Existing rails are slow and expensive due to anti money laundering laws and taxes. Enterprise customers want to move funds without those pesky laws and paying taxes.
Your linked article is solely about SpaceX customers paying with stable customers, as reported by Chamath Palihapitiya. Even if I disregard the fact that I strongly think Chamath must be lying because his lips are moving, everyone in that story has a clear biased incentive to pump crypto.
Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.
While it’s easy to dismiss one story, stablecoin payments are gaining legitimate adoption.
> monthly B2B volume has more than doubled since February, rising 113% to about $6.4 billion. The expansion lifted the cumulative value of stablecoin payments since 2023 to over $136 billion, representing that on-chain money is no longer a niche settlement tool.[1]
And $9T in annual payment volume[2].
As it turns out stablecoin payments are actually a real thing, especially B2B.
I cannot for the life of me articulate why, because I actually don’t understand its value prop (despite lengthy conversations with ChatGPT and people on HN about it) or see any reason for its growth, but it is a thing whether we admit it or not.
I had a look at the second source. It goes to crypto investor A16Z's report, where they are looking at all crypto trading volumes. $46 trillion transaction volume but once they remove bots $9 trillion per year.
Note that forbes seriously misquotes. A16Z is counting transactions, not payments.
They compare it to visa which seems like a rubbish comparison. People use visa to buy things. Crypto trades are much more like forex, and A16Z seems to be measuring crypto for crypto purchases.
Global forex volume is about $9 trillion per day. But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
Crypto is largely traded to trade crypto.
As for payments, supposing we take $136 billion cumulative lifetime payments as accurate. Mckinsey reports that global annual payments are $2 quadrillion dollars per year.
The crypto industry LOVES to throw big numbers around and tell tales of use cases just around the corner but the majority of actual use cases still seem to be skirting regulations.
>But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
No, most of this volume (>99%) is institutional speculation. If people actually do something with this money you would see payments of over 9T a day, which is not happening.
Then you're doing it wrong? Solana has low fees. Lighting on Bitcoin has low fees. L2s on Ethereum have low fees. Curious when you did these transactions on what chain?
This looks like a think tank problem more than an NVIDIA problem. If you work at a think tank, and you do research, and public companies are capable of doing harm to your career - your think tank is a weak facade that will give up its core ideals and bow to corporate overlords.
Think tanks should think, and not give a shit what other people think. Unless they’re partisan aligned, and will give up “thinking” to tow the party line. In which case it’s just veiled political influence hiding behind a moniker, which is really what think tanks are. So I’m thinking now - nonstory. Everything is working as intended.
> act of "toeing the line," most likely from a combination of nautical discipline and athletic races. In the Royal Navy, sailors had to stand with their toes against a line on the deck for inspection, while in sports, runners line up with their toes at the starting line
And while I'm here I'll mention a couple other terms I never knew about:
Slave:
> The English word "slave" originates from the word "Slav," which was used in Medieval Latin (\(<<!nav>>sclavus<<!/nav>>\)) to refer to people of Slavic origin who were frequently captured and sold into slavery during the early Middle Ages.
Pothole:
> A (potentially legendary) origin story suggests the name came from potters digging clay from roads, creating the holes
Yes, the metaphor here is that of perhaps a military officer drawing a line and soldiers are expected to stand along the line, so their toes will touch the line. It's about obedience.
Early examples are clearly about standing in an orderly formation, and also sometimes use alternative words such as "mark" instead of "line" - which wouldn't make sense for tow. You could tow a line, but it's unclear how one might tow a mark.
Yes what do harming career even mean? Nvidia filing defamation case or doing something public is probably more problematic to Nvidia than think tank. Now one could imagine doing something more private like blocking the funding, but I don't think Nvidia can pull this off without anyone knowing, at least not to all the think tanks.
A very large portion of medicine is for treating symptoms, improving quality of life, making someone comfortable, etc. so you’d sometimes defin the problem needs fixing as the illness, the symptom, something else. But then part of medicine is identifying what the illness is, what causes the symptoms, etc. additionally, there is no “fix” for illnesses. Everything has a list of approaches that doctors choose from based on the context - IE strep throat may have prescription A as like 1 (the first/best choice generally), but the patient could be allergic, have used that medicine in the past unsuccessfully, etc.
Unions helped Detroit autoworkers so much. I'm not totally opposed to unions but if people don't want to buy the company's product at the price it's offered for (and costs), they can't sustainably force the company to pay workers more.
“ It is not good management to take profits out of the workers or the buyers; make management produce the profits. Don’t cheapen the product. Don’t cheapen the wage. don’t overcharge the public. Well-managed business pays high wages and sells at low prices. Its workmen have the leisure to enjoy life and the wherewithal with which to finance that enjoyment.”
You mean the Henry Ford who brought in often violent internal company police to prevent unionization? I imagine there are many modern examples if not to the same degree.
A further level of intelligence may recognize the futility in worrying, accept the situation and your inability to impact it, and purposefully take the approach of a meathead.
A man’s search for meaning is an incredible book you may enjoy based on your comment. My strongest takeaway was that in situations where I cannot make an impact or control something, I still control how I react.
And they _will_ find them. For example, one year I forgot to add a line from one of 1040 forms to my return. I got a notification from the IRS about a year later that I have under-reported taxes.
And with the defunding of the IRS, they'll severely limit the complex audits.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-uses-stablecoins-colle...