bitreality

Does it? Bitcoin just says anyone can transact. But that doesn't really solve the problem. The problem is that legal businesses should be able to transact. Illegal businesses should not.

Bitcoin just removes all the limitations. But that creates new problems, quite frankly. Plus, it's very difficult for businesses to utilize Bitcoin. Fiat onboards have similar limitations to Visa/MC. Many legitimate business models will be denied accounts at reputable exchanges.

This is the reality. Payment processing is a utility. Small businesses literally cannot operate online without payment processing. On first glance there appears to be many third party providers, but ultimately they are all processing Visa/MC, and are selecting customers on the same criteria.

Such as what happened in 2018-19? Bitcoin never goes "bankrupt". Bitcoin never ceases to exist. The price can do whatever it wants, but the lower it goes, the more momentum it can build on the way back up.

Most cyber criminals have a script. They don't deviate from the script unless they think they have a potential home run. Even then, going from this to sending out fake mail correspondence... That's a whole different toolbox. 99%+ of the time they will not even consider it. Especially since it's not scalable.

They have people voting over 3% tax increases and gay marriage, not surveillance. Doesn't matter who you vote for, every party is in favor of increasing their power.

Another example on how tech giants control the livelihoods of millions of people. They can press one button and put thousands of people out of a job at any time. Workers rights? How about an automated reply and no specific reason for the death of your company/application/income.

These companies need to be regulated ASAP. Especially when it comes to terminating users.

I assume those data waivers are set up through deals between the telcos and the companies behind those applications. Microsoft certainly has the resources to arrange similar deals, but they seem to have given up on Skype years ago. Absolutely baffling, especially with the recent valuation of Zoom.

The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged. One of those labs was right near the seafood market which had one of the first documented outbreaks.

It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab leak. To me, this is the clearest and most likely source of the outbreak.

Skype for business school case studies on how to destroy a massive lead in video chat and messaging.

The problem is that discussing this hypothesis in any form is often labeled as "offensive" and "racist". The generally accepted theory even in the West is the lab leak was somehow disproved. It's always baffled me, because the only way you could really disprove the lab leak theory would be by finding the original source of the virus.

Instead, the media often attempts to disprove the lab leak by pointing out that COVID-19 differs from the viruses that were being worked on in the Wuhan Lab. But that in itself implies that China is being transparent. To the contrary, we know that China would take every measure to obfuscate the lab leak if they believed it was the origin of the virus.

For that very reason, we cannot accept their narrative at face value. We certainly don't have enough information to confidently eliminate the lab escape theory. The media has largely suggested that the lab escape theory has been disproved.

This will be an interesting case study in what happens when a government goes head on against cryptocurrencies. This will lead to some interesting innovation in the space. There are too many cryptocurrency users and believers in India at this point.

We will see some interesting P2P exchange platforms where anonymity becomes paramount.

Bitcoin is the first successful project which achieved digital scarcity. Scarcity is one of the most important features in assigning value to a particular object. Bitcoin's scarcity is not only proven, but also completely transparent and trackable. Its scarcity does not rely on any centralized organization, it is completely based on mathematics and cryptography.

It may not have been apparent how ground-breaking or important digital scarcity was at the time. Most of the time when we think of money, we think about how we use it in our everyday lives. We buy coffees, we pay for an Uber. But underneath all that, there is a deeper meaning to money. Why do we value money? It really just boils down to scarcity, liquidity, demand.

Money has all 3. However, the scarcity factor of traditional money is flawed. It relies on centralized parties, for which money is not actually scarce. They can and do alter the supply at any time. It's a tradeoff we make because fiat is so liquid / demanded / transactable.

Bitcoin is less transactable than fiat money in most regards, but it makes up for it in the transparency of its scarcity. If you were going to lock your wealth up for 25 years, would you put it in USD or BTC? More and more people would say BTC. I can tell you how many BTC will exist in the year 2050. I would have no way to do the same for any fiat currency.

The main risk to BTC is some sort of technological breakthrough which greatly improves upon the concept of cryptocurrency. It's not that cryptocurrency will suddenly disappear or lose its value. Cryptocurrency is here to stay. We have witnessed the birth of a new asset class.

What is the most hospitable environment? A tide pool? Also the most hospitable environment for genesis is likely different from the most hospitable environment for a complex ecosystem.

This is all possible because China has standardized bank to bank transactions across all banks in the country. It sets the tone for secure P2P transactions at fractions of the cost of a regular Credit Card payment.

This allows people to on-board to WeChat Pay easily through online banking. They also have way less KYC hurdles, so people can go from signing up to sending money in minutes.

US online banking is eons behind China, and almost any other country. So many online banking systems in the US are prone to unauthorized access, which makes on-boarding and security highly inefficient.

Yes, apps like Venmo/CashApp/Zelle have grown massively in the US over the past 2 years. However, there's still limited options for merchants to integrate these payments into ecommerce systems in a way which allows the customer to make payments through a website.

It's hard to say whether these apps are actually focused on B2C transactions, so far it's almost entirely C2C (P2P).

I have some competitors in the UK who told me that if a single customer pays you from a frauded bank account, your entire bank account is closed permanently, and they investigate with the police.

They also assume you are involved in the illegal activity and you have to interview at the bank. All this for what can amount to a 20-50 GBP payment, and even if it represents <1% of your transfer volume.

If bank payments are going to become prevalent in e-commerce, this type of primitive reaction to fraud will need to improve drastically.

