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It took this long for MasterCard to do that?
Probably contractual stuff. multi-year contracts. no way you'd enter into a long term finance offering without guarantees it'll still be a thing in 5 years.
Either the contracts expired or they reached a situation where they could break it.
ninja edit: looks like further down someone made the point that the Russians were using Binanace to move cash with BTC, which violated sanctions. Mastercard is at risk of violating those sanctions and it sounds like they just tapped out rather then risking staying in crypto.
Why did they think it was a good idea to begin with?
It seems likely that MasterCard and Binance signed a two year contract and that has now expired and the "less than 1% of customers" simply is covering the cost of operation. Existing the contract early might have been rather expensive though.
While I don't know it could also be that the cards are issue with a two year lifetime and MasterCard didn't want to close cards early.
Why does hacker news hate crypto?
Minus using it in countries that have shitty government, no one has provided a use case for it.
And no, just because it is useful for some people in some shitty country doesn't make it generally useful. If carrying knifes and guns to a bank is considered normal in some shithole it doesn't mean that the rest of the world need to adopt this insane idea.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if many companies are using crypto as a simple and unregulated way to suck money from unsophisticated traders. I wonder how many people lost money on crypto, and where most of the wins are at.
I am also curious how much portion of crypto is actually used for "goods" out in the wild versus simply used for trading. Simple metrics like volume on all exchanges / volume outside of exchanges should suffice.
It is abused a lot, but for instance, for us, an honest b2b saas company, we get flagged like common criminals way too often when paying people who work for us in ‘shitty countries’. It’s always unblocked but it’s a huge strain with sending in paperwork, talking to idiots etc. Our main account has been blocked for 3 weeks and our account manager keeps apologising as the regulatory department is handling it and they don’t really talk to eachother.
I understand the criminal abuse, but it is just an easy way of paying out like you say to countries that banks flag (not sanctioned ones; just one that ‘normal people don’t send money to’).
International money transfers? I've been scalped by moneychangers before. Next time I need to pass money to a friend overseas I'd prefer to use crypto.
There are a lot of weird peculiarities of the international monetary system (things like the weird not-capital-controls that US citizens operate under where nobody will give them a bank account or whatever) that crypto just bulldozes through and I don't have to worry about when sending someone in a foreign country money.
Many banks won't give accounts to US citizens because that means giving the US government access. US citizens are subject to worldwide taxation regardless of residence.
Much easier just not to have US customers.
Toxic description, and demeening to countries outside your own. Do you really have to talk like that about other people that live further away from you?
What? I live in one of these countries (not as bad as the one I described). My hometown is very serene and peaceful, until you are of a certain race or creed, then they are extremely racist. It is ultimately a backward place with backward people. Western folks like to pretend that every place is equally good until they have to raise their daughter in one of these places.
The first step to a country's growth is the acceptance of one's place in the world. Pretty much all of the emerging countries of today at some point kinda accepted the state that they are in and decided to get out of it (Japan, China, Indonesia today)
Mind you, I classify certain states in the US as shitholes. The fact that you _need_ a gun means that it is ultimately a shithole place in my book.
So just because it helps some people with hard lives survive, you still hate it because some shitty traders talk too much about it?
Yes, I don't condone crypto the same way I don't condone carrying guns to a bank (because you can't trust anyone), or building nuclear shelters on the off chance of a nuclear fallout, or building EM bombs in the escalating nature of warring nations in deadlock.
Whether you like it or not, things have external cost to them. "Let's spend a trillion dollar building a bunker for every citizen in the event that a nuclear fallout do happen". "Let's give everyone AC because its getting hot...and will keep getting hotter because we keep installing ACs". All of these things are "good" but people very rarely talk about their externalities.
There's a thing called "opportunity cost", "externalities" that no crypto bros ever brought up when discussing how bad their system compared to the current system.
Should we sacrifice the relatively very efficient global financial with one that can barely handle a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its precursor? What about user protection? Correct me if I am wrong, but it is perfectly possible to lose all of your coins due to fraud and there would be no way to recover it back. How is this even a reasonable financial system?
I think it's because it was promised or sold as something beyond national currencies, that offers some sort of anonymity, a way to make money relatively fast (or at least not lose any), etc.
Finally, most of it turned out to be just plain marketing made by those who needed more and more people in the system/scheme.
At least this is what my take is on this.
I’m no economist. But even without any training, all crypto including Bitcoin sounds like a scam. No regulation. Waste all that effort solving nothing of value. Can’t do refunds.
And it wasn’t just Luddites or the uneducated not understanding what was going on, but really smart people weren’t convinced and the benefits of the technology never solidified. In fact, turns out everything really was a scam.
There’s probably a bit of smugness from Making correct predictions, and there’s also probably a bit of regret that we didn’t jump on the gravy train and sell at the peak even though we didn’t believe in it.
So far there is no evidence that it is a scam. The cryptographic promises are rock solid, it has on average done a better job of preserving value than the USD [0].
There is a brief window (2021-2022) where it was a bad time to buy and even that might not be the final word. The last time this happened was in 2018 where the price of bitcoin peaked at half it'd current value.
If anything, it is starting to look like Bitcoin is a respectable asset. It has outlasted several allegedly-reputable banks and is weathering a difficult credit environment quite solidly. It is still very risky, but it is hard to dismiss it.
[0] Over the last decade, say. Not much to hang an argument on, but it is the opposite of a scam.
No evidence it’s a scam except all the pump and dump schemes and the exchanges collapsing?
