Mastercard To Open Up Network To Select Cryptocurrencies (reuters.com) 41
Mastercard announced on Wednesday it was planning to offer support for some cryptocurrencies on its network this year. Reuters reports: Mastercard already offers customers cards that allow people to transact using their cryptocurrencies, although without going through its network. "Doing this work will create a lot more possibilities for shoppers and merchants, allowing them to transact in an entirely new form of payment. This change may open merchants up to new customers who are already flocking to digital assets," Mastercard said. Mastercard specified that not all cryptocurrencies will be supported on its network, adding that many of the hundreds of digital assets in circulation still need to tighten their compliance measures. The announcement comes after Elon Musk revealed it had purchased $1.5 billion of bitcoin and would soon accept it as a form of payment.
And now we wait... (Score:1)
A few months ago I'd agree (Score:2)
1. The nature of it means there's a finite amount of coins.
2. This means the currency is going to deflate at some point.
3. MasterCard, Apple, Musk, etc and all the other big players are all capable of capturing the market at the drop of a hat. Yeah, they can't buy all the coin, but they can buy enough to control it.
4. There's almost zero regulation
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Pretty much. BTC also has a few fundamental limitations. One is an insanely low transaction rate. Currently it can do apparently less than 10 transactions per second globally. (That is "can do at max", not "does".) Even a smaller interbank exchanges does an order of magnitude more and can do much more if needed. Transactions are horribly expensive or you have to wait a long, long time and possibly forever. In addition, anybody can see what you are doing and it stays publicly recorded forever.
For large playe
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Slashdot is the go-to-place for when you feel like laughing at crusty boomer luddite crypto currency critics.
Have fun staying poor.
I am not poor. But a lot of those that fall for this scam will be.
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Haha. I would at least have been fabulously wealthy until the madmax-collapse happened :)
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> I am not poor. But a lot of those that fall for this scam will be.
That's quite the gamble, assuming Bitcoin will fail, forever. Part of the reason some people own Bitcoin is a hedge against it's success.
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No gamble at all. BTC is mostly irrelevant, far too unsuitable as a "currency" and far too small in volume. Not more relevant than any other pyramid-scheme. Ignoring it will cause no issues for anybody.
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If you are long USD you will be poor, if you aren't already. That is a suckers bet if there ever was one.
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I am not.
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Meanwhile in the real world [inflationdata.com]
(Cue the phrases "printing money" and "quantitative easing" (followed by a comically bad understanding of what the latter is) in 3, 2, 1...)
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And the funny thing is, if one is worried about inflation, there are actual, proven, productive hedges against inflation. Land, for example. Land has inherent value without regard to any currency's current exchange rate, so it acts as an inflation hedge. If one invests in, say, a timber company with vast tracts of land, they're not only hedging inflation; they're also getting income from the harvesting of those timber lands. The asset is productive, not merely something that just sits there. Furthermore,
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The liquidity of land is not a factor in the valuation of a land-rich company. Their assets inflate, their value inflates.
Also, I'm getting whiplash from your transition to capital gains taxes. And then it seems to be a direct admission that one of your main goals in putting money into bitcoin is tax evasion?
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If you're realizing gains and not declaring it, that's textbook tax evasion.
If you're not realizing gains, then you wouldn't have been charged capital gains taxes to begin with.
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I live in Europe. The exact same statements apply.
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Indeed. Rather than hundreds of kilowatt hours per transaction, a Visa transaction is 1,5 watt hours, and they do an average of 1700 per second, with capability to do vastly more. Which is, of course, because for them a record is just an update in a database, not a proof-of-work challenge.
It's amazing how so many crypto advocates feel that basic laws of supply and demand don't apply to them - that cryptocurrency X will just "keep going up because it's deflationary and has a fixed supply", regardless of ext
Motives (Score:2)
new customers who are already flocking to digital assets
What new customers are flocking to digital assets already? Is it people who see the advantages of cryptocurrency; people who find it more convenient to pay with such currency; or people who put their money in it because they are banking on a generous appreciation in value? The vast majority probably falls in the latter category.
With that said, that huge lake of virtual cash just sitting there could be very interesting for MC and their clients, the merchants. If people are sitting on a pile of money, y
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And Mastercard will continue to charge vendor fees per transaction.
Which is of course logical. Forget profit for a moment; there's competition in the credit card space after all, and entities that push their fees too high relative to others start causing vendors to refuse to accept them (see American Express). Heck, forget being credit-card specific, and focus on all ways of sending money today:
* The provider has to bear the burden of compensating customers for fraud
* The provider has to bea
Cryptocurrency (Score:3)
"many of the hundreds of digital assets in circulation still need to tighten their compliance measures."
Places like Mastercard have legal duties in most jurisdictions to counter money-laundering, which means identifying the sender and recipient on-demand.
Bitcoin etc. doesn't allow that.
It is now, always has been, and likely always will be, the biggest hurdle to cryptocurrency adoption, without which it'll be relegated to the Paypal-announced use of it: you'll be able to send it between two registered and proven Paypal users, and that's it. You won't be able to receive it from an anonymous third party, or send it to one.
And whether or not one country allows it, for sure the whole of the European continent will not because of their money-laundering laws which require licensed financial instituions and banks (and Paypal is a proper bank, and Mastercard a licensed institution, etc. in the EU because they couldn't legally be anything else) which require them to "know their customers".
And doing that would likely destroy many of the supposed advantages of cryptocurrency and turn it into a bit of a pointless exercise.
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I tried to sell my Bitcoin from years ago.
My banks literally won't let me send/receive money to/from any major Bitcoin exchange or escrow site. The transactions are blocked, and that's all you get.
The only way to do it is via a random third-party who I can't verify, send them my Bitcoin in advance and then *hope* they send me the equivalent as a (traceable) bank transfer. If they back out, I have no information to go on, whatsoever. Just a "5-star rating" on a random off-shore unregulated website.
You won
Hundreds? (Score:2)
Coins: 6259 [coingecko.com].
Yeah, better make that the many thousands of digital assets in circulation.
Get ready for the Mastercard-approved cryptocurrencies to go up.