It seems so. Sooner or later people will post some benchmarks so we'll have more precise knowledge. At this point the statements from MS are a bit fuzzy.
They need to ve very conservative in the statements and err on the side of caution. It's better for people to find out is not as bad as they thought than to find out it's worse than they thought.
TBF the current state of Bitcoin is on par with what banks have always been offering for international transfers. So, it still has the use case of sending unrestricted amounts of money to a peer abroad.
However, I agree on the general sentiment. Transactions are more expensive than they should be.
- I am not american. I used international transfers with french, british, japanese and korean banks, and there always was either a fee of 30~50$, or an awful sub-market exchange rate.
- TransferWise is not universal and does not work for many currencies, including the Chinese Yuan and the Indian Rupee.
TransferWise can send rupees to Indian bank accounts and I am assuming the reason they cannot take money out of India is because of Indian Govt forex regulations.
And there's the next massive bitcoin advantage : you can bypass financial regulations for normal people.
"Somehow" these rich bankers and regulators (mostly ex-bankers of course) do not see the need for poor people to be able to transact either internationally, or in some countries, at all (in anything but cash, and thus very short distance only).
With bitcoin it's 30$, but there's no percentual charge (in fact the exchange rate is often better than market for BOTH participants because bitcoin is rising in value)
Whereas if you use a bank transfer, a 3% drop is the base cost on every single transfer. Bitcoin is volatile, but you'd very rarely have costs that high, and as I stated before, usually the cost would be negative.
but they can't sell any of it without annihilating the market. It's like I sell a diamond to my friend for 1 billion dollars, but she pays me 1$ every year for a billion years. So formally I am a billionaire, but actually I am one diamond short.
$1/year for a billion years isn't worth a billion dollars. It's essentially a perpetuity, which is worth $1 / the prevailing interest rate. If that rate is 5%, you're only worth $20
That's like saying Bezos or Gates aren't really worth ~60B dollars, like the news are repeatedly saying though. Isn't that right? Considering most of their wealth is in stocks.
It is technically right. However, even in a 100% firesale, they could make - say - $10bn to $20bn, because the fundamentals of their companies' earnings and dividends would entice sufficiently many new investors to step into the market.
Cryptocoins have no such fundamental value backstop - someone desperately trying to sell a large fraction of the market cap would drive the price to basically zero in short order.
It depends. Surely they could not instantly dump all of their "ripple assets" and expect the market to absorb it. But currently the 24-hours trading volume is 6.6 billion USD (https://www.livecoinwatch.com/price/Ripple-XRP). A huge part of that may be wash trading due to some zero-fee exchangers. Nevertheless I am speachless how relatively speaking a lot of money is actually being poured into this right now.
> Surely they could not instantly dump all of their "ripple assets"
They can't. They've escrowed that 60 billion away and will release it to institutions at regular intervals. Any XRP that isn't bought will be put back in escrow. The executives that have large amounts of XRP themselves are contractually obligated to not dump it. They can only sell a certain amount per week. I think its like 10,000 or something (but I could be wrong on that).
The market depth is a more interesting metric than volume. As you say wash trades, or just short-term speculative trades, inflate volume without actually impacting the size of the market.
> What, then, can we do? .... Only then can we engage in rigorous and countrywide education campaigns to persuade people not to use drugs.... We still have time to persuade our young people not to ruin their lives.
Yeah you should've persuaded Steve Jobs not to use drugs and especially LSD. Then you could also invent iPhone yourself
everywhere i go, i got fed with cookies and candies. everywhere i see children eating ice cream and sweets. I bet we will remember these dark times one day but right now the state of the ignorance is staggering
And that ignorance is an accomplice in the every increasing cost of healthcare. Talking about healthcare without talking about health is silly. Yet that's what we do.
iiuc simple carbs are main reason of three big ones, heart problems, cancer and diabetes. Seen more research linking it. And no one is talking about yet
Please allow me to clarify just a bit: No one mainstream in a position of power/influence is talking about it.
Sure we got ACA but that was only half the opportunity. The other half was telling the American people The Truth about their diet/lifestyle, and how that effects the cost of healthcare (to say nothing about the quality of life).
The problem is, that kind of honesty doesn't fare well with voters. It's also not good for business: Big Pharma, Food Inc., etc.
As far as I can tell, yet is going to be around for a long time.
