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Brand confusion is never a good plan. Block, Meta, alphabet, who cares? It's Square, Facebook, and Google that are the big brands these companies have and that they are known for with billions of people (well not Square probably). Only a fraction of those people would be able to name the parent companies.
Facebook owns Whatsapp, and Instagram and a bunch of smaller stuff as well. But Meta is just not a great brand. It's a vague ambition at best. That's the problem with this rebranding. Google did it because they had a bunch of aimless acquisitions/spinoffs, none of which since managed to rival it's money maker Google, which continues to be the place that is associated with their successful stuff (Android, Youtube, ads, etc.).
Facebook is doing it because their Facebook brand is imploding due to years of mismanagement. It's a dead zone at this pont. I check in once a month and then leave in disgust. Absolutely nothing going on there whatsoever.
Square on the other hand is a successful product. Nice growth. Nice brand. Worth going all in on. The stuff they acquired pales in comparison. Why mess with that brand, create confusion and awkwardness, etc.?
From the Wire on when to rebrand:
Stringer Bell: "What are the options when you've got an inferior product in an aggressive marketplace?" Stringer's Community College Business Professor: "Well, if you have a large share of the market you buy up the competition." Stringer (shaking his head): "And if you don't?" Prof: "Reduce price and increase market share." Stringer: "That assumes low overhead." Prof: "Of course. Otherwise you operate at a loss. And worse, as your prices drop, your product loses consumer credibility. You know, the new CEO of World Com was faced with this very problem. The company was linked to one of the biggest fraud cases in history. So he proposed . . ." Stringer: "To change the name." Prof: "Exactly.
Every time emails leak from facebook/google/amazon showing unflattering things I think of the end of this scene:
"Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy? What the fuck is you thinking!?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGo5bxWy21g
history erasure of the orwellian variety
memoryholing
It doesn't matter if they can't name the parent company. Most people using Cash App probably don't even know Square is the parent company lol. They don't care. Same with Tidal now.
But Square is a branded platform by Square Inc.
So is Cash App apart of the Seller's platform, named Square, or is it apart of Square Inc?
This is why they separated. Square brand is now just the Square seller's platform.
It's not just that it's confusing, it's misleading. Humans attach a lot of value to names of things. The whole history of a thing is keyed on its name, a fact that is especially pertinent in the internet era.
If some brand has built up a bad rep, they shouldn't be allowed to change it just by renaming themselves. Likewise a firm that's built a good rep and wants to try something new in order to protect the brand shouldn't be allowed to either. I don't know whether the law could ever protect us from this, I suppose it's more the job of the media to keep remind us who Altria are, and where Lexus came from.
A lot of brand shenanigans is basically abusing how humans associate history with names. Somehow it's never been an ethical issue to change brands, spawn a new brand, or buy another brand while hollowing out the product.
It's less driven by the marketing and more driven by the lawyers. It is confusing, it is stupid from the perspective of investors, customers, and users, but it is a defensive maneuver against both the government and potential civil plaintiffs complaining about mismanagement.
The government could also at any time revert to the much more stringent antitrust regime that was in place before the 1970s/80s, vestiges of which still impact other older industries, which sharply limit how many lines of business or modes of communication/transportation can be used, much less dominated, by a single firm. There are also of course movements towards more internet-specific regulation, although not much has been actually happening.
The only reason I can see for rebranding a known successful brand like Square into Block would be due to some hope of a perceived connection in consumers minds to crypto via the word _blockchain_.
Not being versed in branding strategy, I must say this just feels odd to me and somewhat lowers ny opinion of Square as a proper tech company (why, I can't fully articulate).
Edit; I now see that this was due to the fact that the _square_ product is just going to be one of many of the parent corp (i.e Alphabet style). In that sense I guess this makes sense. Just hope that crypto connection was never a part of the discussion/decision for the name.
A payment application called block? Some might infer the link to blockchain. While to me it has negative connotations such as payments being blocked due to falsely triggering AML etc. Block + payments = blocked payments. I just had a payment blocked temporarily for 48hrs sending on wise.com. First time ever. If it happens again I cancel my account.
You're correct, I didn't even see that connection!
I think from now on that will be the main connotation that will pop up in my mind when seeing their new name around.
> hope that crypto connection was never a part of the discussion/decision for the name
@jack is a massive buttcoiner, OF COURSE it was
I agree. Branding changes "for nothing" help nothing.
But the worse contender seems to be Transferwise who changed their name to Wise, losing the recognition and the brand specificity.
Oblig. "Yeah that wasn't a very wise choice."
> Facebook is doing it because their Facebook brand is imploding due to years of mismanagement. It's a dead zone at this pont. I check in once a month and then leave in disgust. Absolutely nothing going on there whatsoever.
What do you base this on?
This is their revenue, operating profit and monthly active users.
I get it, facebook isn't your cup of tea but don't be delusional about them being on the brink of collapse. A lot of people use the product and they're still seeing double digit user growth after nearly 10 years of double digit user growth.
Year Revenue Operating profit MAU
2010 $1.97 billion $1.03 billion 482 million
2011 $3.71 billion $1.75 billion 739 million
2012 $5.08 billion $0.53 billion 955 million
2013 $7.87 billion $2.8 billion 1.15 billion
2014 $12.4 billion $4.99 billion 1.31 billion
2015 $17.9 billion $6.22 billion 1.49 billion
2016 $27.6 billion $12.4 billion 1.71 billion
2017 $40.6 billion $20.2 billion 2 billion
2018 $55.8 billion $24.9 billion 2.23 billion
2019 $70.6 billion $23.9 billion 2.41 billion
2020 $85.9 billion $32.6 billion 2.7 billion
This. People hate Meta/Zuck so much that they can't give credit for what was a brilliant rebrand.
Given that what makes a good brand is subjective perhaps a more objective measure is the value of the domains the companies rebranded to.
By this count Meta.com > ABC.xyz > Block.xyz. I'm basing this on data available via namebio.com, automated appraisal tools such as GoDaddy Appraisal and Estibot and thousands of hours of personal experience researching, buying and selling domains. Meta.com is worth six or more likely seven or even eight figures as a standalone domain. Block and ABC.xyz? Not so much.
Who cares if the company is called Google or Alphabet? Consumers know the website is google.com. People they want to hire know enough that the company is Alphabet even if consumers don't.
I think these new names are silly (even after 6 years of hearing "Alphabet"). It's obvious Meta and Block chose these names to lean into where they want to go. A big reason I think a rename is a good thing is just talking about the company. Does "Facebook" refer to the app, the company, or something that affects Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp? You can use internal code names, but that still is difficult for investors or new hires to discuss the company. I think this is more of the reason for the name changes instead of their brands imploding.
I think Meta was a good move. As you mentioned, Facebook brand has been taking a beating. But more importantly, I really believe that their focus in the next decade is going to be the metaverse and not Facebook. That's good for Facebook, no growth plans means they can focus on improving the experience rather than growth which often ruins the experience. Personally for me the only two Meta products I use are WhatsApp and Oculus Quest 2.
Say whatever was the motive but the meta branding change is the only one that has stuck for me. Of course I don't call Facebook as meta but I'm looking forward to what mark does or not on meta(verse).
Who thought designing this page and actually publishing it was a good idea?
https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...
My eyes! My eyes!
Horrible design aside, there's some interesting politics represented on there.
1) Alyssa was given all of Square to run, making her the effective CEO of Square. Jack was never going to give up CEO of Square role in any other way than by taking over a top-level entity. I strongly suspect he hasn't had any interest in the core business in years, though. Given Alyssa's general background in AWS, this likely represents continued platformization of Square, and a continued de-emphasis on Square as a product. Instead an emphasis on Square as infrastructure. How this squares (hah) with their small business moat time will tell.
2) Jesse Dorogusker runs Tidal and crypto hardware, which is fascinating - he's ex-Apple, a solid hardware lead, but to my knowledge he has no music background or industry experience. I wonder how that happened?
3) Mike Brock in charge of whatever the fresh hell TBD54566975 is, is honestly the about 10x as puzzling as Jesse in charge of Tidal. I could not understand this less. The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.
[1]
https://twitter.com/TBD54566975
> The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.
That's intentional. If you're peddling crypto, you're either a scammer, or a gullible fool. Those people are no fools.
