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Ethereum Will Match Visa In Scale In a 'Couple of Years,' Says Founder (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the matter-of-time dept.

Ethereum's founder, Vitalik Buterin, believes that his cryptocurrency has the potential to replace things like credit card networks and gaming servers. He even goes as far to say that Ethereum will replace Visa in "a couple of years," though he later clarified that "ethereum *will have Visa-scale tx capacity*, not that it will 'replace Visa.'" TechCrunch reports: "There's the average person who's already heard of bitcoin and the average person who hasn't," he said. His project itself builds upon that notion by adding more utility to the blockchain, thereby creating something everyone will want to hear about. "Where Ethereum comes from is basically you take the idea of crypto economics and the kinds of economic incentives that keeps things like bitcoin going to create decentralized networks with memory for a whole bunch of applications," he said. "A good blockchain application is something that needs decentralization and some kind of shared memory." That's what he's building and hopes others will build on the Ethereum network.

Right now the network is a bit too slow for most mainstream applications. "Bitcoin is processing a bit less than 3 transactions per second," he said. "Ethereum is doing five a second. Uber gives 12 rides a second. It will take a couple of years for the blockchain to replace Visa." Buterin doesn't think everything should run on the blockchain but many things can. As the technology expands it can grow to replace many services that require parallelization -- that is programs that should run at the same time.

54 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. translation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Founder is worried that his investment will become worthless if he can't convince people that it's the next big thing.

    1. Re:translation by Kokuyo · · Score: 2

      You mean like about 90% of all products out there?

    2. Re:translation by admin7087 · · Score: 1

      They had too many high-level security failures, though.

    3. Re:translation by Lorphos · · Score: 1

      If he were worried he could sell his ETH right now and be a multi-millionaire. That's obviously not his motivation.

    4. Re:translation by dasgoober · · Score: 1

      Only if he can convince enough people to make ETH generally acceptable, which he's trying to do, here.
      Otherwise, he may only be able to buy a Palo Alto condo,

  2. Let me get this straight.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ethereum currently does 5 transactions per second.

    Wikipedia tells me VISA can manage up to 56,000 per second - and that was "a couple of years" ago, so it can no doubt manage more than that now.

    So, in "a couple of years" the Ethereum processing is going to scale by a factor of (more than) 11,000?

    If you think that's true then I've got a wonderful Olympic stadium to sell you...

    1. Re:Let me get this straight.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Negligent. Give me a payment system that does not steal 3.5% in transaction fees.

      I want a Paypal alternative.

    2. Re:Let me get this straight.. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      If you figure that 10% of Visa transactions are some kind of attempted fraud...

      That is because all you need for many credit card transactions is the CC number and the expiration date, which are semi-public. While crypto-currencies may be used for nefarious purposes, it is much harder for the transaction itself to be fraudulent.

    3. Re:Let me get this straight.. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In theory, you are correct. In practice, keeping a private key that controls access to real money secret is very difficult and with most such systems if you have access to someone's private key then you have complete and permanent control over their accounts. If I steal your credit card and make some fraudulent transactions, the Visa (or whoever) can reverse those transactions and won't be able to take the money from me. This is guaranteed by law in a lot of places (even for debit cards though not, I believe, in the USA). In contrast, if I steal your private key (or the card that it's embedded in), then I can immediately transfer all of your money to another account over which you have no control. There is a public ledger saying where that account went, but there's no mechanism for retrieving the money and it can be accessed from any jurisdiction in the world, so I can take it to a market in any country in the world to convert it into local currency and then take that money to another exchange and convert it back into the cryptocurrency, at which point it's untraceable. I may pay a big transaction fee, but I don't care, because it's your money.

      To stop me from doing this, you must keep your private key secure. For most people, this probably means having a bank store it in their vault and carrying around the private key for a smaller wallet that doesn't have access to most of your money.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re:Let me get this straight.. by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 2

      In a couple of years Ethereum will say as much bs as much as all the major banks combined.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    5. Re:Let me get this straight.. by icejai · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Precisely.

