Comment on Meta shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to explore adding Bitcoin to the company's treasury, with less than 1% voting in favor of the measure

• echodot@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.

  It’s not going to happen. You can’t price things when the value of the currency changes every 10 minutes.

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  • MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You’re aware we just use the conversion price in fiat, right?

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    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I don’t know what you’re saying. If I charge a particular amount for a loaf of bread and then the price drops halfway through the day then that person still has the bread but I now don’t have the money.

      The whole point of currency is to get away from the fluctuating value of exchange that everyone had to deal with when we used to buy things with gold and semi-precious stones.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Vendors can immediately sell upon receipt. And prices rarely change that much in a day, usually it’s a few percent, especially for the currencies targeted at actually being currencies instead of scams.

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  • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Never gonna happen is a bit of a stretch. It used to be a thing. Steam accepted bitcoin. They stopped accepting it due to volatility and high transaction fees at the time. You still price things in your local currency but convert at checkout. There are “plug and play” payment processors who can handle it now… Spar in Switzerland accepts it.

    But imo, its not something regular people should be using anyway.

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    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The fact that they stopped due to volatility kind of proved my point.

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      • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I thought your point was it was never happening? I provided examples where it did happen in the past and where its happening now. Volatility of the price vs USD is not the biggest issue if the payment processor gives the vendor USD back after the transaction. If the vendor believes in crypto, they can decide to keep it as well. Had Valve chosen to hold their crypto earnings in 2016 for a few years, they’d have seen even larger profits. But thats beside the point. I personally believe they canned it more because of transaction fees. At the time, bitcoin network was oversaturated due to an explosion of popularity which reduced it to unusable levels for everyday transactions.

        You should be focusing on why other vendors are still supporting crypto and asking yourself why.

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  • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That is not what’s stopping people for paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham’s Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there’s also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.

    Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.

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• rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.

  I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It’s basically what can be done. You can’t decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can’t plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).

  If I understand that correctly.

  Gosh. It’s year 2025, I’ve achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I’ll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Taler is cool, but it solves a completely different set of problems vs cryptocurrencies, and is ripe for being replaced with alternatives, undermining its primary purpose.

    Here are a few of the problems being solved here:

    • transaction fees
    • privacy
    • decentralization
    • independence from fiat

    Taker largely attacks the first two, and cryptocurrencies largely attack the second two, and I’m mostly interested in the middle two. However, since Taler doesn’t do either of the last two, it’s subject to either being ignored (i.e. if no banks are willing to support it) or directly competed against with something that sacrifices one of the first two, and customers won’t get the option of Taler.

    I think Taler makes a ton of sense for something with its own currency, such as microtransactions or a browser extension for rewarding creators (say, in lieu of displaying ads). I don’t see benefits for banks who make a ton from credit cards. There are some cryptocurrencies that hit the last three (e.g. Monero), so that’s what I’m excited to see take off.

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