I have to say I thought the most ridiculous name I'd see in this space was coins named after people's dogs. This not-even-a-name might be even more ridiculous. It reminds me of those spam emails where they the writing forms an effective filter on the people who reply, the idea being that they are so ludicrous that only a sucker would reply (hence saving the time of the scammers on interacting with people who reply but won't fall for the scam). I have to say I'm super sick of all the bullshit happening in the crypto space at the moment because I think it really tarnishes the reputation of everything in the space including some decentralized apps and decentralized finance stuff that could actually be a massive net positive to everyone.
I worked at AWS at a time when Alyssa was there (running Amazon S3), and the few times I've met her, I can guarantee she was a formidable executive. No surprise she's in the top ranks at Square.
âRunning Amazon s3â⌠wow, itâs hard to think of many roles that are more fundamental to todayâs Internet infrastructure (never lose a byte!) and at the same time quite dull (itâs an object heap after all. Nothing else to see here).
It's easy to underestimate how difficult it is to make a core building block do one thing and do it really good. I mean, Twitter is another frequently cited example; most people with basic software development knowledge could build a Twitter clone in an afternoon, but the challenge is to make it globally and infinitely scalable.
Comparing Twitter and S3 though? Twitter literally epitomized site unreliability with its fail whales for so many years before finally figuring out how to do the one single thing they do reliably, viz. shuffling around a bunch of text messages. As far as big tech goes Twitter looks like the least well managed or thought Out tech stack I can see.
To make sure itâs not interpreted that way, Iâm not saying a single guy could create Twitter at its scale in a month, but they do basically one thing and have infinite resources. Itâs not that hard.
The real challenge is it to get people to use. I believe that there are no insurmountable technical or organizational problems in scaling a messaging service.
The hard part isn't designing and building an object heap, the hard part is building, guiding and managing a team that builds, manages and operates an object heap, at a world wide scale.
Payment processing is at least as dull as storage. And it should be. Dull and reliable is exactly what I want in anything financial.
What made her so formidable?
their white paper is one of the most obtuse writing I've ever read:
https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/
the best I can understand... you can use your identity as a token? or something?
They're using LaTeX, it must be legit
This explains it a bit better
https://twitter.com/brockm/status/1431319755055513610
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1431320761474617344
stuff
TBD to me is pretty clearly just trying to capitalize on memecoins. That Twitter is exactly what a watered down corporate version of a shitcoin looks like. Some technical mumbo jumbo, a white paper, bs name, and what boomers think memes are (putting lowercase text on a hat, using a drake img as your Twitter profile, weird snarky responses).
Based on my knowledge of shitcoins, this will do extremely well.
Honestly... I love it.
The whole website is just aggressively bad. The C suite cube faces, ugly color palette, spinny cube complete with a Jay-Z curated soundtrack, the misaligned text & links on the media kit page etc.
It reminds me a lot of aesthetic in the game Cruelty Squad - just an intentional rejection of design norms. Nothing worse than being boring right?
/default.aspx on every url
This is actually the investor relations tool they're using (Q4). If you follow the "powered by" link you can see that Q4's corporate website has the same thing
Also on the whole, it's a very unimportant website. It's just some investor relation website. There's no signup conversions to optimise for.
squareup.com is still a normal "boring" website.
> It reminds me a lot of aesthetic in the game Cruelty Squad
Would love to work for a company with full Cruelty Squad world branding, but I guess Consumer Softproducts isn't hiring.
it reminds me of the 'siren song' in Odyssey that would dash sailors across the rocks... except its ADHD Millenial/Zoomer developer/crypto enthusiasts
and hijacked scrolling
I need your drug dealer.
I think it's intentional. I don't think anyone in the company said "this is great design let's do this" but more like "this is unconventional (in Apple words, "takes courage") and rad, we know people will call it ugly but let's be unique this way and do it".
Which, in my opinion, works.
You're being way too charitable here. It's a quick and dirty website built with a CMS[1] and no designer involved. There's tons of obvious design mistakes. Don't get me wrong, I'm a terrible designer myself but after spending a lot of time with great ones, I can tell the difference between an ugly website made by a designer with an aesthetic intent and one built by a front-end web developer without supervision, and using 5 different fonts on a single page is definitely a clue.
[1]
https://www.q4inc.com/Powered-by-Q4/
Ok, I just had a quick look on the go. If 5 different fonts (families I suppose) are used it's definitely a red flag. Interesting on their side, then, to go such a route.
The cubes slowly popping into view as the page lags out is a special kind of unintentional modern humor.
It is obviously heavily inspired by web pages from the NFT/crypto space. Because it is trendy or because they want to go that route, who knowsâŚ
Edit: seems like they are already heavily invested in crypto. There you go.
Let's do financial crimes ... _in Minecraft_
(joke nicked from __femb0t on Twitter
https://twitter.com/__femb0t/status/1466283819246538753
)
As someone who doesnât design websites for a living, Iâm always a little baffled by strong reactions to website designs, especially ones like this one that donât look all that different from a million other websites to me. I have a suspicion that thereâs a very wide gap between how website designers appraise a website, and how everyone else does. Just an observation.
I thought it's a joke. It's a like a bunch of 4chan teenagers designed it for shits and giggles.
You can make jokes but these people already are a large portion of the money spending people and they will only become more important when they get better jobs and opportunities as they move on in life.
Upper left corner: "Block Vibes, Curated by Jay-Z" is probably the most silicon valley thing I've ever seen on a website.
It's all going to crash horribly, isn't it?
Haha unreal, that is the worst design I've seen in a long time
Lol I love it. The music is not really my cup of tea but the whole site oozes S O U L. If it was a bit more optimized and wouldnt stutter on my iGPU equipped laptop id give it 8/10. It's just the right amount of wacky and tasteless that it wraps around and becomes enjoyable.
I would love it even more if it wasn't made for yet another rent seeking, blood sucking, middleman bullshit company that feasts on people being discouraged from using cash, yet having no privacy respecting alternative that is run for their benefit instead of getting rich off their situation.
My guess is whoever that was decided to go full-on for the NFT aesthetic.
This page is 18 MB.
A company run by literal blockheads
That is surprisingly less bad than some of the stuff my company has pulled and thought it was excellent while patting themselves on the back.
Usually it is a sign that the greater spotted MBA is insufficient on its own to produce effective business strategy and marketing. It requires a combination of two other mysterious forces; talent and clue, which are unavailable at business school.
> Who thought designing this page and actually publishing it was a good idea?
Somebody who read "I wish webpages today were as simple as they were in 1999" and then did their best to emulate the Geocities pages that they found from that era.
But still managed to ship a 20MB webpage!
Haha, now thatâs good visual humor.
If the design for this didn't create negative reactions like this they would have probably considered the design a failure.
its the block logo meant to be flashing or is it just me?
It's the n64 tech demo all over again!
Clearly a bunch of blockheads!
A single >15MB page. Nice.
Whoever thought adding a scrolling accelerator is a good idea should be sent to a Gulag. I know by how much I want to scroll down - dont "fix" it ಠ_ŕ˛
Don't understand this trend. Apple has done just fine diversifying as Apple, Inc.
Square, as a name, is simple and well-known, and the logo is recognizable, inoffensive, and amenable for design updates.
Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now).
> Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now).
I suspect this has something to do with it. I had a co-worker once describe Jack as a magpie. He's usually much more interested in the new shiny thing. That was Cash App for a while. Now the blockchain stuff I guess. I haven't worked there in many years so I don't know for sure.
Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff.
I had a big WTF with this move, and have a similar feeling about the blockchain efforts. But I also tend towards the new and shiny, so I have a harder time faulting that.
Square had been trying to do Bitcoin stuff for years. When I left in 2016 they had built accepting Bitcoin into Square's Online Store product a few years ago, because it was shiny. I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off. I guess the popularity of BTC speculation among retail investors brought the whole thing back.
> I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off.
Accepting Bitcoin as payments has never been about facilitating payments. It's not rational to go through all the trouble of transferring Bitcoin, paying transaction fees, waiting for the transaction to clear (took over an hour when I tried it a few months ago), and then surrendering all of the protections you'd normally get when using a credit card.
Accepting Bitcoin is about propelling the Bitcoin narrative: The more you can put "Bitcoin accepted here" on everyone's website, the more you can convince other people that Bitcoin is going mainstream and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).