      Not just that, but it's already very difficult for professional lawyers to write loophole-free contracts, and professional programmers to write bug-free code.

      Ethereum wants to combine *both*, with *permanent transactions*??

      The "hacks" on Ethereum so far have demonstrated that its problems are precisely these.

      It is inherently flawed.

      I see it being used by companies internally, running their own mini-Ethereum networks, as a replacement for a traditional DB system, but only for specialized use-cases.

    6. Re:Let me get this straight.. by mbkennel · · Score: 1

      Individual large banks do a few thousands of transactions per second (and need higher capacity for holiday and bulk payments hitting in a batch), and there are strict latency rules imposed by the networks (i.e. Visa & MC) for banks to run the transaction through authorization systems and fraud scoring, total latency is well under a second, any individual piece, maybe 25 to 50 ms.

      Some of it runs on z/OS mainframes, the rest, on-premise unix servers.

    7. Re:Let me get this straight.. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      The problem is revocation. If I steal your smartcard, I can immediately transfer all of your money elsewhere. You need to race me to your backup and transfer all of your money to another wallet before I can steal it. If I steal your debit card then your bank can simply reverse the transactions.

      This is both the advantage and disadvantage of block chains. They're immutable public ledgers. Once a transaction has gone through and the network has agreed that it's taken place, it is public and irreversible. This is great for some things, but not so great for financial transactions where some percentage are expected to be fraudulent.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. He did not say that by Interfacer · · Score: 5, Informative

    He was misquoted, and in fact has explicitly said so on twitter that he was misquoted and provided his original quote:
    http://www.globalcryptopress.c...

    1. Re:He did not say that by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Even with the correction, his claims still seem outlandish. He is predicting a five orders of magnitude increase in transaction processing capability in a relatively short amount of time.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:He did not say that by CastrTroy · · Score: 2

      Relevant XKCD.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    3. Re:He did not say that by urusan · · Score: 1

      He's expecting this change due to the planned switch-over to proof of stake:
      https://www.coindesk.com/ether...
      https://www.coindesk.com/ether...
      https://github.com/ethereum/wi...

      If proof of stake works, it will fix the fundamental scalability issues that cryptocurrencies currently struggle with. It could also implode spectacularly if people figure out how to game the system or figure out a major exploit. It makes sense that he'd be very confident in his course of action, but only time will tell whether he's right or not.

  4. Vitalik Buterin is a modern age genius by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Even though this sounds outlandish, there is no doubt in my mind that if he says it, it will be true. Vitalik is a genius comparable to the likes of Newton, Leibniz, Lagrange, and so on. Years ago when bitcoin was in its infancy slashdotters were very eager to shoot it down as a non-starter that will never be worth collectively more than a couple thousand dollars. If anything, there is a very strong trend indicating that if something is laughed at at slashdot, it will be a great success.

    1. Re:Vitalik Buterin is a modern age genius by Bongo · · Score: 1

      Aren't there also technologies which had great promise but didn't live up to it because there was another innovation which was needed but which didn't appear for a few decades? So the big question isn't the "if" but the "when".

    2. Re:Vitalik Buterin is a modern age genius by coofercat · · Score: 1

      LOL - your post made me laugh so much I lost a bit of my lunch onto my monitor. You'll go far, son.

    3. Re:Vitalik Buterin is a modern age genius by conquistadorst · · Score: 1

      Even though this sounds outlandish, there is no doubt in my mind that if he says it, it will be true. Vitalik is a genius comparable to the likes of Newton, Leibniz, Lagrange, and so on. Years ago when bitcoin was in its infancy slashdotters were very eager to shoot it down as a non-starter that will never be worth collectively more than a couple thousand dollars. If anything, there is a very strong trend indicating that if something is laughed at at slashdot, it will be a great success.

      It'll blast off as soon as crypto currencies become widely used by common people for everyday transactions, like buying their groceries, paying their mortgage, or filling up their car. It'll take off so fast everyone's heads will never stop spinning. Until then, everything is speculation. Bitcoin, Etherium, and the like may be superseded by yet more superior crypto currencies, maybe governments will continue embracing, maybe they will become the most secure way of transacting business, or maybe they will unreliable once it hits mainstream? Whatever challenges come up, I'm sure they will meet them head on and adapt as needed, but who knows what the future will hold.

