The listing of so many altcoins in the robinhood app (monero, zcash, etc) plus it’s low fees makes buying on altcoin exchanges that only accept crypto like binance a lot less attractive. No longer will users have to buy $ltc/$eth on coinbase/gdax then transfer to another exchange to buy altcoins.
This will have a big impact on the crypto ecosystem. The gauntlet has been thrown down for coinbase.
Edit: my bad. I got confused by the app update, Robinhood are just displaying tracking data for alts :
>-Robinhood is not allowing you to transfer in crypto from outside.
So robinhood is the sole supplier of coins on their exchange? Imagine if NYSE was also running a prop trading operation on the side, talk about conflicts of interest...
Afaik Robinhood is actually buying and selling coins on existing exchanges and baking any fees into the spread. For example, gdax doesn't charge any fee if you are a maker/using limit orders.
One of the above, hence the question. (I assume the latter and that they’re just a marketing organization.) The scummy part is that their customers don’t know this.
What makes you think their customers don't know this? It's in their brokerage disclosure statement, same as anybody else who does this. It just doesn't... matter. Zero-fee transaction trading from my phone outweighs this.
It doesn't matter if money doesn't matter, yeah. Zero-fee transaction trading does not outweigh this, unless you have only peanuts to trade such that trading fees are more significant than spreads/execution.
Almost zero customers at any brokerage are aware of this - how many do you think read the fine print? It’s an unethical industry. And zero fee trading is great, except it’s not zero fee. But “stupid people deserve to get fleeced” seems to be enough ethics for most people.
> The listing of so many altcoins in the robinhood app (monero, zcash, etc) plus it’s low fees makes buying on altcoin exchanges that only accept crypto like binance a lot less attractive.
I don't understand. My understanding is they allow only BTC and ETH on their platform. So, if I want to buy a ICO token I do need to buy ETH here/GDAX etc and transfer to another exchange.
Robinhood are listing monero, zcash and a bunch of other coins. So you can buy them directly for fiat.
Coinbase allow you to buy ltc, eth, bch and btc. If you wanted to buy monero you would first have to buy one of those then transfer to another exchange.
Edit: my bad. I got confused by the new Robinhood ux:
Anyone that uses the Robinhood platform to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum today comes into a market that has lost roughly half of its value over the past couple of months.
I believe those coins can be tracked but not bought.
My bad. I am still in the queue to have crypto trading turned on in the Robinhood app. When you open the app it makes it look like they are supporting multiple coins at launch:
You can only trade BTC and ETH at this time. Robinhood allows you to track 16 currencies, although I imagine this tracking is going to be used to estimate interest in other cryptocurrencies to integrate.
So you can't sell your crypto there? Where is all this bitcoin coming from then? Sounds like robinhood is hoping for a huge disparity, so they can dump what they have for better prices.
Nice, I might have to look into them. I believe I did I couple months ago and they had a long waiting period or a freeze on new accounts or something like that.
Same. I got really excited when I opened the app and saw the update. Then I read the fine print and alas it was just pricing data for alts. I would dump binance in a heart beat if I could buy alts on Robinhood or coinbase :(
As a user of both, I'm excited that Coinbase finally has a competitor. The fees alone on Coinbase, not to mention transfer times, are getting too ridiculous in my opinion.
If you're a Coinbase user, please don't use Coinbase to buy. The fees are really high. Instead, use GDAX. Your Coinbase account is sufficient to register with GDAX and all your privileges like limits, KYC, etc. is carried over.
It supports both Market Orders and Limit Orders. Transfers from GDAX to Coinbase are instantaneous and off-blockchain, so there are no fees.
As a bonus fun fact, if you transfer BTC from GDAX to your personal wallet, there is no Bitcoin network fee charged to you. However, if you use Coinbase, you'll end up paying a lot more in fees than you must because Coinbase uses very inefficient fee-estimation systems and still haven't deployed SegWit or batching which would reduce network fee for their customers.
> Accepted ID types: For our US customers, you must submit one state-issued driver's license or ID card.