And Bitcoin is an asset now? Back in my day we were trying to buy pizzas and beer with it. Bitcoin illustrates the point very well. It’s was supposed to facilitate transactions. Except, there was never ever a plan, or a plan I understood anyway, on how that could be achieved.
And now people hoard it like gold.
Bitcoin is still this
HN as a whole used to love anything crypto/NFT... the tide shifted as more and more ICOs, token offerings, exchanges and whatnot turned out to be pure rug pulls and at the same time, none of the promised benefits of cryptocurrencies failed to materialize.
> none of the promised benefits of cryptocurrencies failed to materialize
But that sounds awesome?
I think the parent poster accidentally made a double negative.
This is subjective, but my impression was rather the tide shifted when ChatGPT came out.
Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37290356 As I am writing this, three comments. One by the author, the other two about ChatGPT.
Shifted when ChatGPT came out? HN comments has been borderline trolling flamewars in every cryptocurrency related post for years now.
Dan Olson's video "Line goes up" is a pretty good summary of why:
Crypto is trying to fix a social problem (currency) with technology, with obvious outcomes. It's not about empowering a new generation of solutions or allowing the unbanked access to financial services. It's about replacing the current money masters with techbros.
Thankfully, they've mostly shifted to AI scams now.
If there's herd behavior, it's because it's so easy to cite examples of crypto fraud and false promises, and for many (but not all) in the tech sector fraud is verboten.
Most governments around the world are against crypto because it undermines KYC and AML efforts. No amount of wall street lobbying will change that because the bureaucrats believe that "national security" is at risk if crypto is allowed to proliferate. Central bank digital currencies are popular among regulators and the national security apparatus precisely because they centralize control. It's also why Circle and USDC are widely accepted - all the advantages of being decentralized have been neutered to the point of uselessness.
Exactly. That's the whole ideea to begin with - destroy the state monopoly. Of course the state sees it as an existential threat, because it is.
> Why does hacker news hate crypto?
Because crypto and its industry is a complete scam and nothing that it has produced is of any value.
Crypto is a complete grift and there is not a single person in it for the technology. The only reason it exists is because of the regulatory arbitrage and loopholes that needs to be closed which will shut crypto all down.
All in all, crypto is full of greed, scamming, grifting and completely the lawless shady behaviour of evading regulations.
That is why we hate it and it needs to be extinguished by drafting crypto laws in every country.
I don't think HN hates crypto in particular. HN hates fraud.
Because it's a playground for scammers, rotten up to its Andreesen-Horowitz (and others) underwriters
Because it's a playground for scammers
My theory is that HN (like people in general) simply hates change.
Off-topic; what happened to this thread? For me most comments disappeared. It says 36 comments; I see only 7. Maybe this is a thing, but I never noticed before.
Yep, and showdead didn't help either. (Maybe it takes time to apply?)
UPD: okay, it did work and there's a whole hidden thread now.
Yep, I guess something with cache. It works now.
This article fails to mention the front page wsj article last week about binance allowing Russian users to avoid sanctions. Clearly Mastercard doesn’t want to be associated with this.
Burying the lede, indeed
I wonder how CBDCs will treat binance
I’ve said this before here, but I wonder if the blockchain’s most lasting contribution will be, ironically, forcing the world’s governments’ hand to create their own form of digital, easily trackable and controllable money.
Something like CBDCs always seemed inevitable, given how much more of their privacy citizens are willing to give away with each passing year. But I wonder if the crypto space has accelerated the implementation.
Good.
The crypto bro fools thinking this was a use case need their heads corrected by regulation. Binance and the like are inherently not fit for the financial system.
And I'm going to make an on the record bet that you can quote me on:
Crypto will all completely collapse before they will find any possible use case that hasn't already been solved by the current financial system.
The collapse will be even bigger than FTX.
I’m sure eventually we’ll see that Wall Street and Big accredit as well as other elite institutions were behind the collapse of crypto.
Maybe, but I don't think directly as in they orchestrated a collapse. Wall Street have probably extract most of all the lower risk capital available in the crypto-markets and the bailed once things got to heated. Sort of like the gold market, leaving individuals and smaller investors with the toxic investments and all the high risk stuff.
What crypto would have need, was for the larger institutions to have stayed long term, but that's not how "Wall Street" works. It's no different from dropping shares in a company once the risk gets to high. The future for crypto, if one exists, is beyond the horizon for Wall Street in terms of a payout. Their lack of support may very well have contributed to the collapse, but I don't think they've actively made plans to destroy crypto-currencies.
Crypto mostly collapsed because it failed to be useful. The MasterCard deal was the most useful part and only because it could convert funny money to real money, and very few people used that. MasterCard is likely begin generous when they say "less than 1% of customers". There's no way that close to 1% of MasterCards customers had a crypto-backed card.
I think the opposite is true - they were very much behind the rise of crypto, and now they're just divesting and it's naturally collapsing back to a niche technology.
they are agnostic. they make money from fees either way, up or down.
I think two aspects are rather important in viewing Wall Street. They are agnostics so only want to make money. And they are not monolithic. So there is plenty of players are in their own sub-fields and products.
Some might want to extract money with crypto from public. And some might. And they might not care if someone else also makes some money as long as they make enough of it themselvs.
> elite
Are you implying that basic understanding of finance and economics makes you a part of some 'elite' these days?
nah. it never took off. i'll believe crypto is a viable currency when people are using it to pay for haircuts, oil changes, and $25 worth of groceries.
as it stands it's just a vehicle for finance-tech-bro speculation.