I agree with what another commenter said about getting some money and trying it out for yourself.
I'd add on though to try out some DeFi protocols as well. Using things like DEXs, lending protocols, and yield farms. Experience is the best way to learn for sure.
From the Tweet, "Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors."
> Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.
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The tech is there but mainstream adoption and understanding is still coming along. It's incredibly easy and cheap to send USDC or DAI to OnlyFans if they accept tokens on a sidechain (like Polygon or Fantom).
You don't have to sign up for an account or provide any personal info, just use your wallet to send certain tokens to an address, then you can use that wallet as a sign-in.
OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
It's a more seamless user experience and solves the payment processing issue.
In my opinion it's a matter of educating the masses to a very different method of paying for services and using services (both on the business and consumer side).
> It's incredibly easy and cheap to send USDC or DAI to OnlyFans if they accept tokens on a sidechain (like Polygon or Fantom).
I'm a pretty techy guy but in this one sentence alone you said 5 things that I have no idea about nor even heard of ("USDC", "DAI", "sidechain", "Polygon", "Fantom").
The chance of the general population catching onto this stuff anytime soon is slim.
I’m a smart contract and altcoin developer. Yes it’s confusing now but there is a path forward.
USDC and Dai are both US-dollar stable coins.
They’re always worth 1 dollar each, they’re among the most trustworthy USD stablecoins, and they are perfect for storefronts. The problem is that Ethereum transaction (tx) fees are now around $15-$25 because the network is so popular. Everyone wants to use the highway but the highway is only so big. Ethereum 2.0 is supposed to increase the size of that highway by some order of magnitude to make each transaction cost cents to send but we won’t know until it happens in few years. But we need a solution now! — and not in a few years!
That’s where other less popular but still good enough networks [side chains] like Polygon, Stellar, Binance Smart Chain, Tron, and a few others come into play.
Side chain is a term for a non-Ethereum or non-Bitcoin blockchain. Think of it like getting off a tollroad and getting onto a less trafficked, cheaper, and possibly faster side road, with the risk of coming across some new undocumented potholes.
USDC (and probably Dai too) for example, can already run on the Binance(bsc20), Ethereum(ERC20), Polygon, Tron, Stellar, and a few other networks. This can be super confusing and shocking for users because if you send your BSC20 USDC to an ERC20 USDC address you usually lose it. It’s a good thing that many of these networks have different address formats and that helps considerably to have software preventing that goof but some networks like BSC20 and ERC20 share the same address format because ERC20 is a copy of BSC20. Very user unfriendly. Alright I know I might be loosing you here but the solution is next.
Now, here’s what I think a solution to this all is: Rename one existing Stablecoin on one of those networks and let’s call it something idealistic like Freecoin. For example, DAI on the Polygon network or something else. To make it simple, it’s only one coin on one cheap network that is anything but the Ethereum network and then boom, you’ve dropped your terminology down to just “Freecoin” and “where is an easy on-ramp to buy it?” It’s important that there is only 1 kind of Freecoin. Buy them on this Shopify website, these exchanges, or this DeFi exchange. Obviously you can allow people to pay with other cryptocurrencies but you can either give a 1%-2% discount for using a certain cryptocurrency or make the UI button for your cryptocurrency larger than the buttons for the other cryptocurrencies. Both are effective nudges.
If you have a product worth buying, people will beat a path to your doorstep.
Yea, it's a lot of foreign concepts. Bit of a learning curve to it. Whether or not the incentives are great enough so that the public goes past the learning curve is going to be interesting to see.
USDT is printed out of thin air (which is why I didn't mention it). USDC is a bit better and more transparent. DAI is decentralized and backed by collateral.
There's been a lot of talks of regulating stablecoins to ensure backing, which I don't think is a terrible idea.
Telling him to google, then providing exactly one link to the company that created USDC isn't really much of a refute. Maybe a link to an independent audit (as far as I can tell there are none).
Much like tether, there is no proof that they have anywhere near the currency they claim and folks that operate in that market are the ones shouting the loudest about the apparent fraud occurring. I've yet to see tether or usdc provide proof otherwise, it always seems to be a "we wouldn't be this big if we didn't have what we say we have" - bernie madoff style. And to get in front of it, an attestation != audit.
> It's incredibly easy and cheap to send USDC or DAI to OnlyFans if they accept tokens on a sidechain (like Polygon or Fantom).
And then you quickly realize how useless USDC/DAI is when you want to pay your rent, for milk, etc.
> OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale...you can't convert large scale amounts of crypto to fiat without someone noticing. Silkroad "worked" because there was no central authority taking money, just lots of a smaller drug dealers. Pablo Escobar wouldn't have been able to run his whole operation on crypto without getting seen.
>> OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
> They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale.
Isn't KYC only a problem for people trying to hide their income? Onlyfans (and other legit businesses) would not have this problem as they would not be trying to hide their earnings.
KYC/AML isn't just for hiding income, it's about understanding the threshold for which someone wants to do business with an individual or company. For the same reason CC companies don't want to take on potentially illegal activity, no crypto exchange is going to take on the risk of business conducting $B's of dollars worth of crypto as its means to doing business.
This is essentially how Coinbase is allowed to operate - it doesn't have whales on its platform, just millions of KYC'd minnows who are individually low risk.
It is more chargeback and fradulent transactions processors are concerned with it. Those cost immediate money to them . Blockchain and altcoins solve that (for payment processing consumer, protection is lesser of course)
Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem, I don't think there is a case where law enforcement went after the payment provider for facilitating transactions for illegal activities, it is website/marketplace responsibility usually
> Blockchain and altcoins solve that (for payment processing consumer, protection is lesser of course)
> Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem
And now this is where AML kicks in. Now you're dealing with banks and not credit card processors as the source of the issue. No US bank is going to work with a company who is converting money from crypto to fiat at the level of billions of dollars.
Ren of billions if not lot more has already moved from USD into crypto coins. Banks have had very little say in it, and also no control how money is being used once USD is converted to crypto.
Exchanges are doing pretty well to convert USD to say BitCount, despite Bitcoin's unsavory reputation for illicit/ illegal transaction like ransomware payments that actually happen on the coin. Even single transactions in the millions barely register these days.
I am not sure porn as an industry earns in billions and even if it did the market is today large enough that it won't be sticking out all that much.
"Eventually you end up with the worst of both: a centralised system wrapping a phony pretense of blockchain. All of the energy waste, and none of the decentralisation"
The author presents themselves as familiar with blockchain applications, but I believe the statement above has two incorrect assumptions.
For one, if a developer aims to reduce energy use, they can deploy on a PoS chain.
Also, not every decentralized application has a "phony pretense of decentralisation". Sure there are some applications like that, but decentralized exchanges for instance, could not work anywhere else other than on a blockchain.
> One part I’m unclear on: if someone outbids him, do only they get the token and pg pays nothing, or do both pay and are the contributions etched into the NFT?
No, only the person who wins the bid gets the token.
I typically defend the tech behind NFTs but this just seems like it's riding the hype of NFTs more than anything.
Good on them for doing that. Their mission is to save as many lives as they can and if riding a hype train lets them do that, then the overall outcome is still very positive. The environmental externality is bad but trivial compared to the benefit of lives saved if this auction goes through.
Yes, only the winning bid would go to Noora. However, there would be a record of any other bidders' intent.
With a bit more of creativity/effort, someone could have created a smart contract for keeping track of all the donations and only releasing them once they reach a certain threshold, then giving a token back representing a "life saved" to donors if they truly wanted, but I get capitalizing on NFTs' hype right now.
Most charities already give you pdf certificates recording how many lives you saved with your donation. What's the point in having an NFT instead of just a pdf?
But then, the seller has to pay taxes - either business taxes if it is a merchant or capital gains taxes in case they sold an asset. And taxes are paid only in Fiat. So you still need Fiat integration somewhere.
> Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well collateralized) clients.
Yes, this is definitely correct in that crypto does nothing to solve the legal requirements of the banks and does not help the banks.
But it's worth mentioning that this sort of fully collateralized and anonymous borrowing does not (and would not) happen through banks, but through platforms like AAVE and Compound. It's a financial tool separate from banks. And these tools cannot be shutdown, as long as ethereum exists, these tools exist.
Banks don't need to issue fully collateralized loans. That is not a thing people need to do in the real world, because banks will gladly issue partially collateralized loans.
As for anonymous loans, those exist solely to service criminal customers, so that is not an advantage of cryptocurrency.
For people holding crypto assets which they don't plan to sell, it's a valid way to borrow other assets for use. Potentially for other investments. Definitely not just for criminals.
And overall, it's a demonstration of a financial product which can only be built in the space of decentralized finance. I do not know of another tool which allows anyone around the world to borrow significant amounts of money anonymously and without an account. Whether it's a net good for the world I don't know, but I do believe it's a powerful technology and space.
People who equate privacy from banks and the state with criminality are the reason the financial system has normalized mass-surveillance and the principle of 'guilty until proven innocent' inherent in AML laws, and the reason why the financial system has become so laden with financial friction, power disparities, and exclusion of marginalized populations.