> and therefore they should be putting their money into Bitcoin as an investment (not to spend).
I disagree with this part of the paragraph. Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less.
> Maybe legitimising Bitcoin was hijacked by cryptobros later on to push their own narrative, but the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services, nothing more and nothing less.
I mean the "pay for starbucks using bitcoin" ship sailed, what, 10 years ago? Bitcoin is absolutely nothing more than a giant pump & dump scam. Of course pedants will say "technically it isn't a pump & dump" just like "technically it isn't a pyramid scheme"... Bitcoin might not meet the technical definition of any of those... but it is a scam none the less.
It's a technology, and open source. You could say it is literally the opposite of a scam.
Alternatively, you could say everything is a scam. For example the USA is a scam. It only exists because people play along and collectively decide it exists.
At most you could argue that tanks would come and force people to play along if they stopped. So is that perhaps your threshold for something not being a scam? What is the minimum number of tanks that stand ready to enforce an idea, to make you call it "not a scam anymore"?
Most legal fictions can effectively be regarded a scam, if enough people don't buy into it(and by those who don't buy into it).
MtGox & Bitfinex & the Satoshi mystery should have been enough to end cryptocurrency's future as a security instrument. They weren't. There's more than 1 fool born every minute, I suppose.
Seeing the Satoshi mystery as a discrediting factor points to a genetic fallacy, doesn't it? Does it really matter who made it, as long as it is open?
I am aware of the pre-mined Satoshi coins, but it's perfectly possible that the key to those got lost forever by now if they weren't explicitly designed as a pump & dump/kill switch for Satoshi's benefit.
Not really, IMO. Knowing the actors in a scenario often illuminates more than the declared intentions & motivations. I can't help but refer to MS's embracing Linux, for example.
> It's a technology, and open source. You could say it is literally the opposite of a scam.
The fact that it's technology, and that it's opensource doesn't mean it's not _used_ for scams (and almost exclusively for scams).
Being used for scams is not the same as being a scam. Dollars are being used for scams all the time.
In what sense do you claim BTC is used "almost exclusively for scams"? Seems to me for the most part it is simply being traded. Do you mean Ransomware? What fraction of BTC transactions happen because of that?
> Being used for scams is not the same as being a scam.
You have to read context and understand what people are saying. When people say "Bitcoin is scam" they mean the way it's used, not the tech itself.
> In what sense do you claim BTC is used "almost exclusively for scams"?
In the sense of the word scam.
I was wrong though. Bitcoin is used almost exclusively for two things: scams and hoarding. There are almost no other uses.
> Do you mean Ransomware?
No, I don't.
"When people say "Bitcoin is scam" they mean the way it's used, not the tech itself."
It just comes across as "those people have no idea what they are talking about".
Honestly I don't care that much about people using BTC for scams. I care about the tech.
I find it difficult when people say "BTC will be worth xxxxxxxx$ soon". That kind of statement may be scammy, or at least speculative. But that is different from the tech.
> It just comes across as "those people have no idea what they are talking about".
It doesn't. When the tech is exclusively used for hoarding and scamming, it becomes synonymous with its use.
> Honestly I don't care that much about people using BTC for scams. I care about the tech.
This really is a non-sensical statement. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum.
"When the tech is exclusively used for hoarding and scamming"
There are a gazillion startups in Bitcoin, I don't think they are all into hoarding and scamming.
Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
"This really is a non-sensical statement. Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum."
Of course I care about what can be done with the tech, but not about the scams. There are many other uses. However, I don't have to convince you, it doesn't matter to me.
> There are a gazillion startups in Bitcoin, I don't think they are all into hoarding and scamming.
They are.
> Sorry, you still sound like the people who have no idea what they are talking about.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. Show me a start up, and I will show you how the very same things can be done and are being already done faster, and more efficiently without Bitcoin.
Apart from the very, very, very small use case of sending money to failed states, and even that use case is hinging on a lot of ifs.
> And as I said, dollars are being used for scamming a lot, too.
Yes, but that's not their primary use.
> There are many other uses.
If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now.
" I will show you how the very same things can be done and are being already done faster, and more efficiently without Bitcoin."
Right, so how can I get a bank account that nobody can shut down?
"Yes, but that's not their primary use."
Neither is bitcoin's. So is gold also a scam, in your opinion?
I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever? How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
"If there were, it wouldn't be used almost exclusively the way it's used right now."
So gold is also a scam?
> Right, so how can I get a bank account that nobody can shut down?
What's a bank account when there's literally nothing useful you can do with it, except hoard, scam, and trade other meaningless tokens?
> Neither is bitcoin's.
The absolute vast majority use cases for bitcoin are scams and hoarding.
> I mean if Bitcoin is a scam, it is probably one of the most complicated scams ever?
It's not. It's very, very simple.
> How many millions of lines of code have already been written for the Bitcoin ecosystem?
You assume that having many lines of code is equal to something not being a scam.
There exactly two kinds ow people who peddle bitcoin and crypto: scammers who know what they are doing (and yes, writing millions of lines of code), and gullible idiots.
> So gold is also a scam?
Outside of technical uses? Yes, mostly, as in the usual scenario of "you need to hoard gold because soon everything will fall, and you'll need gold". So are diamonds. There are very many scams. But blockchains, and bitcoin among them, take the current crown.
"What's a bank account when there's literally nothing useful you can do with it, except hoard, scam, and trade other meaningless tokens?"
So you can not give me the thing that Bitcoin delivers, without Bitcoin. Case closed.
Sorry, you are clueless, and your attitude may bite you in the ass in the long run. Discussion is over. You can keep your beliefs.
> So you can not give me the thing that Bitcoin delivers, without Bitcoin. Case closed.
I have given you that. "Bank account that can't be shut down" is meaningless if it doesn't provide any function beyond storing bitcoin.
> Sorry, you are clueless,
I'm not.
> You can keep your beliefs.
These are not beliefs. These are things grounded in reality. Unlike, you know, anything bitcoin-related.
"I have given you that. "Bank account that can't be shut down" is meaningless if it doesn't provide any function beyond storing bitcoin."
You can not just store bitcoin. Your assumptions are ridiculously wrong.
While you can not pay everywhere easily with Bitcoin _yet_, you also have to think of it in terms of insurance. When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled, more and more people will seek refuge in Bitcoin. There are many scenarios where Bitcoin can provide a way out. Extreme cases like having to flee the country - are you going to carry gold bars across the border?
A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
> You can not just store bitcoin.
So, what else are you going to store there?
> you also have to think of it in terms of insurance.
Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year.
> When pressure increases and more and more people get cancelled
There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely.
> A quick google claims 2 Billion unbanked people in the world. People who can't get a bank account for some reason or other.
Ah. "For some reason or another". Could you tell me those "some reasons"?
Let me help you.
--- start quote ---
[In the US] the majority of the unbanked and underbanked are American-born while a growing number are immigrants where _the two groups have low income as a commonality_ and _lack the minimum balance_ to open checking and savings accounts
--- end quote ---
Wells Fargo requires you to have _25 dollars_ to open a checking account. People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year.
Same goes for other unbanked populations across the world, the vast majority of whom live in developing countries.
> With Bitcoin, nobody can prevent you from having a bank account.
There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality.
"So, what else are you going to store there?"
You can transfer BTC. What else can you do with a bank account?
"Ah yes. Insurance. With bitcoin's price fluctuating as much as 300% over the course of the year."
It's still early days. Fluctuation is better than devaluation to zero.
"There are 9 billion people in the world. How many "got canceled", for whatever the term "canceled" means to you. 10? 100? This will definitely make Bitcoin a global means of payment, surely."
At least a billion people in China, for starters. And you vastly underestimate the number of people who are being cancelled. You only hear about the famous cases. The number of people whose funds have been frozen by PayPal is legion. Also the people who are not cancelled yet may still be unhappy about constantly having to worry and having watch their steps to avoid being cancelled. It's not a good feeling. Sometimes stories even make it to Hacker News, maybe you missed them.
"People who don't have 25 dollars to open a checking account will surely flock to Bitcoin, where such a simple thing as a transaction can cost anywhere from 3 to 60 dollars per transaction over the course of the year."
Even those people will have banking needs, and the transaction costs are being tackled with things like Lightning. Fiat banking is not free, either.
