That's an interesting thought. I'm not sure I would consider a precious metal a currency because its value is driven by its intrinsic value more than trust. But I do agree that they can be used "as" a currency that is indeed entirely decentralized. Their use online would require trusting services that store them and allow their transfer between accounts which, quite interestingly, maps quite well to the mint model proposed in Settle.
> I'm not sure I would consider a precious metal a currency because its value is driven by its intrinsic value more than trust.
I don't think that's really true. Most precious metals are valuable because people think they're valuable - they're propped up by a collective myth, by the collective belief that there will always be someone else willing to pay. Sure, there are industrial applications, but those are not the primary drivers of value, especially not historically.
Most precious metals are worth more than their industrial applications. I suppose you could say that their value is derived from trust in the stability of their market prices.
If they're worth more than their industrial applications, how can it be economical to use them for their industrial applications?
If gold-plated contacts cost more than they're worth, nobody would make any as it would have a negative ROI.
I agree that the market cap of gold is higher than it would be if industrial applications were the only source of demand. But given that gold is used for industrial applications, it must not cost more than it is worth for those applications. Hope that makes sense.
If they're the best material for the job then manufacturers will pay the inflated luxury-good prices. People selling gold are selling it at market price, regardless of what their buyers do with it. Just because something only adds X amount of value, however that's defined, doesn't mean that one will be able to buy it for at or less than X.
Ah sorry, it's is also definitely possible. The documentation lists the endpoints but it's still very WIP (the doc, not the endpoints): https://settle.network/documentation/
You can also refer to the source code[0] but that requires a bit more effort.
To interact with m.settle.network you would have to signup first using the command line (that's the easiest, to get your key, though doable over curl as well as you rightfully point out)
These are only pointers, but happy to answer any question async over email at stan@stripe.com as well!
I agree that pure credit networks left with no supervision have been quite bad historically, but it also appear in our new online world as one of the less cumbersome way to move value at scale. What changed since then I think is the amount of information we have on each actor of the credit network which may lead to other outcomes at scale. Also sub part of the network may be quite safe, as an example the subnet that allows BTC wallet users to pay on Stripe merchants with one hop through gdax or any other exchange.
true, seems like the more something in finance resembles a utility (like a pure conduit or short term store of cash / tokens) the safer it seems to be. altho i guess even those types of agents can get infected if enuf shennanigans are going on around them (e.g. money market's breaking the buck in 2008-2009)
> BTC wallet users to pay on Stripe merchants with one hop through gdax or any other exchange
thats pretty cool. so thats how stripe's btc processing works? dump the btc for usd (for example) at market via some exchange routing algo? then forward the fiat so the merch never has to handle any cryptocurrency?
Very good question. The cost. I wanted to explore/play with a system with free transactions, which is only achievable interestingly without a global blockchain to maintain.
We do not send funds back to the originating address but instead allow merchants to programmatically supply a refund address or alternatively handle this part for them by contacting the customer over email to provide a refund address to send the over-payments to.
Hope that clarifies this particular point.
Additionally, to compute over-payments, we rely on Coinbase notifying us of the amounts received on a receiver bitcoin address. In that instance Coinbase erroneously notified us that they received BTC .00231463 (~$5 at the time) instead of BTC 0.1154481, leading to our overpayments logic to not be triggered.
We're investigating with Coinbase on what happened on their end and we'll make sure that the root cause gets fixed.
I was part of the PBL lab at Stanford which was doing a bunch of research in that space. I think the major benefit is remote collaboration ala whiteboard and replay of course.