Not sure about GC, but it's quite common to have either a driver license or a non-driver license state ID. It might even accept Real ID which is something you can get through DMV. If you live in the U.S. I highly recommend have a state-issued ID (Real ID would be a wise one at this point for future domestic traveling).
They rejected my GC and I came across another hn reader who had the same issue. I know this from first hand experience with gdax.
I’m renewing my drivers license next month so this problem will go away. Just letting others on hn know as you can be stuck in a verification queue for a long time.
Kraken has gotten better since their big rewrite (just this year), but it's still not as great as other options (like GDAX). It is better than it was though. Also, Kraken has margin trading (and shorting), and GDAX doesn't (if you want to use those tools).
I tried using Kraken a few months ago and their website was down frequently and the crypto withdrawal functionality was also frequently not working/unavailable.
Coinbase/GDAX has been gone down a few times but not at the frequency/duration I experienced with Kraken, YMMV.
Gemini is ok, but less volume than GDAX and I'm not sure they have a free type of orders. Also Gemini's interface is personally less interesting for day trading. But to that point GDAX's graphing interface is a bit odd and represents data differently than say trading view.
Trading view is by far the best to check out a coin, see its indicators etc imo.
Still I think it's good to diversify your funds over various exchanges, just in case of a hack.
Doesn’t Gemini have an advantage to gdax in the way funds transfers work? A friend was telling me about this but I have yet to try it, I’m still in a queue to be verified for Gemini.
Kraken did a massive upgrade so it doesn't have issues like it used to. People haven't come back yet however, and the spread is pretty bad. It's the only exchange I've found to support margin trading and shorting for US customers which is why I went back.
I bought one ETH last fall that Coinbase took away from my account and has been holding hostage from me for 8 months. Apparently my Credit Card expiration date was not correct or something, but they successfully took my money... and show that I have no crypto either. Their support has been a nightmare. I'm really excited to move away from Coinbase to Robinhood as soon as possible.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/ paints a pretty ugly picture of Coinbase's support. I'm glad I never had issues but took all my money out this year.
I had a few issues with them and I contacted them in every way I could. No response, ever. Not even after months of trying. Coinbase support just doesn't exist.
I think we need to see how Robinhood shapes up. AFAIK their customer care isn't great either. And with their estoeric rules on coin transfer this might not go down well.
Just wanted to say that I've passed hundreds of thousands of dollars through Coinbase and have always received stellar support. Not everyone hates them :)
so far in the market I feel like Coinbase has acted as one of the only – and certainly most vocal – trustworthy marketplaces. Especially with a concept like cryptocurrency which in and of itself seems a bit "sketchy" to most (especially becuase of its association with black markets), many competing marketplaces dont instill a lot of confidence in users. That may be something as simple as UX/UI or branding, either of which would solidly add Robinhood into the "easy to understand for non-techies" category along with Coinbase.
On first glance, it seems to fall into the category of "not-intimidating" along with the previously mentioned markets. The point i was trying to illustrate was that there are many laces on the web that skew much more towards LocalBitcoins or the like*.
A lot of these kind of sketchy sites have been stomped out in the frenzy that was the Bitcoin Bubble, being replaced by these more legitimate - at least at first glance - sites.
As more scandals like Mt. Gox etc arise, however, trust in the currency - and random places on the internet to buy and sell said currency - will drop, leaving only those more "reputable" and known brands like Coinbase and Robinhood behind.
I signed up for it weeks ago but they haven't verified my ID yet and haven't responded to inquiries about how long it will take. It'll be 4 weeks this weekend. Also, their process to link my bank account felt like a scam - they required a huge amount of information that traditional banking institutions don't need to withdraw/transfer. It needed my bank account password(!) and all of my security question answers! Plus copies of my ID.
You can buy crypto for no-fee on Coinbase by using their integrated GDAX exchange. Simple post a limit buy order instead of a market order for zero fee purchases.
Then I got good news for you! the RobinHood app's transfer times are infinite, because you can't transfer the coins out :).
They never let you hold the bitcoin--all buys/sells take place on their system. I imagine they did this to avoid a lot of challenges that come with being able to transfer coins out.
