I feel that's exactly what the op was saying in response to gp?
There's a spectrum, and while we should have increased empathy and awareness of a LOT of places in the world where life is spectacularly rough and wildly different than ours (2 years of my childhood were in a civil war and my Canadian wife just cannot fathom any of those experiences), there are indeed a lot of places in the world where knowledge and access and technology are helpful.
> You're not going to be able to do any of that luxurious learning when your stomach is empty and you're having to sleep each night in some war-torn slum.
Not sure why your calling out this poster when the OP said the above.
You don't use 3rd party software to generate the wallet. Electrum, Specter, or another FOSS app can do it fine.
The keys have 3rd-party software, but all they do is sign. Don't have a quorum from the same manufacturer. If it takes 3 signatures of 5, don't use 3 from the same company.
By that logic, nothing can ever be secure for any reason. We should all abandon the internet and go home.
From the string of your comments throughout this conversation, you seem to be making some weird, "I can't do it, so nobody can do it," false equivalency.
I don't know you from anybody, but I'm reasonably confident you're not more intelligent than all the highly incentivized people who have been, on the one hand, solving these problems against adversaries on the other hand who are every bit as incentivized to unsolve them.
None of the points I've made have been in any way groundbreaking or insightful. They're basic "I spent my free time for a year going down the bitcoin rabbit hole" stuff. You're throwing out incredibly basic objections as though they somehow mean the whole system is an unreliable fraud, but all it's really showing is that you haven't done even a cursory overview of the topic.
I'm really not trying to be rude here. People can understand code, even lots of it. People do understand it. They even understand the high-level cryptography these systems are built on. You might not, but that doesn't mean nobody does, much less that nobody can.
Nothing can ever be completely secure, but one can increase the security.
The aspect of security I talked about is reducing counterparty risk. What one can do to reduce counterparty risk is to have multiple systems, make them as independent as possible, and compare the output they create.
Example:
1: An air gapped Dell laptop with Electrum on Linux
2: Another air gapped laptop. From Lenovo with Specter on Windows.
Create your seed phrase offline with dice and put them into both.
Every address you create, every transaction you sign - do it on both systems and compare the output.
Now, both systems would have to be faulty/malicious in the same way to harm you.
OP explained this, if the signing is required by multiple 3rd parties then you’re good. You can do this with pencil and paper btw and write down keys. It’s not far fetched.
I don't want to be rude, but you're not the only smart person who's thought of counterparty risks. There's tremendous incentive to all sorts of people to break the cryptographic security that secures these networks. And, thus, also incentive to stay ahead of those people.
I'm not very worried about the cryptographic security of the Bitcoin blockchain.
I am worried that in 5 years we will learn that some hardware wallets used side channels to transfer bits of your private key out to make it easier to guess for someone who worked at the manufacturer.
But you can check this. You can monitor whether info is leaving on other channels. And you can sign on an air-gapped computer and transfer only the signed transaction hash (never the privkey) to a connected one to broadcast. You can do all but the actual signature with open source tools.
Just because you haven't taken the time to learn how this stuff works doesn't mean there aren't thousands of incredibly intelligent people who have been working on it for a decade and have actually solved the low-level concerns you have.
Composability and open APIs are rarely talked about.
Composability lets you create a token to represent anything* of value and exchange it for other tokens. ETH and BTC are tokenizations of proof of work.
Open APIs exist for any verified contract on Ethereum. You can permissionlessly plug a new application into many existing ones if your application is even partially on-chain
+1 to this. Having nvim as my daily driver allowed me to NOT upgrade my 4 year old macbook with the next top-of-the-line macbook, saving me an arm and a leg. Instead I just got a gaming PC with way higher specs for less than half the price and I just ssh into it now.
It's also neat to be able to code from an iPad by SSH'ing with Termius :)
It also allows you to go the other direction, and purchase a $200, nearly ten year old thinkpad, since it meets all your requirements for being productive.
Coinbase is more about turning non-crypto currencies into crypto currencies while UNI/SUSHI are more about turning crypto currencies into different crypto currencies.
In my POV, there's only two ways to get into crypto:
- Centralized exchanges with KYC
- Mining
Coinbase is a KYC centralized exchange and enables people to turn their bank account $$s into crypto. Uniswap and Sushiswap are only relevant once someone has crypto and needs to exchange between various tokens.
No one wants to pay you for legal above-board work in bitcoin[0] because bitcoin is not a useful currency (for reasons that have been rehashed plenty of times in HN comments.
Nonsense. I have been getting paid in BTC or (when BTC fees ramp up temporarily) in other coins like Ethereum and XRP for years for completely legal, non-criminal, not even grey work and know of many jobs, job forums and other compensation sources that happily pay in crypto for perfectly legal work, either by default or if you request it as your method of payment. You basically just invented a fact and casually stated it as if true.
