Well, there's the seller, the buyer, the seller's bank, the buyer's bank, and the seller's card processing agent. In some cases two or more of the third parties are the same organization, but usually they are not.
You don't necessarily trust the other party's bank or the payment intermediary, either. Sometimes, you just hope that your bank will be willing and able reverse the transaction if you have a problem.
Obviously, there is a point where the combination of the Fed's policies and Congress's borrow-and-spend policies will trigger inflationary price increases. No one knows for certain where that point is, but the Fed's operative assumption is based on doubling the money supply in one year during the 2008-2011 recession without any perceptible impact on prices.
I'm not sure they know what they're doing. Some government agencies probably still think #Bitcoin is a gold-color token, like something you would use at Chuck E. Cheese.
Though they did take the time to call out #stablecoins as one type that banks & thrifts can use, so they have at least read that much.
But I’m not pretending that I can time the market, so I’m not looking to buy something that will rise high enough to make me a millionaire. I’m looking at them as a medium of exchange, a means to facilitate purchases and sales. At this point, I’m not looking at them as a store of value, and certainly not as an investment.
Despite my insistence in conversations with #sonTwo that he should likewise consider cryptocurrency only as a means to purchase things, his father-in-law has been reading about sky-high #BTC prices and is putting up a small amount of money to get started investing in #cryptocurrency.
One of the big issues I have with #blockchain is that people lost all rationality once they saw the prices that #Bitcoin ( #BTC ) has reached. Suddenly, everything is blockchains when most things are not improved in any way by adding a blockchain.
And of course, whenever sleazeballs smell dummies with money, they start rolling out scam after scam using the magic word or phrase that convinces people to open their wallets and bank accounts.
He seems to be talking about the general concepts of #FreeSoftware, #copyleft, the #GPL and #OpenSource, and how the #Anti996 license relates to all this. "Why any software movement will fail", referencing #RichardStallman, not sure what the proposition is here. He moves on to a critique of #DataAsLabour, and the proposition that #disintermedia, via decentralized tech like #IPFS and #BitCoin, will allow users to monetize their own data directly, rather than mediators capturing that value.
@alcinnz 1) elsewhere in the piece he says that 100% of the network has to approve a transaction, ie he doesn't understand consensus, or consensus algorithms. 2) he's commenting on the limitations of the consensus algorithm #BitCoin as if they apply to all #blockchains (they don't), 3) anonymity is not the only reason people want to use blockchains. I could go on.