What fees ? I have never paid a single cent in fees in coinbase. Buying/selling with limit orders is free in GDAX and they pay the miner's fees themselves when you withdraw. I don't even know how they make money.
I'm near-term bullish, but mass marketing a crypto brokerage using imagery of astronauts and moons is really irresponsible and will most likely end terribly for many customers.
Apart from the "texting and trading"-part I don't get why it's appalling at all! Other than that it's a playful and stylish ad about the "to the moon" crypto inside joke.
Sorry, but if people are too dumb to understand that it's a joke and purely for entertainment value, they deserve to lose their money. It's a gag. Just like Lionel Richie in the TD Ameritrade spots that aired during the Super Bowl.
You're not buying stocks because Lionel Richie said you can trade after hours, are you?
Robinhood provides commission-free trading on every stock and ETF. This is huge for small-time retail investors like myself, who want to incrementally buy up positions on a monthly basis. I agree that cryptocurrency trading can potentially end badly, 1929-style, but I also give kudos to Robinhood for increasing competition among brokerages to make small-time retail investing less costly.
Great, I'm glad it works for you. I'm mostly concerned about the UI, which promotes frequent trading based on hype, and their advertising. Supporting cryptocurrency seems to be another step away from promoting sound investing for retail investors.
We're at the top of the market. Their capitalizing on that. Bad investors will make bad decisions on any platform. When we hit a recession, all these people will pull out just like any other recession. We'll see them back 7 years later.
Schwab does have a 6% minimum cash allocation which afaict they pay ~0.15% on. If you could have invested that at 10% nominal returns you're paying 0.591% in opportunity costs.
I don't understand how its anymore or less a gambling app than scott trade or any other retail investing platform. You can still do fundamentals analysis on the stocks you buy.
Investing should be done with care and thought. Due diligence is required. At best, Robinhood's app and advertising portrays investing as easy, and at worst they portray investing as something to be done on a whim.
The act of buying a security should be easy, but the thought that goes into that decision is MUCH more important. They trivialize this aspect of investing in their advertising and app, which I believe is dangerous for the retail investors who don't know better.
I can certainly name a number of investments with less risk than cryptocurrencies. Namely, basically every traditional investment: stocks, bonds, gold, real estate, ...
I don't quite understand why saying that cryptocurrency investment is highly speculative requires me to offer "zero-risk" investments. You know as well as I that none exist.
Speculation is investing. The difference in risk is a difference of degree, not category. Hedge funds, venture capitalists, real estate investors, etc. all routinely invest their or their clients’ assets by engaging in speculation.
The word you’re looking for is “gambling”, which is a meaningful difference. This isn’t just pedantic - the word “speculate” has a well-established definition in financial jargon, and altering that definition clouds discussions that could benefit from precision. Moreover, it implicitly puts “Real Investing” on a pedestal of responsibility and financial acumen, while dismissing the utility of speculation.
Sometimes people try to differentiate between speculation and investing by restricting their definitions to high risk trading and value investing, respectively. But in real world investing, it is extremely common for people to “invest” their money in vehicles which are “speculating” on securities of various types.
So now they need more retail crypto currency traders so that hedge funds can figure out how to trade the new crypto currency options and ETFs? If I recall correctly Robinhood was founded to do this originally for stocks (that’s why they have no commission). But, retail stock traders just stopped trading or went to S&P index funds so I guess this is a pivot ?
I feel the term "opens" is a bit generous at this point. I'm in California. I updated the Robinhood app and I do see the crypto stuff. But when I try to use it, it says I'm on a wait list with over 1 million other people.
Robinhood makes money on it's "gold" service, which is $10/month. For that $10 they float you the cash to immediately reinvest cash after stock sales (rather than waiting 3 days) and they give you $2000 in margin. Really it's pretty genius. They figured out that transaction costs for exchanges are essentially free. With their gold service they are monetizing at least 6% profit margin, i.e. you can think of the $120 yearly as a cost of borrowing $2000, which would boil down to 6% interest rate. Since that money is secured by assets in your account, this is actually a really attractive rate for the risk profile, and, likely scenario, few people are constantly maxed out at $2000. So membership / margin lent is their total profit margin. I bet its well over 10%. Not bad.