"There are exactly two kinds of people who peddle bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools with a very tenuous understanding of reality."
Or people who see the issues in our current system and try to create something better. People like you will probably be unable to understand the mindset of pioneers.
I'm sorry but if the US dollar was deflated at the rate Bitcoin has no one would continue to play along.
These kinds of arguments held water when BTC doubled after two years or something, not anymore.
Clearly people are playing along with Bitcoin, so I don't see your point? I also don't fully understand what you are saying. You mean if dollar would gain in value as fast as Bitcoin, people would stop using dollars?
> You mean if dollar would gain in value as fast as Bitcoin, people would stop using dollars?
Yes, did you not realize that?!
Are you really rallying this hard against people discarding its economic value without understanding something as basic as deflation?
-
Deflation is more deadly to a currency than inflation. By far.
You reduce interest rates to 0% and then what? You can try negative interest rates, but with the kind of deflation BTC has seen you would need _negative triple digit interest rates_ which is a complete absurdity.
You'd probably see the government outlaw physical cash to boot, forcing you to use a bank and forcing the bank to constantly siphon your money if you don't spend it quickly enough.
It would be a literal hellscape.
I know about the usual "deflation scares" by economists and governments. I think they are a bit overblown, though. They seem to assume people spend money just for fun. But people also spend money because they need things. If you are hungry, you have to go out and buy food. It doesn't matter that your 1$ may be worth 10$ tomorrow, if you need an Apple now or you will starve. So I think people would still be spending, and things would even out after a while. I don't believe we need those centralized banks manipulating prices to keep some inflation rate so that people keep spending.
I also don't think Bitcoin will just keep doubling every year forever.
But all that is besides the point.
As for "people discarding the economic value of Bitcoin", clearly right now it has value, so those people are wrong. Whether it will still have value next year is another question. But right now, you can sell 1 Bitcoin for 56000$, so it provably has value.
You are completely out of your depth, you have no idea what you're talking about, and it is not worth any effort to explain to you how a currency increasing in value by 10,000% in 5 years would cripple the economy.
Understanding why that would be disastrous to the point of irrevocably destroying a nation and leaving millions in abject poverty should be table stakes when you have the bravado to shrug off the fear mongering economists who study this stuff for a living.
Bitcoin exists and hasn't left millions in abject poverty yet.
Maybe you are the one who is clueless?
Are there even any examples of deflation ruining things, apart from Krugman's babysitting exchange? I don't think we should hinge the faith of nations on that one story, which may as well have many other explanations besides the deflation theory.
You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
Also new currencies have been created a lot of times in the past, technically their value would also have been increasing by 10000% over night.
Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x". There are economists advocating socialism and economists advocating capitalism, for example. There are even economists advocating Bitcoin.
> Are there even any examples of deflation ruining things, apart from Krugman's babysitting exchange? I don't think we should hinge the faith of nations on that one story, which may as well have many other explanations besides the deflation theory.
Ever heard of _The Great Depression_???? Go read up on it and tell me if deflation made things better or worse.
> Bitcoin exists and hasn't left millions in abject poverty yet.
Bitcoin is not the official currency of a country! The closest cases we have to that are failing economies where BTC is used as a life raft and its taken * 10 million percent * inflation to finally make BTC an attractive alternative!
>You don't even know if BTC would increase by 10000% in 5 years, if the nation would run on it.
The only way it wouldn't have is if it was highly regulated... sounds like a great match for BTC right?
Like you realize we ran this experiment before right? Do you know what the gold standard was? And why we moved away from it? _Hint: Go look up deflation and it's role in the Great Depression again._
Leaving the gold standard gave the government tools like interest rates that didn't have to compete with a commodity. Let alone _a commodity increasing in value 10,000% in 5 years_
> Economists have lots of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "economists say x".
This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying _"Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x"_ when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks.
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Your comment as a whole just tells me this is not even worth the effort I've put in to get to this point. I'm not even trying to be rude, you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here.
I know about the Great Depression. Economists are discussing the causes to this day. And why it ended is also up to debate. Yes, they left the gold standard and all that, but there also was WW II and war economics. Politicians love Keynes theories because they can employ them to rationalize government spending and money printing.
It seems quite ridiculous to claim the Great Depression was caused by Deflation. It might as well have been the other way round.
I have a Billion Reichsmark at home. Was the collapse of Nazi Germany caused by Inflation? I rather doubt it. An egg cost 100000 Reichsmark in the end because there were few eggs to go around. In the Great Depression, presumably labor was cheap because there were more workers than demand for work.
As for the gold standard, most economists agree that we don't know how the experiment will end yet. What if the central banks keep interest rates low forever - nobody knows how that game will end. And they can not easily raise rates again now without bankrupting a lot of people.
In any case it seems humans have existed for thousands of years without central banks setting interest rates.
"This is like stabbing your thigh with an icepick then saying "Doctors have a lot of different opinions, you can not simply appeal to "doctors say x" when someone points out that doctors would not like people to stab their thighs with icepicks."
What an idiotic comparison.
"you don't have the basics to even make conversing about this productive for either of us, so let's end it here."
Yeah you know nothing about reasoning. But you are entitled to your beliefs and cherry picked "facts", of course. Let's hope you won't get responsibility for any nations money supply any time soon.
It's not a scam. It's a parody of the USD back when it was on the gold standard.
Why is a fixed supply a bad idea for a day to day currency? Just look at Bitcoin.
A currency is effectively a public good, it's needed to facilitate trade. People sell stuff for currency and this creates a chain of transactions. If someone saves money beyond what they intend to spend, it's like damming a river. There are less transactions on the other side, in extreme cases no transactions may happen, which means an infinite chain of transactions has been interrupted. If the owner of the dam periodically releases the water (spends the money) then people downstream don't mind it. However, the dam owner may abuse his power and charge these people for the privilege of not having their water drained. (real interest) People get indebted to the dam owner but at least the infinite chain of transactions is no longer interrupted.
However, there is a problem with this. The dam owner makes it harder to make a living. Everyone starts building their own dam because it is more profitable than working. Suddenly, there are droughts everywhere even though there is no lack of water in the dams. That's how you get a 30s style depression. It's like panic buying money instead of toilet paper. All these Bitcoin investors are panic buying into it, for whatever (possibly valid) reason.
When you think about it, a fixed supply currency is meant to be exclusive for elites that don't want to give up their power.
In my opinion we might be in a mini depression (Japan and euro area) since 2008 or maybe even 2001. Our money systems are more flexible than a gold standard, however, pessimistic outlooks prevent banks from lending to small businesses. So you get a lopsided recovery at the top income spectrum where the rich are highly credit worthy and get their shoes kissed by the banks, meanwhile the average person still gets up to 10% interest for a small $10k loan.
>People sell stuff for currency and this creates a chain of transactions. If someone saves money beyond what they intend to spend, it's like damming a river. There are less transactions on the other side, in extreme cases no transactions may happen
Please explain how does me not spending money stops others from spending theirs?
if everyone doesn't spend any money, and incentives encourage hoarding treasure instead of productive work, this is a bad outcome in the aggregate
Not hoarding, it's called saving. And people would still spend money because everyone has their own time preference and we're all going to die someday anyways.
On the positive side, economy with a large number of savers would be less vulnerable to crisis. Governments won't be afraid to let zombie-companies die, because they know that people are not going to starve when this happens.
Then why aren't the majority of the miners or large wallets selling at all-time highs?
Miners have discovered that by going public they can simply sell shares in their Bitcoin without selling it, making them yet another degenerate ETF. DeFi lending has opened an avenue for old wallets to obtain liquidity without selling. This side-steps both the liquidity issues in BTC and also negative price pressure.
The âgreater foolâ effect â most of them think the price will continue to rise so theyâll be able to sell it later and make even more money. It has little to do with a bunch of people suddenly believing that Bitcoin has intrinsic value
So, like gold or any other speculative investment?
I used to hold similar views before life-changing events that now have me firmly on the side of BTC and crypto in general.
You can't convince them - in their mind, you are part of the "scam", and hence not trustworthy.
No point in debating, they will buy in when it clicks for them.
I'd love to hear the life-changing events, if possible. Because I've been trying to convince myself that BTC might be good. But I really couldn't find a reason. The "pump and dump" thing is the one that makes most sense right now. I'm open to contrarian ideas.
