and Bitcoins seems a bit flawed too: For the purposes of international transfers it might be apt, but for small day to day business like buying coffee, it may be better to compare it to cash. And then there's no bank stopping you from transacting in cash.
You pay the same price for coffee but you will certainly pay more for coffee beans, the market will only absorb the difference for a while.
I wasn't drawing an analogy between bitcoins and debit cards. I was taking about how a bank lets me access my money vs me having direct access to it. I cannot get cash in a foreign country without my bank cooperating unless I carry a world recognized currency (USD, Euro) in cash and try to exchange it somewhere.
The problem is that you read a comparison as an analogy. It's a comparison of our current dependency on the banking system vs bitcoins relative independence from the same.
Actually, it's pretty straightforward these days: http://howtobuybitcoins.info.
By now, everyone should know the advantages of bitcoin:
* low or no fees
* transactions are nearly instant; confirmations take a few minutes
* payments are irrevocable - no chargeback issues
* you can pay anyone anywhere at anytime - no bank holidays, no paying Western Union fees to send money oversees and have it still take days
* pseudo anonymous - you don't have to provide personal information to a financial organization to make payments
* many vendors give a discounts for users willing to pay in bitcoin vs. dollars
It's about 5 business days for coinbase to enable your account, not to mention the risk of giving a vendor access to your bank out. And I think each buy/sell transaction also takes a few days to apply?
This is true for my credit card too.
As a customer, I prefer the ability to make a chargeback.
I specifically excluded international transfers in my question. Anyway, these are heavily regulated and risk and volatility of bitcoin simply aren't worthwhile in comparison to the few dollars I would save.
Could possibly be an advantage but isn't really true because coinbase would know all about me and all my transactions could be traced back to them by just traversing the block chain.
I would think about using bitcoin for this reason if I could convert USD -> BTC and quickly buy whatever I needed using BTC. But again this is something that takes days and who knows what the USD->BTC rate would be when I eventually do get my bitcoin. It's simply not worth it.
You can send a single satoshi* to an address that cannot spend said satoshi with the cryptographic signature of a document as the notation on it. Once the transaction is validated in the blockchain, you can prove mathematically that the document (while keeping secret the contents of the document) was published (created) on a given datetime.
*1 satoshi = 5.8e-6 USD @ current coinbase exchange, Sat Dec 07 2013 02:59:12 GMT-0500
Your (b) sounds suspiciously similar to "if you've got nothing to hide, then why do you want privacy?" Having control over your money is valuable on its own merits for a lot of people.
Actually that is a perfectly good argument except the people who make it are always being dishonest.
When Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft or the NSA say "why do you want privacy?", they specifically mean us and not them. It's not like we can look into Apple's servers and make sure they aren't abusing all the the private data they store about us. It's not like we're allowed to analyze the NSA's hitlist to determine if there's racial profiling going on there. These companies won't let us look at their source code to see if there are backdoors in supposedly secure products. And we're never going to be able determine exactly where a politician's campaign funding is coming from.
I would buy the argument "if you've got nothing to hide, then why do you want privacy?" if people making that argument were willing to apply those standards to themselves. They never want to do that, so I'm forced to conclude it's just a rhetorical device used to trick the naive into giving up their information for free.
I put some money into Bitcoin recently. I'm speculating.
There's some value in press/notoriety, if you think you'd be reaching eyes and ears for those who care about that sort of thing.
currently, sending money over the internet without getting charged fees is non-trivial. with the number of players in the payment space, i don't expect that to be the case for very much longer, and i don't think it will be bitcoin that solves this problem.
Unfortunately the barrier to this has been counterparty risk management. The players in the payment space are limited by their contracts with Visa/Mastercard/etc. and therefore have to manage risk accordingly. This is what increases the fees. (chargebacks almost always honored, etc. etc.)
Paypal offers micropayments and their rates are by far the most competitive. You know what happens ? I get paid $2 per subscription and Paypal pays me $1.83. That's an 8.5% commission! It's the best rate in the industry! (right now..)
It's just that the more middle men you add, the more fees you're going to need. The current financial system is a truckload of middlemen and yes, they do have their utility and run immensely large networks (visa/mastercard/etc.). The only way to lower fees is to cut them out, whether that's going to be bitcoin or someone else is anyone's guess. But bitcoin is definitely a viable prototype.
Curious--how/who will solve this problem?
This is exactly what Ripple is attempting to solve, acting as a open, global payment network where transactions are nearly free and you can use any currency (including bitcoin) you want. More at https://ripple.com/about-ripple/.