I also should note that for work done for clients outside my country of residence, I preferred crypto payments because local exchanges allowed me to have the payment in my bank account, in local currency in minutes 24 hours a day, any day of the week, as opposed to waiting 24 hours or even days by any other non-crypto payment method
If your customer is willing to spend BTC they own for your services, and you’re willing to exchange your services for some amount of BTC — then it’s very straightforward, zero extra hoops to jump.
Imagine now your customer is in a non-US country, and you are in another non-US country with another currency. Using USD wire transfer is jumping through hoops in this context, and might not always be fast, cheap, or possible at all with some pairs of countries.
> If your customer is willing to spend BTC they own for your services[..]
In this scenario, would one's rate be set in BTC, or fiat?
I'm struggling to understand how a (non-crypto) business could want to hire a contractor at - let's say - 0.016 BTC/day, then watch the real (fiat) cost of that rate change value as the crypto markets move.
"We hired a contractor at what was $100/day but right now it's costing us $1000/day because we agreed to fix her rate in BTC" ?
Isn't this essentially like agreeing to pay someone in gold, or any other random commodity?
> In this scenario, would one's rate be set in BTC, or fiat?
You set the rate in USD, and do the currency conversion upon sending.
> I'm struggling to understand how a (non-crypto) business could want to hire a contractor at - let's say - 0.016 BTC/day
You’re right, BTC is too volatile to set the price in it in advance. But it is a perfectly good payment method.
It’s true that if you need the money you receive in BTC to feed your family tomorrow or they starve, then BTC is not convenient and too risky due to price fluctuations. But if you’re a reasonably compensated professional or a business with healthy margins, there’s very little downside in receiving 10—20% of money as crypto, and potentially very high upside.
It would be foolish for a business to enter into BTC-denominated contracts because that would expose them to a huge foreign exchange risk in return for nothing.
So you're saying these people don't want to use BTC? If they used BTC exclusively for everything this wouldn't be an issue. Dollar denominated contracts only matter if all you have is dollars. By that I mean that if you buy 0.01 BTC today and hold them until the contract is completed then you face zero foreign exchange risk.
If you don't possess the BTC on the day you signed the contract then you basically created an option with a zero dollar strike price. You aren't truly using the currency the way helloworld1 and others imply.
If they used BTC exclusively they wouldn't have foreign currency exchange risk. Instead they would have alternating periods of hyperinflation and hyperdeflation, coupled with highly uncertain tax liabilities, because taxes are still paid with real money. So, not much better. And this is assuming that there are no technical limitations or prohibitive costs preventing the adoption of BTC as exclusive currency.
This doesn't really address the comment it replies to though. Paying someone for work in a dollar stablecoin still obviates their need for a crypto onramp.
1) Not everyone has a job where they can be paid in crypto. 2) Some people want to invest larger amounts into crypto. Both these cases require an onramp.
and yet, almost nobody does this. Because it's impractical so far. I would look forward to the day when it does become practical, but i cannot see when that may be.
It’s not that unfathomable, it’s just not something you’re about to get in place of a direct deposit any time soon. I’ve seen internet artists and musicians offer to take commission payment in crypto before. Assuming the ecological issues of cryptocurrencies are possible to sort out, this kind of peer-to-peer usage feels nearly ideal, especially when many smaller businesses have trust issues with internet peer to peer payment providers such as PayPal.
There's already an entire industry growing up around enabling cryptocurrencies to be spent using traditional payment rails too, though, for those who don't want to see their governments print away the value of their money.
Coinbase itself has a debit card that deducts directly from your crypto balance and allows you to swipe the card anywhere that normally takes Visa. They're even a card issuer for Visa in their own right, so they don't have to do it through partner banks.[0]
Spending crypto is easy, whether the vendor opts into using it or not, so if you do get paid in it, it's easy to use.
I think we must be talking past each other or something. The purchasing power of every single fiat currency has trended down since the elimination of hard money standards, so as far as I can tell, every single government is printing away the value of its money.
I don't see how that's "failing to do so" if "so" refers to "printing away the value of their money"?
As others mentioned you're forgetting an economy which just uses crypto as the means of exchange, which for many has always been the long term goal.
But you're also forgetting P2P crypto marketplaces like LocalCryptos[1], which (for Ethereum) allows you to have smart contract escrow and therefore the middle-man is only really required in the case of disputes. I personally have transacted > $100k with LocalEthereum, not once having an issue with a trade, and most settling in under 30min.
> As others mentioned you're forgetting an economy which just uses crypto as the means of exchange, which for many has always been the long term goal.
Taxes are owed in income or capital gains, whatever form that income or capital takes, but taxes can only paid in legal tender. Until the IRS et al hang out a wallet address for payments you will still need to touch the ordinary financial economy.
A good number of people (in the US at least) legally pay no taxes every year. So it's hypothetically possible to live entirely within crypto (legally) already.
But yes, that was more talking about the future. That is the matter at hand, after all – Coinbase's future (or lack thereof).
Presumably people who make less than $22,000 USD and have no capital gains, which definitionally cannot apply to anyone dealing with cryptocurrencies (as they're securities).