I'm not exactly sure how it works but people are able to take much more than $2000 on margin. If you saw on the Robinhood reddit after XIV crashed, there are people who owe over $30,000. Maybe someone else can chime in on how the "gold" currency works in Robinhood to allow that.
I was listening to a podcast the other day where someone from the financial industry said retail order flow (from Robin Hood) has value, because you can simply make the exact opposite trades and make money off them. Nothing tricky involved, because retail traders (on average) consistently do the opposite of what is smart. So, Robin Hood would be getting paid for order flow and someone else would be paying them, and making money off the trades.
Just like they make money on stocks, selling their order flow. There are tons of cryptocurrency hedge funds who would be more than happy to Robinhood to get that kind of data.
This is out-and-out illegal, and I can pretty much guarantee they are not doing it. The SEC has a group of regulations, RegNMS, which mean that you will never trade at a worse price than the best price offered in the marketplace.
There are two ways that they can easily make money aside from fees. One is to lend their securities to other parties that want to make short sales; that's a fair amount of money. The other is to sell their order flow and keep the price improvement -- if a dark pool or router can fill the order at a better price than the NBBO (National Best Bid/Offer), then they can keep the difference. While the latter sounds a lot like "widening the spread", it is still guaranteed to be inside the best spread offered on all the trading centers that publish market data.
EDIT: Note that I am referring strictly to their equities side; the cryptocurrency side has no such regulations and they could well be doing it. I interepreted the GP comment to mean how they make money as a company, rather than on these particular trades.
Yeah, you're totally right about NBBO in equities. I'm talking about crypto, where fees are non-trivial and Robinhood is not just covering out of pocket.
fee-less market orders? Does this provide an API? I guess this offers an alternative to Coinbase for the casual buyer, but looking at gdax, it seems like 99% of volume is bots tracking price at larger exchanges.
I'm curious to see how arbitrage will play out with this.
I have a question for Bitcoin fans. This is the opening sentence of the abstract from the original Bitcoin paper:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1]
In the Bitcoin community is that vision basically dead? As here, all of the action seems to be through financial institutions.
It's still early days. It's like asking if the goals of the Internet are dead because most people log-in via AOL and browse only AOL curated content.
Crypto adoption is still at a very low percentage in the United States. Imagine one day when _most_ people own crypto, and are willing to transact in it, and there is more advanced tooling and software and understanding. What will the world look like then?
As a specific example, take a look at the 0x protocol, and the many relayers that are building on top of it like Radar Relay or Dy/Dx. 0x and these companies are tying to build exchanges that let you trade alts with zero counter-party risk. The trade occurs via on-chain smart contracts.
The above could all fail; I'm not saying it _will_ happen. Just that it's too early to declare the original vision dead.
And as sibling commentators have noted, even today one can easily send BTC peer-to-peer once you have some without any intermediaries.
And depending on when you define the "launch" of the internet, it's 10 year anniversary was in 1999, square in the AOL timeperiod that the parent comment was talking about.
I know you put launch in quotes, but just to emphasize - the internet was launched much earlier than 1989 in terms of the technology. The base technology was worked on in the 60s and 70s, and things like email were already in use in the 70s and early 80s.
Of course, digital cash has been worked on for many years too, but if you compare the bitcoin whitepaper to, say, the TCP/IP RFC, then you'd expect AOL-comparable bitcoin usage in 2030, more or less.
If you compare this underwater spacetravel whitepaper I wrote in 2008 to, say, the TCP/IP RFC, then you'd also expect AOL-comparable underwater space travel usage in 2030, more or less.
AOL's heyday was more like '93. By 95-96, connecting directly to the internet was becoming explosively popular and everyone was starting an ISP. Source: first hand experience.
A wildly speculative investment in an era of really low (in fact somewhat negative) interest rates? I mean we have a global asset bubble in general, it's not surprising that some of it is spilling into new and untested stores of value, i suppose.
I agree that current crypto-currency ecosystems are pretty insane, but the original idea was super-cool.