Some things are a little more appealing when you are in a country without a competent Federal Reserve
> Some things are a little more appealing when you are in a country without a competent Federal Reserve
Why bother with Bitcoin, when you can just use money from a country with a competent Federal Reserve? IIRC many countries have "dollarized" (either de jure or de facto).
maybe because the country with the FED can print new dollars and spend it on stuff they like (infrastructure bill, paying back debt, âŚ) while such dollarized countries, (beside yes the short term stable currency) just see medium-long term inflation (without the aforementioned benefit the dollarizing country gets).
Google for: âcantillon effectâ (also accounts for inequalities inside one country like the US)
Simple: there is no country with a competent Federal Reserve (Central Bank)
> Simple: there is no country with a competent Federal Reserve (Central Bank)
Eh, that's pretty obviously untrue under any _reasonable_ definition of "competent Federal Reserve."
Now, there are definitely unreasonable an/or extreme ideological definitions under which you could make such a statement (e.g. the most reasonable of these are monomanically overoptimizing to one metric), but those definitions are irrelevant and can be ignored.
> Eh, that's pretty obviously untrue under any reasonable definition of "competent Federal Reserve"
It's not obvious. Is any central bank that debases currency through money printing without some kind of fixed peg/ratio to a scarce asset competent?
No. This is self-evidently true as, by doing so, they are perniciously taxing the savings of the poor in order to feather the nests of the (asset-)rich.
There is no avoiding the truth of this inviolable fact as Cantillion himself described many years ago.
> Is any central bank that debases currency through money printing without some kind of fixed peg/ratio to a scarce asset competent?
You're...
>> monomanically overoptimizing to one metric
As long as they do the debasing competently, as in the currency is able to sustain a healthy economy, then they're a competent central bank.
Bitcoin could never sustain a healthy economy, for instance, because it strongly promotes hoarding and speculation.
> As long as they do the debasing competently...
This is a contradiction in terms...
Bitcoin promotes hoarding no more than gold does. And speculation no more than FX or commodities trading does.
If a payment currency was pegged to bitcoin and the backing ratio remained fixed things would be fine like they were when we had the gold standard or even the later USD reserve currency standard when the USD was backed by gold.
However history had shown that these arrangements did not hold as central bankers simply couldn't resist firing up the printer and breaking the peg with the scarce backing asset. Political pressures, wars, whatever the reason. Every peg was broken.
Human greed, misplaced albeit well-intentioned mistakes, and simple human fallibility will continue to tempt even the most honourable people close to the money spigot. It's happened throughout the ages and human nature will not change in this regard.
Bitcoin _algorithmically_ prevents this debasement and so it is literally the perfect base monetary asset. No one can fuck with it.
>> As long as they do the debasing competently...
> This is a contradiction in terms...
No it isn't. For instance, I can see carefully controlled debasing (e.g. inflation) as motivation to put money some use rather than sit on it, for instance.
> Bitcoin promotes hoarding no more than gold does. And speculation no more than FX or commodities trading does.
Maybe gold promotes hoarding too much, as well. When you get down to it, it's also questionable to tie your money supply to the availability of some arbitrarily-chosen commodity. Do you want deflation until someone discovers some big gold deposit, then things swing inflationary? Bitcoin seems even worse since it's designed to be deflationary, since people will irretrievably loose them and at some point no more will be made.
Like I said, I don't try to convince people to buy Bitcoin, because I remember how I used to respond to people talking about it.
I would mock them, call it a ponzi scheme, call them shills, etc.
I think Satoshi did it right. He said -
> If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
He said this when Bitoin was still extremely niche and inexpensive.
But because you asked, I'm going to tell you what the personal event taught me - people are irrational.
Watch "Gods Must be Crazy" and try to understand the allegory of the bottle and what effect it has on the tribe.
That's what Bitcoin has achieved in cyberspace.
Full on cultist talk. Including "irrefutable" quotes from the founder of the cult. Allegories. "Personal events that changed my life".
I think those events probably had something to do with getting rich
The fact that nobody adopted Freicoin is a sign that there is nothing of substance in the cryptocurrency space. Freicoin is Bitcoin without the speculation. Freicoin can only be used as a medium of exchange.
It's far more likely that in 50 years we will see negative interest rates on cash and thereby complete abolishment of the business cycle, involuntary unemployment and growth dependence than a move back to a currency designed to maintain dynasties.
That's a lot of words to avoid answering the question.
> No point in debating, they will buy in when it clicks for them.
Sounds like Herbalife to me.
The only way WikiLeaks could accept donations when they were cut off from traditional finance. Yup, sounds like Herbalife.
>No point in debating, they will buy in when it clicks for them.
Yeah, it didn't take long for the aristocracy to click that owning land and passing it onto their heirs for all eternity is good for humanity and the landless peasants are just jealous that they can't abuse their own landless peasants.
Bitcoin is the most egalitarian money ever created. Nobody will ever refuse to sell you Bitcoin because you're a "peasant".
And comparing money with land is also incorrect - having Bitcoins in a wallet that you're never going to spend is as useful as having no Bitcoins at all. Unlike land, where you can live, extract resources, grow food, etc.
> the people who originally got into Bitcoin simply wanted to be an accepted currency for goods and services
Unfortunately, they built the currency to be deflationary, so itâs only used for speculation.
It's not deflationary, it's inflating at a predetermined rate, gradually getting closer to the 21M cap.
The governments are unable to rebase it to fund their wars and propaganda though, so naturally they don't like it.
Presuming population continues to rise, any currency whose volume does not rise at the same rate is de facto deflationary. Similarly, assuming an increasing supply of goods and services in the market, the same logic applies. Itâs possible to have a currency thatâs neither deflationary nor inflationary, but Bitcoin is not that.
Due to technical reasons Bitcoins are lost every day though. There is nothing that keeps the dead Bitcoins moving. So the supply is shrinking over the long term.
Bitcoin custody is getting better every day, so the supply shrinking is not a real, fundamental problem.
2010:
> While this view of Bitcoin might sound like it is a betrayal of Bitcoin's original vision of fully peerâtoâpeer cash, it is not a new vision. Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto, wrote this on the Bitcoin forum in 2010: Actually there is a very good reason for Bitcoinâbacked banks to exist, issuing their own digital cash currency, redeemable for bitcoins. Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases. Bitcoin backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve while others may be 100% Bitcoin backed. Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others. George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and selfâregulating.
This was largely based on an implicit technical promise that did not pan out. Bitcoin simply doesn't scale well enough to ever be a functional payment system, certainly not a commonly used one. I doubt any digital currency will ever be performant enough to work like a credit card while being widely adopted, not without some level of centralization, but then why bother?
Well, credit cards are very expensive to use (3% of every transaction on average). Digital centralized stable coin type of currency could compete with those.
But a centralized stablecoin has.. basically none of the benefits of Bitcoin?
At this point it looks like a bait and switch. We were promised a decentralized currency and we just got a get rich quick scheme.
Not to the customer. I don't pay 3% more for anything if I choose a card vs. cash, in fact the card gives me a 1% cash back reward.
Meanwhile buttcoins have ridiculous spikes in miner fees. New bullshit "distributed app" like the next cryptokitties is clogging Ethereum again? Now moving $10 costs $40! Money of the future!
Current stablecoins are fraudulent wildcat banks. Research Tether.
You might want to look into the Lightning Network - this enables instant payments on top of Bitcoin.
It's just a talking point. Only about 2x as many people are using it as 3 years ago, and due to being boat-anchored to the molasses slow L1, it would take 75 years, $500,000,000,000 worth of electricity and all the remaining block reward to open a lightning channel for everyone on earth. Even then its quadratic routing complexity would likely render it completely ineffective long before that many people tried to onboard. It's like a Soviet phone line, if you apply now, you might get a channel before you shuffle off this mortal coil.
So you're against the lightning network because it can't be scaled infinitely?
The overall system is just software, and it can be improved.
L1 is capable of 4.6 transactions per second.
L2 is capable of 25 million per second currently.
L3 will be in existence long before getting a channel to every human on Earth becomes a problem (please note that this is something the traditional financial system has also failed to do, despite hundreds of years and legislative support).
