That is why I am saying you are being Pedantic.
Iâm sure if I ask Visa theyâll say thereâs no consumer advantage to using stable coins. I canât think of a single one. Can you?
Yes you can. But Amazon doesnât accept stable coins and the transaction does not occur on the blockchain. Bitpay works by generating an invoice. Bitpay sells your crypto and sends an equivalent dollar amount to the merchantâs bank using ACH.
Bitpay has a pre-paid card works a little differently and uses the Mastercard network.
So I think it is a bit of a stretch to suggest piggybacking on ACH and Master card is disruptive. Those are the old guard establishment settlement networks.
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But itâs not pedantic. Thatâs the question. Not whether you can store your wealth in stablecoins (you can), but whether you can use stablecoins to make payments to major retailers (you canât). So in order to use your stablecoins to make payments, you have to use a payments system like MC/Visa.
Stablecoins canât replace MC/Visa with retailers unless the retailers accept stablecoins as payment.
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They will literally link a Visa card directly to your altcoin account that allows you to use it with any of Visaâs merchants.
Why does that matter to me or anyone else. If I can use it to pay for anything. Visa is actually using the altcoin networks for cross border transfer of money.
Yes it is pedantic. If people are doing it, and they are, then why does it matter how it is being done. The product is being delivered whether you use a Visa, A gift card, or cash. No, a gift card does not have to use MC or Visa. It can but it doesnât have to. The whole thing is that you can take stablecoins and use them to buy products. This is just starting out and can only get better.
Yes, they do. And Visa says straight up the way it works is Visa converts your alt-coins into the merchants preferred currency, then sends the money to the merchant using the Visa network, of course collecting fees (they donât say that part very loud).
Visa selling your crypto for you certainly eliminates the annoying parts of crypto, like self-custody, decentralization, and blockchain. But the payments are settled on the Visa network.
Remember your post:
Stablecoins are almost exclusively used to buy crypto. If you want to use stable coins for normal shopping, they have to be converted to dollars first. Bitpay and Visa (and others) are happy to do that for you.
Then the payments are settled using traditional networksâincluding Visa and Mastercard.
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Because the discussion is about how it is being done.
I think youâre coming into the middle of the conversation, and not engaging with what people were talking about before you got here. The immediate discussion was whether stablecoins might replace Visa and MasterCard as a faster or cheaper way of settling payments with major merchants. Thatâs entirely a conversation about how payments are made.
Bitpay is just a credit card/debit card company that pays in dollars - just like every other credit/debit card company. Their gimmick is that theyâve bolted a crypto buy/sell feature on the front end. You have a wallet with them that has your crypto, and they will handle selling the crypto for you to convert it into dollars to pay your credit card balance.
Youâre not actually paying with crypto. Youâre paying with dollars - but BitPay will convert your crypto to dollars for you.
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Not all networks, sometimes Visa also uses the networks of alt coins to move money across borders because it costs less. That is what I was talking about when I said they were disrupting Visa and Mastercard. The thing is Visa is trying to fight back. But when you use a new network to move cash across borders you are funding the competition. So people can move crypto without even using Visa and Mastercard.
That is like saying you are not paying with dollars- but Bitpay will convert your dollars to crypto for you. Of course you are paying with crypto, if you werenât you wouldnât be holding it and using it. Also I think you are getting caught up in what money is being used in the final process. If I have US dollars and exchange them for Euros you would say I didnât pay in dollars, yet the money was spent from my account.
Do you have a source? Because on Visaâs website they say explicitly they donât do that.
Visaâs involvement in any of these potential use cases is solely to send fiat currency funds using an OCT or AFT
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That would be true of the supply-side ideology were in play. Instead what passes for supply-side ideology is gibberish.
Bitcoin will be hacked in the next five years by quantum computers.
Until you tell me why the USA should embrace something worthless you have no case. Never mind the Democrats endorsing a loser.
Andy this sort of discussion is all good for some months to come. Then you need to worry about days. Finally or suddenly bad luck will strike and all of the blockchains will be completely worthless because of hacking.
I buy Amazon gift cards periodically. BUT, I only buy them if the seller is offering a discount greater than 5%. Why? Because otherwise I may as well just use my Amazon Visa card that gives me a 5% discount on everything (including Amazon gift cards). Whereâs the âfaster and cheaperâ in this case? Itâs neither faster nor cheaper. I can imagine standing at the Home Depot checkout, my total is $73.48 and futzing around with buying a bitpay HD GC, then waiting for it to arrive in email, then figuring out how to get it into a wallet, and then figuring out that the Home Depot sales terminal doesnât handle the wallet, and instead you need to generate the barcode and pin for that gift card. Can you tell that Iâve used Home Depot gift cards in the past? Iâve probably gone through many thousands of HD gift cards over the years. And again, I only buy them when offered a discount, otherwise I may as well use a credit card that gives me a 2% or 3% discount.
Pedantic? LOL. This literally USES Visa/Mastercard and their network to accomplish the transaction! Wasnât your initial argument that crypto is close to supplanting Visa/Mastercard and their network?
Absolutely true and good analogy. Gold rocks/coins are similar to bitcoins when it comes to daily retail purchases! Essentially useless.
An extremely long, mildly heated discussion concerning obscurities that I found myself skipping over.
Like religious arguments.
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Gold will be here 1000 years from now, and 20,000 years from now. Bitcoin will be worthless 5 years or less from now.
YOU pay the conversion fees (stablecoin to accepted currency) AND the merchant fee charged by V/MC. Other than a few locations, no significant retailer accepts any of the coins. El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021. Not seeing any other countries that did the same, nor any businesses NOT in the various digital coin businesses.
I see an expiration date. The tribe is skipping over that.
I want to see Andyâs face the next day after the implosion.
I have seen your predictions to many times. Not once have I seen one of them come true.
I want to see Leapâs face when another of his predictions fail. Wasnât the market supposed to have exploded by now?