Nathaniel PopperVerified account

This is a surprise to nobody that understands money.

That would include most people on earth

"Ben's math" is nonsensical. He is leaving out the entire market needed to service the payments. In order to trade in and out of a currency with each payment, you need open offers for that currency. In fact, you need a good deal more open offers than you normally use.

Open offers require someone to hold the asset at issue. And normally you only hold open offers for a small amount of the asset you are holding to mitigate the risk of price changes.

Taking only the amount of an asset in rout is also nonsense. Payment flows are not symmetrical or uniform across time. Someone has to hold the asset to balance payment flows in both direction and time, whether that be the payer themselves or a third party.

We’ve been telling this to people for years. Spending does not create value, holding does.

But but Keynes says consumption is the key to economic prosperity

Visa lends money. XRP is a digital asset that can move others assets at the speed of light. Remittance. Totally different thing and as a finance guy, a ridiculous analogy. I think you kids call it FUD.

Its interesting that they are already shifting the FUD narrative in anticipation of xRapid going live. "No institutions will use it" ==> "Use won't make it rise in value".

You think if there‘s a universal, global crypto to bridge the $155tn of annual crossborder volume - with tens of thousands of banks, money transmitters and corporates being involved - it‘ll be worth $3bn ?

Catch-22: coins that are useful for payments have a stable proce, and therefore a bad investment. Coins which increase in price are doing so because of speculation that one day they’ll be useful for payments, but increasing prices makes them bad for payments

you need enough speculation to propel fixed-supply coins to a large enough size where there is stability & usability to be used as MoE, I'd say it is around ~10T market cap in 2018 USD terms. 100x from here for BTC.

So what you're saying is the problem is the cryptocurrency ecosystem is only at Bear Stearns/Lehman Brothers size right now, and when it's bigger than that it will be too big to fail and people will be forced to use it?

Do you think Gold was price-stable the very day it was found? Bitcoin is undergoing monetization. It’s not about “too big to fail”, but rather MoE wants stability and liquidity which requires raw size. If anything, BTC’s goal is to stop kleptocratic “too big to fail” phenomena.

Bitcoin's volatility isn't just due to its comparatively modest market size. Tether is being used to manipulate the price

Do you have evidence of this?

Writing a long-form blog post about it now

Here you gohttps://twitter.com/bascule/status/1011627235634278400 …