All of the other comments are missing the point: using blockchain technology is a means to bypass regulation. That's it. That's always been the point of cryptocurrency.

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insane_dreamer 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Incorrect; it's to bypass the middlemen that create the links of trust between two parties exchanging money. That was the point of Bitcoin from the start.

(The many other crypto coins since then are mostly BS freud.)

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j2kun 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

In this case, Stripe is adding themselves as a middleman.

Whether or not it was the point of Bitcoin from the start, "removing the middlemen" is bullshit because you still need exchanges, wallet providers, people running nodes, etc. Cryptocurrency in practice just transfers power from traditional middlemen to new technically-advantaged middlemen.

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bravoetch 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The middleman that bitcoin is cleaved from is banks (that have control over all balances and transactions), and payment processors (same controls). Previously these were required unless you handed physical cash to someone. Now electronic transactions are free of those controls and the associated risk. Exchanges are not bitcoin, you can transact freely without them. Wallet providers are not bitcoin, they are 100% optional. Nodes don't act as middlemen, they are fabric.

	▲	j2kun 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And people could just do all their business in cash to avoid banks. But that's not practical just like avoiding exchanges and not using wallet providers is impractical. Normal people cannot function in a cryptocurrency ecosystem without these new tech middlemen. This is exactly what I mean when I say _in practice_. Average people are still left to the whims of cryptocurrency corporations that are worse than banks because they're unregulated, much greedier, and much less risk averse.
	▲	mbesto 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> middleman that bitcoin is cleaved from is banks (that have control over all balances and transactions), and payment processors (same controls) Miners now replace this since there is a network fee required to transact. I'm not sure what the current state of affair is, but ETH gas fees were egregious last time I transacted ETH.

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insane_dreamer 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> you still need exchanges, wallet providers, people running nodes, etc

you don't need exchanges or wallet providers, or any other intermediary, to exchange Bitcoin -- those add layers of convenience (conversion, storage), but they do _not_ strengthen the web of trust and do not provide the same function as intermediary banks and clearing houses do

yes, you do need people running nodes, but they're not intermediate layers, and you can run a node yourself to benefit from the system (though in practice it's no longer profitable due to bitcoin farms)

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dmak 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If the banking system was compromised from war, Bitcoin still functions without them

	▲	troupo 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Because during war you're guaranteed to have electricity and internet for Bitcoin to function

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MangoToupe 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure there's much of a distinction; the reason there are so many middlemen is regulatory.

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risyachka 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yeah bad regulations must be bypassed.

There is a case for banks that hold your hand as if you are 90yo and there must be a case for banking where I know what I do and I take responsibility for my actions.

If i send my coins to the wrong address its on me. But if I want to send 10k to someone - no one should ask me to wait 3 days, to do 100 verifications if I am not being forced or scammed.

I'd want that protection for my mom, sure.

But I want to remove all that crap for me. I don't have time and energy for it

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LunaSea 5 days ago | parent [-]

Let's check how people use credit cards and buy-now-pay-layer schemes (Klarna & co) responsibly in America.

It clearly demonstrates that people do not have the capacity to make critical judgments and have to be somewhat protected from themselves.

That's als what regulations are for.

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whimsicalism 5 days ago | parent [-]

there should be a pathway where we can opt out of being protected from ourselves and crypto is it.

	▲	LunaSea 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, it should be opt-in, but this is not one of them since it's opt-out by default.

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idiotsecant 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You say tomato I say removing the levers of power from world governments who have proven time and time again that they can't help but pull them to help themselves

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j2kun 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The frequency with which people involved in cryptocurrency "pull the levers themselves" has far outpaced government manipulation of currency.

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idiotsecant 5 days ago | parent [-]

Has it? You're not really providing much evidence of that. If it so far outpaces, it should be easy to give several examples.

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yunwal 5 days ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitget-lawyer-letters-account... https://bitnewsbot.com/us-judge-unfreezes-57-6m-usdc-tied-to... https://ambcrypto.com/avalanche-based-protocol-reportedly-ru... https://cointelegraph.com/news/polymarket-trump-ukraine-bet-... https://x.com/BinanceWallet/status/1904352541615554611 https://x.com/JMilei/status/1890606683291779195

I could pretty much go on forever…

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idiotsecant 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not a single one of these examples is trustless, decentralized crypto. Of course people are going to steal your money if you don't own your keys and put faith in protocols that are not permissionless. That's the problem with people who paint 'crypto' with one giant brush. It's like saying 'websites' will steal your money. Statistically it's probably true, but anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together isn't giving money to realbankwebsite.ru/chasebank

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yunwal 4 days ago | parent [-]

Ok, so at the very least we can both agree that what stripe is doing here is sketchy, since it’s not permissionless at all.