Iâm against it because itâs physically impossible to sign up people in any quantity and doesnât offer the same guarantees as the L1. We can talk about an L3 when there is one.
I've not even got anything against LN per se, what I'm pushing back on is the marketing that it's some sort of panacea, that it makes BTC a viable payment mechanism, or even that its particularly interesting.
All their hardware engineering positions say theyâre working on a mining ASIC, but it just seems like a huge stretch how thatâs part of their business.
The purpose of the ASIC is to make Bitcoin (look) more decentralized and thus more legit.
> Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff.
That sounds good, then? Hope you are not implying that it's a negative thing.
On the contrary, this move means that their core brand and cash cow (Square) can remain "safe" and only associated with secure payments and PoS sales rather than all their bets on crypto, blockchain, music and whatever else Jack Dorsey is cooking up.
The cash cow is actually increasingly Cash App
Block is adding a new dimension to Square.
Lmao that can't be the real reason behind the change, right? Because that's fucking embarrassing.
Why is that embarrassing? I find it pretty clever from a marketing perspective.
What's the next iteration, hypercube?
Cubic square
Tesseract?
I guess Cube would be a natural name progression. But there are manu cube companies.
And presumably the whole point was a link to blockchain. Otherwise Cube definitely would've been more logical. Not that there was anything wrong with Square.
I'd argue Apple started this loooong ago. Their first few products where literally named "Apple", but then they quickly moved towards establishing independent brands for all products, starting with the Macintosh, I believe.
That left their well known company name as an umbrella brand, whereas Google, Facebook et al came up with some obscure umbrella brand way late.
I'm not an Apple fanboy at all, but I think this shows they had more vision than most. Most tech giants had one very focused, ridiculously successful product and tried to find meaning beyond that later. From everything I've heard around the early Apple decades, they always had this mentality of focusing on new product (lines) as their way forward. Probably to some degree because their focus is/was hardware, not software, but I don't believe that's all there is to it. They literally create new products that have the potential of making their established, more expensive products obsolete: For example the iPad.
IIRC âAppleâ was a provisional last minute decision
I don't think the name matters, what matters is that they built the brand early on and were daring enough to build separate brands for their products.
Sure, "Meta" _means_ something, but Apple (now) does, too, by association.
The earned media from this announcement is worth an absolute fortune. Imagine youâre a marketer for a major tech company. How much would you pay to get an organic HN front page discussion of your companyâs roadmap?
Short term this is good PR, long term itâs about positioning the brand. If blockchain hype continues to grow, it will be powerful to have a brand closely associated with it.
> How much would you pay to get an organic HN front page discussion of your companyâs roadmap?
Dozens of dollars! Seriously, that is the going rate for boosting an article to the HN front page (not to say it will stay on the front page, flagging and dang are quite effective).
Considering this article has spent hours on the front page and remains in the top 10, I don't see the point you're trying to make. Also, note _organic_.
Point is doing a whole rebrand to get a burst of news about it is dumb. The burst is over in days, but you're stuck with the new brand for years. Some short lived publicity is at best a small side effect, not a big reason to do it.
There's a risk that blockchain and BTC in particular may taint the brand for many.
I personally think that's a very real risk, but Square definitely disagrees
I'm pretty sure I ruined a job opportunity for myself by expressing my distaste for crypto. I mean, I might as well go work at a multi level marketing company if I'm willing to work in crypto.
im cracking up that you think a front page HN post is somehow worth anything substantial
A block could be a 3-D square, so at least thereâs this cute connection in this case, unlike Meta.
Facelibrary
Unfortunately it's blockhead[1]. I wish this was a joke.
1.
https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...
I think he wants to become the biggest bitcoin/blockchain/fintech company. Probably full service contract/exchange/hodler/wallet/all-the-things.
Apple stopped selling "Apple Computers" decades ago. They sell Macs. If someone is talking about Beats and Apple, it doesn't get confused with the computer. Apple is the parent company and Beats sells audio hardware. In 2007, they changed their name from "Apple Computer" to "Apple Inc." The same year AppleTV and the iPhone were announced.
That said, Apple has some terrible branding in some areas. Is AppleTV the hardware, the subscription service, or Apple's TV app?
Apple Inc. used to be Apple Computer, Inc. You could argue they actually started the trend long ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3sg8b5iXO4
Yep, a block is like a square, but brings to mind a blockchain. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someday soon we're reading about Block's new product, Chain.
Sounds more like the parent holding company name change, Facebook.com is still Facebook and not changing, meta is just the parent company like Alphabet. I'm assuming the same for square.com.
It's so strange. Square has good branding. Why would you just drop that completely? Crypto stuff aside, changing the name of your company like this just feels insane to me.
Crypto companies get a few orders of magnitude the market cap of traditional finance.
See Filecoin: approximately 1/100th data stored as Backblaze, approx 100x the fully diluted market cap of Backblaze, for a 10000x $ per byte stored.
But that's a scam. Square isn't a scam. They're seemingly very successful...
Apple does use different names for things like Beats and is more integrated or has different names such as iCloud instead of Apple Cloud services
Actually points the other way: Apple tends to preserve names, rather than obfuscating them with changes. Beats isn't now "AirPod Fast" after company acquisition, 'i'-prefix names haven't been switched to "Apple "-prefix, etc.
They all did this for different reasons, right? Google, I'm not sure about. Block: because their other brands are really tied to particular things, like Square is super tied to payment processing, there's no upside to using it elsewhere. Facebook: trying to break into new markets as Facebook is hard, because everyone knows Facebook is fundamentally bad.
I guess every company that rebrands has a specific reason to do so. Apple hasn't done anything to soil their name too badly, so they don't have to.
Want to put all of the crypto BS under another brand name for when it blows up
Apple is more integrated.
Good lord.
Pity the poor person out there trying to understand what is going on / what is block.xyz.
At least we are told nothing will change with TBD54566975 (?).
https://twitter.com/tbd54566975?lang=en
The bitcoin world is crazy.
It has been fascinating to watch the corporate cryptocurrency world try so hard to project the fringe, edgy, anti-corporate nature of cryptocurrencies that attracted so many in the first place.
All of these corporate cryptocurrency pushes have strong "How do you do, fellow children?" vibes.
But the funny part is a lot of the crypto people are eating it right up, mostly because they have to accept any and all big business investment in the crypto space to further pump their own assets.
It more mirrors the "FOQNEs" or "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities" from Snow Crash. Sovereign individuals that hold massive bitcoin stores can transact to anyone because they can afford the fees. Normies that can't will be beholden to these large corporate interest. Transferring money to a business or person will happen in a database in Coinbase or other exchange, much like now with a bank. Settlement will happen between banks and organizations they've partnered with. For the common person the interface will be the same. Settlement between organizations will change.
I'd like to say that the fees are an artifact of the poor scaling of both Bitcoin and Ethereum, but proof of work schemes are by design _horrendously_ inefficient and suggested alternatives like proof of stake have yet to be proven in practice.
"How do you do, fellow children?" vibes.
But it's curated by JAY-Z!
Seriously this is the most valuable part of the website -- scraped and brought to my music streaming service.
> the fringe, edgy, anti-corporate nature of cryptocurrencies that attracted so many in the first place.
That was the first wave. This much bigger wave is people like your uncle who's not tech savvy but bought $100 in Bitcoin because they heard you could get rich from it. The ideological component is just window dressing (eventually a lot of ideology becomes window dressing so that's not too unusual).
> That was the first wave. This much bigger wave is people like your uncle who's not tech savvy but bought $100 in Bitcoin because they heard you could get rich from it
Random uncles putting $100 into BitCoin isn't driving the market.
Cryptocurrency is very corporate now, including a mix of shady corporations who love playing in this unregulated space.
The average joe is just along for the ride, but they're being pitched the idea that decentralization is democratization. Meanwhile, there's nothing stopping a decentralized cryptocurrency from being _owned_ by very centralized players. It is, after all, tradable by anyone.
> Random uncles putting $100 into BitCoin isn't driving the market.
No, but the companies providing easy ways for tens of thousands of uncles to put $100 into the market definitely are driving the market.
See: Robinhood, Venmo, PayPal, Coinbase, etc.
Jack paid 300 million for that playlist
Seriously?
I do not know what is true anymore in this world. It feels like stupid people are running the show.