      As for your wide disparaging remarks about slashdot readers, I suggest taking more nuanced approach. Anytime you mention any idea to a wide group of people you're going to get a lot of diversity in opinions. There will always be nay-say'ers. Negative remarks from the few shouldn't lead you to generalize the many. We are pre-programmed to do this at the most primal level so it's not easy to undo. It's why we love to cling to our racism, prejudices, and stereotypes even though we claim to be cured of them all the time.

    4. Re:Vitalik Buterin is a modern age genius by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      You appear to think that there is a need for cryptocurrency among common people. They're used to dealing in dollars or Euros or whatever, and their current systems work pretty well. Most people don't care about their financial transactions being traceable, and if they do wouldn't be convinced that cryptocurrencies will do a better job of providing privacy. Most people aren't going to know what to do with a private key. In the US, for example, I have to deal with the government in dollars, and if the court awards something it will be in dollars. I need to do accounting in dollars, so I can fill out my income taxes. If I have to use dollars for all that, why would I want to use another currency in addition?

      If cryptocurrencies go anywhere, it won't be with most people.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  5. Faster Blocks by mentil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was actually thinking about this the other day. I'm wondering, instead of a new block being generated every 10 minutes or so, with a 1-coin reward worth ~$3000 being given to each person who creates a new block, why aren't new blocks generated every couple seconds, with a say 0.0005-coin reward worth ~$1? Yeah I know the supply of coins determines the price so that 0.005 coins could be worth $3000... but it wouldn't, because a new block is made every few seconds. Regardless of block size, the issue is that more transactions per hour means more blockchain growth per hour. If the global economy were to run on a single blockchain... that'd be a lot of data, particularly to a computer not holding a rack of HDDs and connected to the internet via fiber, with serious monetary investments to keep up with growth. Either a way needs to be found to cull old/irrelevant data, or cryptocurrency maintainers will have to choose between two options: only large institutions will be able to afford to track the blockchain; or low transaction volume will keep cryptocurrencies a financial novelty like they are now. Increasing adoption and transaction volume also requires getting the transaction charge below what Visa etc. are charging.

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    1. Re:Faster Blocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The 10 minute delay for new block creation is to prevent blockchain forking so work isn't done on orphaned blocks, it's partly to correct for network latency. It is mostly a matter of hashing efficiency and also preventing the larger pools from forking the chain constantly. Ethereum corrects for this by allowing these blocks to be part of the reward, they call these 'uncles'. I suspect in the long term the 'uncle' concept will be Ethereum's down fall.

    2. Re:Faster Blocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The issue is block propagation. When a miner mines a block, it has to propagate through the network so that other miners can start working on mining the next block on top of that. If it doesn't propagate quickly, they'll finish their own block, so now you have two or even more "heads" of the chain. Sooner or later a miner will build a block on top of one of these heads, depending on which he received first. Now that is the longest chain, and the blockchain is reorganized, making all the other "orphan" blocks worthless. Of course it could happen that another head also gets another block on top of it before its miner receives the new longest chain. Now this "fork" will keep going for a bit longer, until one chain ends up longer and everybody mines from that place again.

      Now, if you decrease the block time, you leave less time for the blocks to propagate through the network. If you have 8MB blocks and a block time of 1 second, it's possible that the blocks will never propagate in time and you get a complete chaos with most blocks ending up as orphans sooner or later. Some crypto currencies use 1 or 2 minutes and that seems to work fine, but there regularly are some short chain reorgs. Bitcoin's 10 minutes make reorgs and orphans pretty rare.

      It should also be noted that most crypto currencies don't award one coin per block. It usually a decreasing amount that starts out at a few coins per block. Bitcoin started with 50 coins per block, which has halved twice so far, so now it's at 12.5 coins per block as the block reward. Some other coins, such as Monero, use smoothly decreasing block rewards instead of halving it at certain block heights.