Every traditional investment seems to be getting safer and lower in return, so there's all this capital looking for something better...and it's like people assume that high return and high risk go together, so let's invent stuff that has artificially created risk! I was listening to someone who said it's like the opposite of what led to the financial crisis, where they were repackaging risky investments into ostensibly safe derivatives. Now we're creating risky investments out of nothing because we don't seem to have enough risk these days...
> Imagine one day when _most_ people own crypto, and are willing to transact in it,
It doesn't really seem we are moving in that direction. While more people know about bitcoin and more people own bitcoin, it seems like the number of people willing to transact in it has made no progress.
> It's like asking if the goals of the Internet are dead because most people log-in via AOL and browse only AOL curated content.
Arguably, the original goals and design of the Internet ARE dead (or not dead, but certainly not dominant or ascendant). While the AOL business model may have failed, similar closed systems have dominated most of the content and use of the internet. The number of people who build their own sites on any topic or even publish blogs vs. the number of people who post to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat is pretty tiny. Open federated chat clients have been mostly replace by closed, proprietary systems.
> The above could all fail; I'm not saying it _will_ happen. Just that it's too early to declare the original vision dead.
While it may be too early to declare it dead. Your analogy to the internet seems like a strong argument to be concerned that the vision is dying.
> While more people know about bitcoin and more people own bitcoin, it seems like the number of people willing to transact in it has made no progress.
I'd say in some cases there have been regressions. Many indie-type groups have stopped accepting Bitcoin due to its volatility and high transaction fees. Stripe has announced its support for Bitcoin will end late April.
Certainly there's the possibility that things will calm down and it will bounce back, but personally I'm pretty bearish.
Individuals can still transact without interference if they wish, and no one can arbitrarily issue new bitcoin at a whim, so the important properties of bitcoin are still intact. The vision never included anything about preventing middlemen from using the blockchain. Bitcoin is about adding degrees of freedom, not removing them.
This is exactly it. Just like with the Internet... you may choose to transact directly, but if you choose not to the fundamental capability of direct transaction (or direct IP) still remains. Choosing an institution to hold your coins leaves open the option to withdraw your coins and put them somewhere else, perhaps even your own personal wallet on your own personal node if you so wish.
The dream of a micro-payment platform remains to be realized, however. The gains in Bitcoin have been towards freedom, but not efficiency.
> and no one can arbitrarily issue new bitcoin at a whim
Anyone can fork it though. And the interesting part, as seen for bitcoin cash, is that the total market cap of the fork + original chain right after the fork was greater than the value pre-fork. You can technically argue that this doesn't amount to creating new bitcoins, but for all practical purposes the total amount of digital tokens did increase.
> In the Bitcoin community is that vision basically dead?
Not at all. The primary innovators of the protocol are pushing forward with privacy and scalability enhancements every day. The cypherpunk ethos is strong if you know where to look (hint: not CNBC).
Sure, there are lots of corporate-types pushing corporate-type stuff. But any industry will have that before too long, especially if there is profit to be made.
I was originally pretty open-minded; blockchains are a cool technology, and I like to see people try out-there experiments. But for me this stuff increasingly falls into the same bucket as 3D movies/TV: lots of excitement, cool tech, and a plausible story as to why it could amazing valuable. But in practice, I've seen little value actually demonstrated, so my eyes generally glaze over at this point.
That's part of why I'm curious to hear from people who were excited about the initial vision. Maybe there's a pony in there somewhere?
I own a small business in Venezuela. Nothing tech related, but in the food industry.
Bitcoin has been a godsend. We are able to save money again having it as hard currency. I do exchange some of my btc for dollars, using btc to help to make the transaction (Why change it? Because I respect that you shouldn't have on crypto more than you can't afford to lose).
I'm buying small amounts every day (As our currency depreciate every day as well), but it give us the chance to save and is easier and safer than buying usd in cash.
I do understand the benefits have yet to "trickle down" to the regular people (I'm after all, a business owner), but it will trickle down. Our business is safer, I can afford to raise wages and able to plan ahead (As much as you can plan ahead in a country like Venezuela).
Using localbitcoin to buy them. I either send them to a wallet for long term storage or use uphold to change to usd.