The long-term capital gains rate is 0% for single people whose income and short-term capital gains are under $40k per year, or married people under $80k.[0]
"People who pay no income tax" absolutely can apply to people using cryptocurrencies.
Every time I have a discussion about crypto on HN I want to go buy lots of crypto because there are clearly still some smart people that really don't get it, to the point of seeming deliberately obtuse.
Given that the median family income in the U.S. is almost 15% less than $80k[0], the majority of U.S. households don't have to worry about this problem.
You can try to make it out to sound really widespread if you want, but the facts don't support you.
And the fact that people with lower incomes stand to benefit more from crypto than people of higher means who already have access to reliable banking systems is part of the point.[1]
My top level point is still the same. The government won't settle debts in crypto. Taxes are the main one, but there are also fees, levies, duties etc etc which will need to be settled in fiat. That is not likely to change.
can you help me understand the income point you made? I'm not sure I totally follow.
If I make less than $40k a year, I pay 0% capital gains? But what about income tax? You have to have some form of income, which will be taxable. I don't see how to keep that so low your effective taxation will be 0% while having enough money to live on? Am I missing something? Forgive my unfamiliarity with the tax regimes here.
If you had said this 6 years ago I would have laughed, now I'm just sad at how bastardized this project has become. You know you can just... use a bitcoin wallet and do an on-chain transfer?
You can send, receive and even buy Bitcoin with fiat with CashApp after you go through their KYC procedures within the app. [1] https://cash.app/bitcoin
Coinbase tells me there are no fees for crypto to crypto conversion, just when I initially buy crypto with cash. What does a decentralized exchange give me that beats that?
They make money off the spread on exchanges. Exact same principle as Forex “no fees” - it’s the difference between buy/sell rates.
On the OTC side (which I guess you’re referring to?, CB sets their own spread , which makes it more akin to a fee. Even if CB is technically correct saying “0 fee”, they can still charge any price they want for buying vs selling.
Uh that'd be stealing and would make them immediately lose credibility. But if you're really concerned about it, move funds to your wallet as soon as you buy.
You don't have the private keys. If coinbase loses them, you're out of money. Possibly. They're insured supposedly, but if you have your own private keys then the only entity you have to deal with in this case is yourself (this can be both a positive and a negative, depending on how careful you are)
There is a "Coinbase Wallet," though, which is somewhat confusingly a separate app where you actually do hold your own private keys.[0]
You can seamlessly link your exchange account and your Wallet account so you can move the money right into your own Coinbase Wallet with your own private keys as soon as you're done with the exchange.
I'm not sure the parent comment meant that wallet, but Coinbase does "give you a wallet" if you want, complete with your own private keys.
It would be, except that you can easily link the two accounts. Sure, that's roughly equivalent to making sure you have the Coinbase exchange address assigned to your wallet loaded into Metamask and your Metamask address loaded into the Coinbase exchange, but that takes a level of understanding that linking Coinbase Wallet to Coinbase exchange doesn't require.
Coinbase does "provide you a wallet." It just isn't part of the exchange.
This will change in some years though. Conversion will cost less gas with L2. Things are progressing quickly on those problems. Dexs and liquidity pools will have near zero fees.
Personally, I think unless coinbase pivots, their current business model is not sustainable in the long term. But right now, coinbase is capturing value in a way that the early majority of crypto's adoption curve can digest.
I'd also add on that Coinbase is in a position to build payment features (e.g. chargebacks) a la Paypal for transactions within their platform, that a DEX cannot provide.
Bisq is surprisingly smooth if you want to exchange fiat to crypto without intermediate centralized exchange. Great to see a solid implementation of colored bitcoins in the wild with great UX.
> Sure, but why do we need a separate currency for all of this in the first place?
I might be answering the wrong q, but the separate currency represents the cost of a transaction in the network. I.e. the amount you're willing to pay to send a transaction in the network and the amount a staker is willing to receive in exchange for validating your transaction
How else would you represent that cost in a crypto network? Some kind of currency needs to represent the transaction cost.
Not sure if you've read up on recent developments in Ethereum, but in case you haven't, check out proof of stake [1]. Basically, POS lets people put their money on the line for consensus rather than let people only participate in consensus by solving hard computation problems.
I use vim as my main driver at work. Some things that helped me out personally:
- Playing some vimgolf and seeing what neat tricks people used. This is where I learned about “.”
- Going into the deep-end of just using vim (or just vim in IntelliJ without the mouse) will make you notice all the issues that make you unproductive with only vim e.g getting around with only hjkl is really slow so you might investigate other ways to navigate or deleting a word always involves getting to the end of the word and using lots of backspace may make you wonder if there are more efficient ways to do the same thing
- if you decide not to go into the deep-end, just being more picky about how much you’re spamming certain keys may help you gradually incorporate new commands into your flow
Also, this project ends up being a compact way to deliver educational material. Imagine sending them the equivalent in physical books and manuals