    3. Re:Faster Blocks by Baron_Yam · · Score: 1

      > Either a way needs to be found to cull old/irrelevant data

      Which isn't terribly difficult. You choose a balance between history length and security. Periodically you have a checkpoint, and you accept the point-in-time state of the ledger as your new root state. Some people can keep several (or all) checkpoints if they wish, but so long as the majority agree on the most recent checkpoint, it's all good. 'Blockchain' people aren't interested in anything that doesn't go back to the genesis block, so it won't happen.

      The real problem is that by the time you've worked around all the inherent problems with a blockchain... you've had to give up everything that makes it a blockchain so you don't have a blockchain anymore, you have VISA. And VISA already exists.

  6. Hype by LightningBolt! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's really starting to feel like the year 2000 again with the kind of hubris, absurd valuation claims, etc. coming from the tech world in general. One of my favorites: https://www.wired.com/1999/09/...

    --
    Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
    1. Re:Hype by geekmux · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's really starting to feel like the year 2000 again with the kind of hubris, absurd valuation claims, etc. coming from the tech world in general. One of my favorites: https://www.wired.com/1999/09/...

      It doesn't matter whether or not we learn about history.

      Our timeless ability to be ignorant and stupid all but guarantees we will repeat it.

  7. Iota's Tangle already scales by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Iota's quantum-proof protocol known as the Tangle already has the scalability that Vitalik is hopelessly pursuing with a blockchain protocol.

    Iota also happens to have zero transaction fees, which is something Ethereum will never be able to achieve.

    While I don't think blockchains will ever go completely extinct, I do believe that they will be outmoded and viewed as a curious relic of the past, reserved only for very specific use-cases.

  8. Meanwhile, other core devs... by neaorin · · Score: 2

    ... are more realistic:

    "Ethereum isn't safe or scalable. It is immature experimental tech. Don't rely on it for mission critical apps unless absolutely necessary!"

    https://medium.com/@Vlad_Zamfi...

  9. Challenges Beyond the Technical by ytene · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is absolutely no doubt that use of blockchain technologies will continue to expand as more and more people develop solutions that use it. However, there is a world of difference between having the technical means to handle transactions in the volumes discussed, but this is entirely distinct from actually being able to compete with an institution like VISA, for non-technical reasons...

    The global card payment processing infrastructure generates literally billions and billions of dollars of revenues for Mastercard, VISA, plus all banks. The resultant and incredible profits are further enhanced by insane "transaction processing fees" when purchases are made in any currency other than the card's default.

    Do we think for a moment that the vast, established financial services industry will simply roll over and allow Bitcoin or Ethereum to displace it? No. This is why we see all of these grossly exaggerated claims regarding crypto-currencies - that it is used only by drug dealers, paedophiles and terrorists. Of course, these arguments conveniently forget the fact that actual paper cash is even more anonymous than crypto-currency will ever be, yet we don't hear [most] of these organisations clamouring for cash to be withdrawn. [ Most: VISA have been pushing this for a while now].

    As a crypto-currency becomes established and generates the infrastructure to actually make a dent on the current cartel of big banks, expect to see horror stories regarding the criminal use of it, expect to see all sorts of legislation to outlaw it being proposed. Expect to see scandals and stories like the Mt Gox exchange hack being trumpeted as reasons that cryptocurrency should be doomed.

    On balance, I think the distributed ledger concept has a lot to commend it - it makes the financial infrastructure of the world much more robust - but the biggest challenge it faces will come from the entrenched players in this market - the big banks. Which, by the way, are already developing their own, proprietary and "closed" blockchain technologies... Fancy that...

    1. Re:Challenges Beyond the Technical by coofercat · · Score: 1

      ...and indeed national banks are doing the same development. Having a Bank of England backed crypto-currency is pretty much going to be the same as having pounds in your pocket, or pounds lodged in a retail bank + a plastic card. If Ethereum became the technology of choice for any national bank, it could indeed see vast transaction volumes.