A major issue here is that payment processors literally choose which industries, and which players will succeed. If your industry is deemed high risk by payment processors, you are fighting a brutal battle to accept customer payments. If you can't process payments, you don't have a business. Conversions will drop off a cliff if you try to switch them to niche payment methods like crypto currency, or even something like Skrill.

Even worse, the payment processors do not apply their own ToS unilaterally. You'll find some websites will retain processing, while you lose it, even though the reason is that your business model is high risk. PayPal is notorious for this. Their ToS will only be enforced in certain countries, leaving companies in places like China with PayPal processing while your company is permanently banned from the platform.

It becomes impossible to compete if you are banned from Stripe & PayPal while your competitors are not. If their own rules are not applied equally across your industry, they effectively pick the winners. Their platform also favors long-standing merchants in many ways.

First by providing them an account manager, second by essentially grandfathering in certain accounts. You'll find it very difficult to process payments in certain industries on PayPal, likely not even being successful in on-boarding, while sites operating in the exact same business have functioning PayPal accounts.

It's incredibly anti-competitive. These processors run such a large scale monopoly; there are so few comparable alternatives, I've seen so many people go out of business purely by losing their PayPal.

It's two facets. On the one hand, people are definitely buying more essential products. They are also definitely visiting more ecommerce sites. They're bored, online shopping is a thing to do.

Most people aren't at the point where they feel they need to drastically cut their spending. Most developed countries have some sort of payment going out to at least the unemployed. Also, even the newly unemployed have only been in that position for a few weeks.

The people who are still employed, whether that's remote or whatever, have a surplus of money they normally would spend on things like travel, events, and dining out. They are absolutely not worried about spending money on discretionaries.

The reality is, people still have a ton of money to spend. And less places to spend it. This recession is just barely getting started.

Right but they didn't result in Hilton / Disney having 80-90% revenue drops overnight. This is a very unique contraction. Even in the depths of 2008, DisneyWorld still had a steady flow of visitors, and Hilton hotels across the world still welcomed guests.

I'm not suggesting that people will become quickly reinfected, I'm saying that their immunity will be temporary, such as one or several "infection seasons".

I think you might be looking at USO if you're seeing a $10 USD call price, or another ETF which doesn't actually match the price of 1 barrel = 1 share. There is no way a $10 call is $0.3 USD when the market price is $20+. It should be a minimum of the price difference between the underlying and the strike price for an in-the-money option.

Government and industry will want demand to ramp back up, but it's doubtful that will be supported by consumers. I don't think you're going to see an instant rush back to international travel.

Same goes for most other industries. This isn't a situation where you just wake up one day and it's over. It's not a war where you just make up and get back to work. This virus is out there, and most experts say even if you were already infected, you will only become temporarily immune (similar to flu).

So until you see a vaccine develop, coronavirus is not going away by any stretch. It will continue to cause problems in the medium term.

Yeah exactly. It's one thing to board up the windows for a day or two, a completely different story to do it for a month+. People get restless and impatient. They start working each other up about perceived ineffectiveness of the lockdown.

The disease has spread in places like Singapore and Thailand, which are warmer in February than most Northern Hemisphere cities are in summer. The notion that everything will just die down come Spring is blindingly optimistic.

You're grossly misinformed. The China outbreak was so strong initially because they had no idea what they were dealing with. The spread and infection is invisible for weeks. There are many people spreading Coronavirus as we speak without knowing a thing.

Korea, Iran and Italy all have major outbreaks which only revealed themselves this week, but likely began 2-3 weeks prior. Iran has clearly no idea how many cases are in its country, its numbers are 15 deaths and <100 cases. That's over 15% death rate. Makes no sense compared to all other reported number, their real total cases are likely over 1000.

This is a disease with a high spread rate, medium fatality rate. That's far more of a public threat than low spread rate, high fatality rate. Spread rate is far more relevant than death rate, and to top it off someone can be spreading it for weeks with no symptoms.

Just wait until it happens on a massive scale, and does not appear to be stopping the spread of the virus. People in the West are going to be tough to keep on lockdown. The entire purpose of lockdowns and quarantines at this point seem to be delaying until a vaccine is ready.

This will be hard for the average person to understand, and people think much more critically in the West.

Here's the thing with Italy. They're the first Western country to get a major outbreak. They're being told to do things and assuming that it will stop the virus. But the truth is, containment does not actually stop the virus. It simply slows it.

When or if this hits the US or elsewhere in Europe, and it becomes obvious that despite the quarantine in Italy, the virus still continued to spread, they will question the measures being taken. As time goes on, the West will become critical of government response and may be difficult to control.

In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.

There's nothing nonsensical about it. That's a very poor analogy as well, comparing a startup's growth to the spread of a highly-infectious virus.

COVID19 spreads by default. If you leave it alone, it will spread uncontrollably. China went from 0 to 79,000 confirmed cases in 2 months, despite running the largest and most extensive quarantine in human history. If there was no quarantine, you could expect truly exponentially higher number of infections.

The problem with these things is, if the rate of spread is >1, then it becomes exponential. That is, if the average person infects more than one person, then the rate of spread is going to get completely out of control. Unless of course, you can impose measures that reduce the rate of spread to below 1.

With coronavirus, it's not possible to do this. The reason is that many people are asymptomatic for weeks, while at the same time passing the virus to other people. If you cannot identify infections before they have the chance to spread at a rate of >1, then the spread of the disease will by default be exponential.

A startup does not grow exponentially by default. Many actions need to be done correctly to continue growing. A business's default state is death.