I'm only buying in btc "saving money". Local currency (which my business generates) is spent either in supplies, wages, or just living here. I have yet to change some btc back to local currency (Which I might do to make a large purcharse or some emergency), but will probably just change USD cash (it will be easier).
BTC is not being used for small purchases (So no bitcoin to pay for coffee). Is really just used as "store of wealth". Most business could take USD if you want to use it for payment and some even demand USD (car repairs, construction work, that kind of stuff). Most people DO know about bitcoin, but I wouldn't say is mainstream to own it. There's still fear about volatility.
I agree it's a farce. Save from speculators, nobody is going to buy Petro as nobody trust the Venezuelan goverment. It's probably a money laundering scheme.
Maybe the government will try to force it on the population (By making certain things only payable in Petro), but nobody has any reason to invest in Petro as it is now. The next goverment will surely not recognize it and it's value will drop to zero (Maybe even before a new government steps in)
This makes sense, but isn't there going to be upheaval shortly because the government of Venezuela can't print Bitcoin?
On the one hand, I don't see how creating the Petro helps the government any more than printing bolivars, and on the other hand, the fact that they are trying it indicates they are kind of responding in a cargo cult way to Bitcoin, which is a threat because it can't be printed by them.
Assuming ordinary people use Bitcoin that solves their problems in the short run, but what happens politically next? If it is seriously expected that the Petro will capture the cryptocurrency "magic", and that fails, it seems like a crackdown on Bitcoin might happen next.
They might try to crack it down. It will probably go the same way as the crack down of the dollar. Won't work. And is even easier to hide bitcoin that to hide USD cash.
The downside of dealing with local currency is too great, so people are willing to risk being caught dealing with USD or BTC.
Thanks for replying. In my long-ago time living in South America, it was pretty common for people to save money as hard currency. But they'd just do a single exchange, local currency for USD. Could you say more about what makes the two-step through Bitcoin easier and safer than going direct? And have you estimated the extra cost for the extra leg?
You probably aren't the intended audience. Ask someone in Zimbabwe or Venezuela how they feel about crypto. Ask a woman in Afghanistan where all her money is considered property of men. Ask a millennial that has no other way out of the class system they were born into. Ask someone tired of governments printing money to finance wars.
You'll get more positive answers.
Give me a break. Those are political and socioeconomic problems. None of them are solved by tech. You can't sprinkle Satoshi's fairy dust on Afghanistan women and expect them to have equal footing with their male counterparts. You can't just inject Satoshi's Revolutionary Blockchain into zimbabwe or venezuela and solve their political problems. Life just doesn't work that way.
> Ask a millennial that has no other way out of the class system they were born into.
I don't know that betting on cryptocurrencies is a desirable & admirable method to increase social mobility. Bitcoin lost > 60% of its value from mid-December to mid-February.
I don’t understand how it’s useful to poor farmer in Zimbabwe when crypto transaction takes hour and cost is equivalent to $20 which is their monthly income.
Sorry this line doesn't work for me. Previously I worked on Mifos, an open-source microfinance accounting system, and worked for Kiva.org, a microfinance broker. I have at least a passing familiarity with the financial needs in the third world.
I don't see Bitcoin as doing much there. The peer-to-peer aspect requires computing and connectivity requirements most people don't have. What has had mild uptake is new online financial institutions that use Bitcoin. But I don't see any real advantage there. Compare instead with M-Pesa, which has over approximately the same period gained millions and millions of users.
I'm not usually one to defend the parent in this kind of argument, but I think there's room for both. Social reform can take years or even decades. If Bitcoin acts as a band-aid while those reforms take their time to progress, it could be a net positive there. But I do remain skeptical that it's actually making much of a difference.
It costs $2.50 to have your transaction go through in the next 10 minutes. It costs 50c to have it go through in the next HOUR. Bitcoins fee structure is wholly antithetical to its use as currency but TPTB in the mining ecosystem are making fantastic profits milking the fee rates.
Nobody is really using it as a currency when having any amount change hands costs on average a fancy coffee drink from a fast food joint.