      However... and there's a big but here. The reason current crypto currencies are working is because they're decentralised and international. Once they become centralised, and tied to a nation they stop being international in the same way. They also lose most of their 'value' because they're exactly like retail bank + plastic card again.

      There's a paradox which needs solving here. It'll be solved by having exchanges which are national-bank backed, in much the same was as retail banks are national-bank backed. For example, here in the UK I can put something like £70K into any bank - if the bank fails, or is robbed or whatever, I get my 70K back from the Bank of England - I'm told it would only take a couple of weeks. If I put £100 into a UK-based crypto-exchange and the exchange is hacked, or goes out of business, I lose my £100 - until someone's prepared to take some or all of that risk for me, crypto currencies just won't have the same 'penetration' as national currencies. Whomever solves this will 'own' the crypto-currency world over most others (if volume of transactions is your measure of success). I'm looking forward to them all fighting it out in the next few years though...

    2. Re:Challenges Beyond the Technical by quanminoan · · Score: 1

      Unless a crypto-currency is created to let you borrow money you don't yet have, it will never replace credit cards.

    3. Re:Challenges Beyond the Technical by ytene · · Score: 1

      Agreed, but I think we're maybe looking at this from two very different perspectives...

      First, you rightly point out that both traditional banks and credit card companies offer credit. In order to do this, those companies need to have either a full banking licence, or something very similar to one, or they will simply not be permitted to operate in any major, well-developed economy.

      On the other hand, we're also talking about a simple transaction in which funds from one currency are translated in to another currency. There is no loan involved in this transaction - it is essentially "asset swapping for a fee" ... Banks make money in a variety of ways; among them are the extension of credit and the provision of a service for a fee... We are looking at those two activities in the context of this discussion...

      If all you want to do is visit a country that uses a different one to where you live, then any multinational Bitcoin exchange that can keep their transaction fees below the typical 2.75% "foreign currency handling fee" of a credit card is going to do very well indeed...

  10. standard procedure by v1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Name a business that doesn't tell their investors that the business is growing and that there's a big boom in growth right around the corner?

    This is just SOP for any startup, and should be ignored. Judging future performance of any product should be done by careful examination of the product's history and of current and developing market conditions. There will be sudden surges here and there from time to time, but unexpected plunges will occur just as often, (if not moreso) and so should never be expected and only very carefully anticipated. And definitely not on the word of someone with a hugely vested interest in your investing further.

    This has no more merit than those random spam emails most of us have received from someone with a "market tip" about some stock that's going to explode in the next few days and you're advised to rush out and buy some.

    --
    I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
    1. Re:standard procedure by JohnStock · · Score: 1

      Ellis Short with David Moyes at the helm

  11. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  12. Schrödinger's average person? by dogbert_2001 · · Score: 1

    nt

  13. He's Appealing to the Greater Fool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

    "The greater fool theory states that the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants.[1] A price can be justified by a rational buyer under the belief that another party is willing to pay an even higher price.[2][3][4] In other words, one may pay a price that seems "foolishly" high because one may rationally have the expectation that the item can be resold to a "greater fool" later."

  14. The problem with blockchains is time by guruevi · · Score: 1

    VISA doesn't have to wait for a transaction to propagate in order to do the next one. Blockchains do.

    VISA allows you to overdraw your account because inherently that's what they want you to do (Credit) while with Blockchains, you can't spend money you don't have (Debit).

    If all VISA transactions were distributed (they somewhat are but are geographically centralized) and converted to direct Debit and eat the transactions that would put a customer in an overdrawn account, they would have nowhere the capacity they do today. Every time you do a transaction, they would have to query your bank whether you have enough money, then they would allow your transaction and post it to your bank account as if you wrote a check. That takes about 2-3 days to "propagate" so a VISA card would allow you to make 1 transaction every 2-3 days. Blockchains allow you to do 1 transaction every ~10 minutes.

    For a blockchain to work in the real world, you need to have people take risks, assess your "credit" and allow you to build up a credit of transactions which you would pay back to the blockchain over 1, 6, 12 months.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    1. Re:The problem with blockchains is time by Baron_Yam · · Score: 1

      > That takes about 2-3 days to "propagate" so a VISA card would allow you to make 1 transaction every 2-3 days. Blockchains allow you to do 1 transaction every ~10 minutes.