It's only a 90 billion dollar company running a significant share of the POS market and peer to peer money market, why would they have a sensical, logical or straightforward parent site?
Exactly - and they are talking / working with at least some boring accountants in all of this who don't care if things are curated by Jay-Z in their point of sale and merchant clearing systems.
This looks really amateur and tacky. I can't believe this is real.
I just looked through the specifications of that thing, it's mental, and still relies on "trusted third parties"(?)
KYC inherently requires trust.
For others as confused as I was: Square bought Tidal earlier this year. Spiral was Square Crypto. TBD54566975 appears to be some sort of decentralized exchange Jack Dorsey tweeted about at one point. & they're all being put under this Block banner, apparently.
Thank you. Completely missed the Tidal acquisition, will never care about TBDXYZ, but was curious, and clicking on the twitter link did nothing useful.
Interesting trend from specialized names with large amount of semantic content, towards more generalized names with very little semantic content: Google->Alphabet, Facebook->Meta, Square->Block (ok a little tenuous). What's next? Apple->Fruit? Windows->Opening?
I guess it is so the owners can imagine the company to be whatever they want it to be, though typically they end up being nothing at all.
Also a trend in making things increasingly less googleable.
iTunes->Music. Searching for issues with the application formerly known as iTunes is borderline impossible now.
Whoever approved that mustâve gotten an MBA from a top-ranked school, because any decent person would immediately recognize it as a bad idea.
Donât ever try to search for Apple TV. Are you talking about the physical streaming device? The âTVâ app (iOS version? iPadOS version? tvOS version? macOS version? Or maybe the version on your LG TV?) Or maybe youâre even talking about the AppleTV+ streaming service.
Same searching issues with âMailâ, âNotesâ, âRemindersâ, âCalendarâ, âNumbersâ, etc. Impossible to troubleshoot.
Iâm as much of an Apple fanboy as the next guy, but I totally agree that this naming is ridiculous.
At least Safari isnât âWebâ (yet).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web
Already been done.
The Word text processor was already ungoogleable before there even was Google. This lexicographic landgrab not exactly a new phenomenon.
Within platforms like Apple OS it's a very powerful tool: if you give your app for doing something a brand it effectively admits that there could be other apps, but if you don't that is easy to forget.
Amazon -> Phânglui mglwânafh Cthulhu Râlyeh wgahânagl fhtagn
Translation:
"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
As companies trend toward being conglomerates of unrelated businesses, it makes sense for them to rebrand this way.
Google makes (a little) sense for just search, but it makes no sense as a self-driving taxi service.
"Google" is a meaningless pair of semi-pronouncable nonsense syllables, inspired by the made up big number "googol" (which was named by a 9-year-old child whose uncle wrote a pop math book). It has no problem standing for self-driving taxis or whatever else.
If you want your own similar company name, visit an elementary school and ask the 3rd grade students for advice. You can make "bleeblax" or "squibjub" or "tibflee" or "shubzoo" into the next unicorn company.
The weak connection is that the googolplex represents a huge amount of data, like Googleâs searched index. Your other syllables donât have that connection. It doesnât matter how a huge number got its accepted name.
The googol connection actually would still work for Waymo since AI driving also requires huge quantities of data.
The new names all sound minimalist and trendy.
In japan the owners just put their family name there. I guess some of these tech owners dont want their family ethics being confused with what their business does
Jack should not have used Block, it should be either called "@jack" or the address of his bitcoin wallet
That makes me think most nouns should be protected in society for companies 'claiming' them.... They are basically putting a flag on the whatever word they rename to, and forcing the entire user base of the English language to reframe what that word means....
If you're company is "Apple", then you are rewriting the meaning of the actual physical apple object. An example alternative that protects the Nouns, would be to have to add a number on the end. Apple-1 could sell laptops, Apple-5 could sell apple peelers, Apple-2123 could make wool sweatshirts
Windows is already owned my a bigger company (Microsoft) and Apple is already a company that sells products (Mac, iPhone, allegedly some software)
I really adore the demo scene vibes I'm getting from
.
You can say what you want about megaholding corporate conglomerates, but this has so much more style than abc.xyz.
Okay I'll bite. I just see a flexing cube (agree it looks like a 90s demo). But is this site meant to do anything else? I tried scrolling or tapping and it didn't do anything.
There's an arrow button at the bottom right of the page, that if you click it reveals a navbar with some links to a careers page and so on.
You can also click and drag to rotate the cube. But yeah, it doesn't do anything particular spectacular.
The âNavbarâ links donât work. At least not on my iPhone.
Thanks! No navbar on my browser, just a cube toy.
If you scroll down (at least on my phone) the cube rotates for a while and then the navbar appears.
You can click and drag the flexing cube and it moves the background in some way.
Makes my integrated graphics chug pretty hard though :(
"Cube" would have been better:
"Square" => "Cube"
but
"Square" => "Block" just seems mediocre by comparison.
Certainly they want "Block" to invoke blockchain, but it seems more gimmicky with just "Block".
If anyone should've rebranded as Block, it's H&R Block. "It's cleaner."
H&R Block is well known as Block in the Kansas City area, where theyâre headquartered, though I donât know if thatâs only among tech people or the general public.
And if they got then Jennifer Lopez as their spokesperson, they'd be a trillion dollar company right now.
I wonder if their lawyers are type type typing away at this moment...
H&R Block Blocks Block Rebranding?
Block is a reference to blockchain, ie Square is looking to move towards cryptocurrency more and more, so cube wouldn't have worked in this case.
Jack has been pretty explicit that they're looking toward bitcoin only, not cryptocurrency generally.
Missed opportunity on cubechain right there!
_Chain_ also has some weird connotations, but Coin might have worked.
Chainlink and Coinbase already exist so they might not have wanted to be too similar to them.
Square Blockchain Corp maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp
Looks like corporate umbrellas [0] are making a come back.
I get the need to productize endlessly on sea of ideas and perhaps incubate spin-offs but even GE and J&J are running away from its conglomerate ways⌠I mean umbrella corporation [1] ways.
â-
I think the current trend is coming about because of SAAS - in the olden days, startup feared big companies because they could make your product / company a feature in their product - but weâre seeing the reverse- theyâre now seeing that millions of customers are willing to pay $X dollars a month for what amount to a feature as a separate product instead of licensing SAP type product.
[0]
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporate-umbrella.asp
[1]
https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Umbrella_Corporation
Block references the [âŚ] obstacles to overcome [âŚ]
Surely thatâs the most problematic thing here⌠Block sounds to me like something that gets in the way. Like a blood clot or something⌠I guess theyâll be fineâŚ
On a side note, the block.xyz website looks _amazing_
Their rationale is good, local merchants use square.
they should use the party tld, for block.party
Interesting⌠thinly veiled play on blockchain? With Jackâs recent leave of twitter, I think itâs clear this is his new vision for the future.
With Facebookâs recent re-org to Meta, is this spurring a new wave of companies re-branding to be seen as relevant by associating with future technologies?
Something interesting is happening in other industries, where large conglomerates are spinning off high-growth potential divisions, specially pharmaceuticals
https://www.fiercepharma.com/topic/spinoff
all for that sweet sweet stock growth
I find it interesting that they're copying Alphabet with their TLD choice. It was clever with abc.xyz, but in this case it doesn't really mean much.
I suspect the âmeaningâ is 3D. Square -> XY, Block -> XYZ.
Ah, could be.
And in turn, copying Hooli:
(I was at google during the alphabet announcement and seem to remember a wink from management towards the connection being intentional, but I could be remembering speculation as fact.)
The announcement letter on
(still) has a hidden link to Hooli, in one of the full stops.
An explanation of the name choice from Square's tweets:
Not to get all meta on you⌠but weâre going to! Block references the neighborhood blocks where we find our sellers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a section of code, building blocks, and of course, tungsten cubes.
https://twitter.com/Square/status/1466158911413760004
Block (previously Square) Bitcoin Revenue By Year:
2018: $166 million
2019: $516 million
2020: $4.5 billion
2021: $8 billion+ in first three quarters
$SQ $BTC
How much of that is revenue from actual crypto-related business vs. just appreciation of crypto the company owns? Feels like the impressiveness of this trend really depends on that
Their Bitcoin "revenue" is simply the face value of the Bitcoin they sell.