The second question is, once you take away anything that’s not permissionless, what’s left in crypto?

- Buying a physical good? You’re trusting the person manufacturing it, storing it, shipping it. If it comes to your door and it’s defective, they’ve already got your money, and it turns out your trustless system actually makes this impossible to resolve.

- Buying some skin for a game or something? Unless the game is also run in a decentralized fashion, they can just choose not to render that particular skin.

So, like, can you give me an example of a single transaction that is rendered trust-less because of cryptocurrency? It seems to me like whenever anyone actually tries to do anything useful with crypto, it ends up being what you would describe as an obvious scam.

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idiotsecant 3 days ago | parent [-]

You're doing strawman shotgun here. You're pasting a bunch of examples that basically fall into two categories and then asking me to defend them:

1) people who put their money into custodial 'banks' and then get it stolen

2) people rely on protocols whose consensus protocol is controlled by a small committee of appointed VIPs

None of which is germane to my original point. I'm simply saying that Im advocating for central banks not having the power to manipulate the currency supply at a whim And somehow you're forcing me into the position of spending an hour reading every trash crypto scam you can find. Not terribly interested in discussing how you can get ripped off with crypto or fiat cash.

	▲	yunwal a day ago \| parent [-]
		> people rely on protocols whose consensus protocol is controlled by a small committee of appointed VIPs Once again, this is what Stripe is doing here in this very announcement. > Not a single one of these examples is trustless, decentralized crypto You brought up trustless, so surely you can find an example. I didn’t pull that out of nowhere.

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troupo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's always funny to me how "we're decentralized ledgers running in lack of trust environments that don't need government regulation" always run to centralized trusted government institutions every time there's trouble.

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paintbox 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's a push to bring international financial systems up to date, there is no need to reinvent judiciary and executive institutions in this step.

	▲	troupo 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It's a push to bring international financial systems up to date It's not a push in any sense of the word. And outside of the US quite a few of financial institutions are "up to date" in most of the areas that matter to people. > there is no need to reinvent judiciary and executive institutions in this step. Strange how "up to date" inevitably involves rediscovering all the reasons those exist in the first place and why the "outdated" institutions do the things they do.

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munificent 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> removing the levers of power from world governments

A lever of power is never removed unless the act itself can no longer be performed. All you can do is take someone's hand off the lever and hope that whoever grabs it next is better than the last hand that had it.

I find it very unlikely that wresting power away from government—which at least has some level of citizen participation—will end up with it in better hands. The most likely scenario is that some billionaire will end up owning it.

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idiotsecant 6 days ago | parent [-]

No, it's possible. Imagine, for example, that you are concerned about growing political control of the central bank in your country and you want to remove the ability of central banks to set an inflation rate for the currency you use. That's quite easily achieved if ownership of the currency system is distributed among all users of that currency.

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munificent 6 days ago | parent [-]

> is distributed among all users of that currency.

Right. What you propose is that you take government's hand off the lever and a million users will all equally get to gently rest their pinky on it and distribute the power equally.

I have never seen anything in the history of the world or my understanding of sociology to indicate that such a power structure has any stability. If you give out power in a free-for-all, what tends to happen is:

1. All of the participants already have some unequal distribution of power going in.

2. Those who have more are able to use that to claim a little more of the new resource.

3. Once they do they, they are able to use the increased inequality to claim even more.

4. Go to 2.

The natural tendency is towards increasing inequality. It takes a ton of work to build and maintain structures that encourage any level of egalitarianism.

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idiotsecant 5 days ago | parent [-]

You're over abstracting a very simple thing. No user can, for example, change the inflationary rate of a decentralized cryptocurrency. It requires network consensus. The party making the change would need to control the vast majority of the consensus power, whether than is ASICs for pow or base currency for pos, at which point they have massive incentive to not do that on account of the loss of power destroying all their wealth would represent.

Non-fiat currency is the most egalitarian system possible.

	▲	munificent 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It requires network consensus. No, it requires network control. Consensus among a large number of independent participants who agree on a change is one way to have that control. But another way is to have a minority of participants that control a disproportionately large fraction of mining decide what to do. The history of crypto shows that over time, miners tend to consolidate until eventually you have a small number of miners who significant leverage over the ledger. None of that should be surprising: economy of scale is economics 101 and certainly applies to miners who buy and run hardware in bulk. > Non-fiat currency is the most egalitarian system possible. Egalitarianism is a property of human behavior and social systems, not the hardware that humans may or may not be using as intended.