Ripple is a petty scam. Please don't advertise that horse dung to HN, we are smarter than that. Ripple generated 10 billion coins, they call them XRP. Of course this amount and even XRP aren't mentioned on that page you linked, an obvious bait. Ripple started giving away millions to generate buzz and use, they've yet to even give away 10% though, and the idea is to create enough value that they can eventually dump all their "genesis" currency and reap the rewards. They recently started giving away a few thousand a day with their ComputingForGood campaign, a pittance to create buzz for their scamware. Mastercoin's done the same thing with no real benefits over Bitcoin itself. Seriously getting tired of these fiat fiascos. I guess creating derivative cryptocurrencies is the new version of the classic pyramid scheme. Some people call Bitcoin a pyramid scheme because of the speculative bubble, fair enough. But these currencies, Ripple and Mastercoin, are true pyramid schemes. Founders plan to get mega-rich based on the illicit adoption of their scamware.
I already wrote my fact checking piece today on Ripple today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867324.
But let me quickly say:
* there's no mining in Ripple, so Ripple isn't pre-minded and there's no "genesis" currency
* they created 100 billion XRP, not 10 billion as you wrote
* they're committed to give away 55 billion XRP to non-profits, users and business partners for the foreseeable future: https://ripple.com/ripple_primer.pdf
* XRP certainly isn't derivative of Bitcoin, but the original Ripple system that this is partially based on started in 2004: http://archive.ripple-project.org/Main/HomePage
* Apparently you don't actually know what a pyramid scheme is or how one works, otherwise you would know that Ripple isn't one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme.
* It's also not a Ponzi Scheme, incase you wanted to go there next: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
What Ripple is: a company, an approach and a currency you don't like and you clearly have an agenda to spread misinformation about it for reasons that are not clear.
I have no affiliation with Ripple Labs, other than being impressed with their approach of addressing our archaic, fragmented payment system that works almost exactly the same as it did 20 years ago. I also have received XRP in a couple of giveaways.
Don't get me wrong—I think Bitcoin is an incredible technology that changed the way we think about money, in ways we're just starting to grok.
What Ripple enables—being able to pay anyone anywhere anytime with whatever currency you wish to use for essentially for free--is the killer app right now.
This is what I mean by essentially free: I paid 0.000025 XRP to exchange USD for XRP: https://ripple.com/graph/#2EF43881B82AE8FBA31A2C3272E61CBC2E...). That's $0.00075 USD.
:: drops the mic ::
* they're committed to give away 55 billion XRP to non-profits, users and business partners for the foreseeable future: https://ripple.com/ripple_primer.pdf
'Committed' Heh.
I guess Ripple is a religion, because you've got to have ulterior motives or faith in demons..
Enough said. It's a friggin' scam. Enjoy that free XRP that OpenCoin started you off with, like a baby nursing on a milk bag.
I guess Ripple is a religion, because you've got to have ulterior motives or faith in demons..
I don't have any ulterior motive or interest in demons.
Enough said. It's a friggin' scam. Enjoy that free XRP that OpenCoin started you off with, like a baby nursing on a milk bag.
It's kind of cool to get XRP a while ago and have the value of then increase quadruple in value in a short time.
If Ripple Labs is performing fraudulent activities, I would love to hear all about it; what would be even better: if you had some facts to back up your claims.
Fact: XRP is a fiat currency created by Ripple so they can profit off of when it increases in value. They control a majority share of it and can pretty much destroy/affect the value of XRP by market manipulation. It is a scam, through and through. You have stated no counter-facts to their motives and their iron-grip on XRP.
Fact: XRP is a fiat currency created by Ripple so they can profit off of when it increases in value. They control a majority share of it and can pretty much destroy/affect the value of XRP by market manipulation.
I'm sorry, I thought you wanted to discuss facts. XRP is not a fiat currency—only a government can create a fiat currency—you know, fiat currency exists because of government decree.
Yes, Ripple Labs hopes to benefit from the increase in value of XRP over time; they've been quite public about that. Unlike you, I have no problem if these guys get rich for disrupting and fixing our broken and fragmented payment system.
The flip side is that all of us with XRP stand to do pretty well too, which is also okay.
The fact that Ripple Labs holding the majority of XRP now is no different than when a company goes public and holds on to shares. Sergey Brin has over 27 million shares in Google, but nobody believes Google is a scam.
You thinking that Ripple Labs would destroy the value of XRP is conjecture and speculation. Unless you have any proof otherwise—which you don't—there's not really much more to say.
They have started publicly that they are going to give away 55 billion XRP; only a tiny fraction so far have been distributed. Again, unless you have proof otherwise, why should we listen to or believe you? You're just making shit up.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to benefit from using the Ripple payment network and the increasing value of XRP.
A fiat currency is any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[1] state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[2] money without intrinsic value.[3][4]
Fiat is latin for "it shall be." Ripple XRP was basically conjured up, it has no value, it has no origin except for the Ripple corp. Now keep sucking on that Ripple currency milk bag. Maybe the ponzi scheme will peel out for you and you'll be able to fund that storybook startup of yours.
I responded to your earlier rant that was full of speculation, conjecture and straight up lies here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867514
Oddly enough, there was no response…
main ones that come to mind: clinkle, dwolla, venmo. but the particular company doesn't matter so much as the clear market trend: fees are in a race-to-the-bottom mode right now, and within 10 years i fully expect them to be effectively 0, if not actually 0.