      That's comparing apples to oranges.

      Under those circumstances, VISA would allow you to do multiple transactions based on your queried bank balance with a 2-3 day delay on use of newly deposited funds. Per person.

      Bitcoin, the most famous blockchain, is limited to a few TPS for ALL users.

    2. Re:The problem with blockchains is time by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      If all VISA transactions were distributed (they somewhat are but are geographically centralized) and converted to direct Debit and eat the transactions that would put a customer in an overdrawn account, they would have nowhere the capacity they do today. Every time you do a transaction, they would have to query your bank whether you have enough money, then they would allow your transaction and post it to your bank account as if you wrote a check. That takes about 2-3 days to "propagate" so a VISA card would allow you to make 1 transaction every 2-3 days. Blockchains allow you to do 1 transaction every ~10 minutes.

      VISA transactions ARE checked. You may think they want people to exceed their credit limit, but there are plenty of cards out there that do NOT allow you to do that (prepaid cards, for example, as well as secured cards).

      In fact, the network is entirely distributed, that's why it's so fast - when you charge something to your VISA, the transaction details go to the merchant's processor. That processor does a quick verification of details, then sends the charge request to VISA, who will examine the details and contact your issuing financial institution with the details. Your issuer does a lookup of your account, and runs through a bunch of security checks, as well as a balance (or credit limit) check, and returns to VISA either a yay or nay result, which goes back to the processor to determine if the transaction can complete.

      If it does complete, the transaction is authorized - no actual money has changed hands, but the merchant's processor has noted it is owed the transaction amount, and your issuer notes it needs to actually send the money to the merchant. At night, what happens is a batch process runs that gathers up all the transactions and then it all gets settled with money flowing through the network. This can take several days especially if the money has to pass through currency conversions and across borders - basically every processor and issuer needs to synchronize with VISA and they do so at their own times (usually at night)

      Authorizations are real time on credit cards - it's what lets you complete the transaction in real time. It's only the settlements take time. But you can get a real time view of your credit cards including all authorizations, authorizations awaiting settlement, and completely posted transactions (everyone's all settled up). They also place holds on the card - they make sure that between the authorization and settlement, you didn't go crazy and spend the money 10 times over - the hold locks that much of the credit limit pending authorization (usually done together) and settlement.

      When you use your card at say, a gas pump, the pump actually puts a hold on your account to make sure you can charge the fill up (usually $100 to $150). When you finish pumping, it changes that hold to an authorization for the actual amount you pumped.

    3. Re:The problem with blockchains is time by guruevi · · Score: 1

      You should understand how that 'feature' works though. A bank debit card allows your funds to be overdrawn and can be used as a credit card as well, sure it checks more frequently against your available balance but offline transactions would still process and put your account in 'the red'.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    4. Re:The problem with blockchains is time by guruevi · · Score: 1

      Yes, I understand that, I was pointing out that with Blockchains, the entire transaction including settlement has to happen at the same time. If VISA were to settle at every transaction AND eat the transactions that would put you in overdraft, it wouldn't be nearly as fast and efficient.

      With VISA, a bank basically tells VISA you have the money or credit, but if you don't, they simply give you a negative balance and the merchant is guaranteed to get the money. It's very evident when you do overseas transactions, even transaction holds, which show up in a matter of seconds/minutes in the US won't show up on your card for days and you can easily reach the limit of a credit or debit card especially when gas stations put on something like $50 hold, make the charge and then won't clear it for a week, you can have $1000 in holds and $800 in charges all counting towards your "available balance".

      Prepaid cards are a different ballgame altogether and can often not be used for offline or overseas transactions.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    5. Re: The problem with blockchains is time by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      "With VISA, a bank basically tells VISA you have the money or credit, but if you don't, they simply give you a negative balance and the merchant is guaranteed to get the money."