Sure. My question isn't about what's theoretically possible. It's about what people are actually doing, which seems to be very far from the original vision.
Last week I paid two online orders (not drugs, thanks for asking) with Bitcoin. I do that occasionally. Others do it too. Mostly people don't go around shouting "I bought something with Bitcoin" because, well, what's the point. Doesn't mean that it's not happening.
Nonsense. Multiple teams are developing Lightning Network implementations and anyone who desires to commit capital to operate a Lightning node can do so without asking permission from anyone.
How is that contradictory with blockstream's lightning network business model? Redhat's business model is around Linux even though anyone can commit capital to build their own Linux business.
Bitcoin itself has a laughably low transaction speed, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4/s. The main way around this appears to "trade" crypto in exchanges without most clients ever taking physical possession of their coins via the blockchain itself.
This is why exchanges getting their hot wallets hacked is a big deal, a shocking percentage of crypto "traders" leave their holdings with the exchange.
The Internet used to have laughably low speed as well. Are you old enough to have used a dial-up modem?
You are right that 4 tx/s is too low in the long-run. But people are innovating: DAG networks like Nano, BTC's Lightning Network, Ethereum's Plasma and sharding, etc.
Maybe those ideas will work, maybe they won't, but very smart people like Vitalik believe they will work, and they are putting serious time and effort into them. Happily, Lightning Network, sharding and other proposals are making serious pushes forward this year as a top priority, so we don't need to argue -- we'll soon see how well these upgrades work in practice.
I had a series of dial-up modems for many, many years. It was always good enough because it's not like we were watching Netflix on them.
Bitcoin is not good enough. Compare to alternatives that aren't cryptocurrency and it's just straight garbage. Saying that people are innovating is a pointless tautology, that's always true and doesn't change the fact that right now it is absolute garbage.
(I trade bitcoin futures. I don't in any way believe in or care for the tech, I'm just here to make money.)
False. You're referring to an adversarial situation where your payment channel counterparty tries to close the channel using an old state that gives them more of the money in the channel than they should own. The duration during which you can then post a breach remedy transaction to deprive them of ALL the channel value is configurable when you update the channel state, but the default is 1 week. Eventually the expectation is that you'll even be able to outsource this operation to third parties to monitor the blockchain on your behalf and post the breach remedy transaction if needed.
If I don't trust one person, I'm supposed to instead trust a tertiary entity to act in my best interests? What motivation could this third party have other than to simply make money?
It seems as though the lightning network is being marketed as a solution, but I don't understand how it isn't simply creating an even bigger problem by stripping me of any/all control.
>In the Bitcoin community is that vision basically dead?
No, and based on the question it seems like you don’t understand what’s going on very well. Robinhood is a fiat<>btc channel, has nothing to do with btc’s vision.
you are right in the sense that the percentage of such posts (focusing on financial instutions) are too high here.
A small percentage should be ok if you believe in the vision, because bitcoin is not just blockchain, it needs a coin with financial value to work, and for that matter it needs users that either trade or at least can enter the system with what they already have (fiat). Such institutions do the onboarding of users. Afterwrds, those users can then stay in the crypto(currency) world without using financial institutions if they wish...
It's the perfect comment. The technophobes will upvote because they think it's sarcastic and an anti-crypto comment and the techies will upvote because it matches their world view of crypto becoming an important part of our society.
Um, are you guys sure that "Robin Hood" is a good name for a cryptocoin startup given past history? the "takes from the rich and gives to the poor" guy?
-Robinhood is not allowing you to transfer in crypto from outside.
-Robinhood does allow you to transfer crypto out but you have to go through extra verification steps.
See: https://ibb.co/dHNENc
The listing of so many altcoins in the robinhood app (monero, zcash, etc) plus it’s low fees makes buying on altcoin exchanges that only accept crypto like binance a lot less attractive. No longer will users have to buy $ltc/$eth on coinbase/gdax then transfer to another exchange to buy altcoins.
This will have a big impact on the crypto ecosystem. The gauntlet has been thrown down for coinbase.
Edit: my bad. I got confused by the app update, Robinhood are just displaying tracking data for alts :
https://ibb.co/noPN8H