      That would depend on how the bank has implemented authorisation processing. Maybe U.S. banks aren't able to do real-time accurate authorisations, but that isn't a limitation in Visa/Mastercard's side. My bank seems to do it real-time. For example I recently had a transaction declined (while filling up at a gas/petrol station), Itransferred sufficient funds from my phone, and re-tried the transaction and it succeeded immediately, less than 2 minutes after the first attempt. In this case it was a MasterCard card.

      "It's very evident when you do overseas transactions, even transaction holds, which show up in a matter of seconds/minutes in the US won't show up on your card for days"

      We get text/SMS notifucations of any credit card activity. I paid my hotel bill by Visa card lst time I travelled overseas (a few years ago), and received a text from by bank (including an accurate balance of available credit on the card) before the credit card machine printed the receipt. I think that was a Visa card.

      So, it seems the capability is there (on both major card networks), but the U.S. banks lag even the banks in African countries in the implementations of their side of the authorisation (like they also seem to do with 3D-secure/VerifiedByVisa for card-not-present transactions).

  15. Re:Big talk for a little man by bn-7bc · · Score: 1

    We beed to retire that prase as it is based on afalecy, Napoleon was actually above avaragr hight, but since the english and the french used different deffinitions of feet ( the french where longer) Napoleons recorded hight was smaller, his souted the english and most of eutope fineas he was not that popular thar siilly little emperor etc so just oød propsgsnda. No Ikm not french, nor english for thst matter but things that ar plain wrrong annoy me

  16. It's not possible by JohnFen · · Score: 1

    It's not possible unless they fix the things that prevents it from being a serious contender as a payment system: the value of the coins needs to be a lot less variable, and there needs to be some sort of recourse if a transaction goes wrong.

  17. What I don't get is... by urusan · · Score: 1

    Why do none of these stories contain any information about the real reason he's so confident in his assertions?
    https://www.coindesk.com/ether...
    https://www.coindesk.com/ether...
    https://github.com/ethereum/wi...

    Etherium is going to move to a whole new way of handling transactions (proof of stake) that will blow the current methods out of the water...if it works safely. Proof of work is not particularly scalable, but proof of stake is.

    As you can see from these coindesk news stories, this planned transition is old news, so I don't get why these stories aren't mentioning it.

  18. Re:I have one for you. by Pascoea · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's called CASH.

    That'll make Internet transactions pretty handy. Hold on while I mail a stack of bills to Amazon.

  19. The Chinese Connection by sdinfoserv · · Score: 1

    Give the number of people in China, and that China is #2 in GDP and #1 in GDP PPP, AND that China is blocking cryptocurrency... the assertion "Ethereum will replace Visa in "a couple of years," is not possible. Ok, so he modified the statement to mean transaction capacity.
    So what? If the largest economy in the World won't use it, and the Largest Bank in the US won't use is (see Jamie Dimon's quote: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/1... ), "founder" statements are just hot air.

  20. Credit card networks and gaming servers? by hackel · · Score: 1

    How the heck are credit card networks and gaming servers related?

  21. Spicey! by Drunkulus · · Score: 1

    Kellyanne has amazing insights on how to effectively communicate the administration's message, and Ethereum will rival Visa.
    -Sean Spicer

  22. Re:anonymous coward Score: 5, Funny 2pm GMT19-09 by david_thornley · · Score: 1

    Sigh.

    First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

    Yeah, everybody thinks that quote applies to their pet cause. What they don't know is that the process can end at any comma. It's made heaps of millionaires.

    So do Ponzi schemes. This isn't a recommendation.

    Speculation will continue to power it. Wheter it's backed by anything means nothing. It's a store of wealth.

    The first and last sentence there contradict each other. A currency powered by speculation is highly unstable, depending on where the speculation is going, and is therefore really bad at being a store of wealth. In particular, any cryptocurrency has the potential of people losing confidence in it, or speculators turning elsewhere, and the value of the cryptocurrency can go to zero fairly fast, in which case it definitely isn't a store of value.

    --
    "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  23. Yeah ok pal by JohnStock · · Score: 1

    Nice try.