It's like if Charles Schwab counted any stocks people bought as revenue.
I suspect the difference is that SQ may hold the Bitcoin and sell directly to the user rather than as a broker. But calling it "revenue" is still highly misleading, as margins will be razor thin, by definition (the transaction fee)
I somehow never understood what square/block is. Tried to understand it again, but still not able to find any grasp while browsing their site. What are they doing?
They are a payments processor, like Shopify. They make physical card readers, with a focus on small retailers, restaurants, nail salons, small time family businesses. Some up-market support. Also e-commerce products that compete more closely with Shopify.
They also build cash app, a competitor to Venmo. They have investment and banking and tax products.
They also have some crypto side projects and own tidal.
Pumping crypto!
I remember when Transferwise changed their name to Wise.
I tried to humor them and use their new name when talking about the service to other people, but people had a hard time understanding what I was even saying. "I use this thing called Wise." "What?" - something about the word is actually hard to enunciate and people don't even comprehend the sentence. I think this is mainly a problem with using a pre-existing English word for your brand.
In the case of Square, their original name was already pretty non-specific/unrelated and they just moved laterally. I guess if they're getting into blockchain then maybe it really is more related now...
That one is kinda different. They renamed everything. It's not like transferwise is a product of Wise. It's transferwise is now called wise. In 10 years or so people will look at you weird when you call it transferwise. Branding and naming takes a while to catch on.
WWF to WWE - It tooks years for it to fully take hold. Sure some people will automatically think of WWE when you say WWF but not all will. And at one point it was called WWWF.
Datsun to Nissan - Honestly, you say Datsun to anyone they'll have no idea what you're talking about.
Marathon to Snickers - Very few people even remember this.
WTF is @TBD54566975?
Their first product is a decentralized peer to peer Bitcoin exchange based on Decentralized Identity. They released their white paper recently.
It's a crypto incubator.
Thanks, it's weird though that their twitter bio doesn't say that.
It's just a picture of a musician and #Bitcoin and a picture of a hat.
https://twitter.com/TBD54566975
Is anyone in this space serious?
Twitter bios are pretty bad in general. I'll check someone's bio and it just says something like "optimist, player of games" which doesn't help my poor literal-minded brain decide whether to follow them or not.
You'd think a Twitter bio created by the founder of Twitter would be better.
"Twitter isn't real life"
Maybe next year they can rebrand as Hypercube.
A block is a square in 3 dimensions
Should have gone to tessaract, which is a square in 4 dimensions.
I'd bet Square already has one or more microservices named tessaract.
I'm going to predict that at some point in time, this company will name itself Tesseract.
Before posting, I searched for "Tesseract" and here you go.
Does any company want (to) block payments? Terrible name!
"If press releases are your thing, hereâs ours:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/52543725/en
"
- @blocks (
https://twitter.com/blocks/status/1466159597194907649
)
OMFG, they weren't even able to get @block username on twitter. This is so pitiful.
Since when has twitter not allowed me viewing individual accounts on mobile browser without signing in?
That's annoying.
(the main nitter.net is down, this just the first mirror instance from
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
)
You can hit reload then dismiss the modal. (works on iOS)
Some info here
https://investors.block.xyz/overview/
This is what happens when you put the product designers in charge of the rebrand
Jack has always done this. Even though the bulk of revenues has come from POS subscription and payments revenue, Jack has only cared about it to the extent it allows him to try consumer facing things like Square Wallet, Caviar, Square Pickup, Square Cash, and then all the crypto stuff.
I just hope the sellers donât suffer because of this
regular brain: company
galaxy brain: blockchain holding company
Can someone explain the TBD54566975 moniker?
> _Can someone explain the TBD54566975 moniker?_
The answer is in the following links:
> _Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is Bitcoin. Its name is TBD._ â
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1415765941904941061
> _Weâve decided to make our official name TBD54566975 based solely on this numerology report [picture]._ â
https://twitter.com/TBD54566975/status/1424818221652324355
tbDEX: A Liquidity Protocol [1][2][3][4]
[1]
https://tbdex.io/whitepaper.pdf
[2]
https://twitter.com/tbd54566975
[3]
https://github.com/TBDev-54566975
[4]
https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/
Thank you!
Hurr durr memes
Other threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409382
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409497
Ongoing related thread:
_Block (aka Square, Tidal, CashApp etc)_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409630
- Dec 2021 (29 comments)
That website looks like something Kendall Roy would have done.
God Jack, I get that you and Jay-Z are besties but people donât care about Jay-Z.
Jay Z is a billionaire and one of the most influential musicians in recent history tho... it's safe to say a lot of people care about him.
I work in tech, I don't care about Jay-Z, and I still care about Jay-Z more than I care about Jack.
Out of curiosity, are you over 40?
That's funny. He's naming the company he left Twitter for after the action you have to perform against promoted accounts on Twitter to make it at all bearable.
What branding consultant has gotten into the ear of bigtech company CEO's in SF to do renames for their conglomerates that everyone will continue to ignore?
Since I'm reading a lot of angry comments here, let me add a bit of thinking behind how these things happen without taking a side. Been designing for companies (probably just 10% branding, mostly UI/UX) for more than a decade.
Rebrands always get a ton of negative press, but almost always the reason why companies try to do so is not what it seems from the outside.
For example, when Dropbox did their big rebranding (sure they kept the name, but I can remember reading the same comments when it happened) I happen to know that their reasoning is not what many people would think of.
Dropbox hit a growth plateau. The growth they had gotten from the engineering community where it started was slowing down.
They decided to reposition and rebrand their company to a new more creative community. This seems to have had some help in continuing the growth curve.
Many of these rebrands get a ton of negative comments, but you have to remember that the rebrand is not meant for you as an existing user/customer/fan/etc. it's meant to help reach a new audience. To push growth. Tap into new markets, please a board and show that you're moving forward to some exciting destination at the horizon.
When looking at rebrands, try to think of the business decision behind the scenes as to why these might have happened.
What's the business/design decision behind this:
https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...
PWC tried to become 'Monday', the worst day of the week, back in the original dotcom boom.
Didn't work out too well for them:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2163472.stm
I always associated .xyz domains with cheap and unprofessional stuff, really weird to use that domain
Makes me think of Fakeblock.
this makes almost no sense unless Dorsey is going full time crypto .....
I predict a VR app from Block called Party where Tidal supplies the music
He is.
Not crypto, Bitcoin. Not blockchain, Bitcoin.
Sure, still a lot of things Jack does doesn't make sense. Michael Saylor did the pure Bitcoin play, he gets it much more: make the company buy as much Bitcoin in the treasury as possible, and get into low interest rate debt that is not marked to market value.
While Jack Dorsey is just talking about helping poor countries, Jack Mallers went there to launch the product, and has a great vision about using the lightning network to compete with VISA / Mastercard.
This is definitely a prelude to some kind of blockchain thing they will attempt to undertake.
It's interesting how their Block design is very similar to Gumroad's new design (which came out earlier this week), and yet they came out so close I doubt either copied or got inspiration by the other
I've had payments blocked with PayPal, why do I need Block for that?
When you think it's April fools day but it's actually December.
Is this real? This reads like spam or some other kind of nonsense...
I wonder if their stock ticker will change. BLOCK doesn't seem to be taken.
5 letter tickers are frowned upon generally unless its a different share class or if its in some kind of credit/corporate action I thought. Like .E means Ch11 (iirc)
Press says no.... still SQ
Yeah you're right:
https://twitter.com/Square/status/1466158918724472837?s=20
Jack Dorsey, November 29th 2021 (
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720/photo/1
):
There's a lot of talk about the importance of a company being "founder-led." Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure. I've worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.
I believe it's critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder's influence or direction
Ironic, given all his push toward making Square a Bitcoin company in line with his own Bitcoin whims.
Please don't make up quotes? Or provide a source.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720
He removed his fake so I got downvoted haha.
Let the meme in, bad is good if it stays in people's head. Accepting the memeplex into a business is all here is really, that's marketing.
The company has acquired (more?) depth .. :o)
Looks like a shitty crypto altcoin website.
I wonder why their crypto arm is called Spiral?
Likely of the downward variety.
Block (previously Square) Bitcoin Revenue By Year:
2018: $166 million
2019: $516 million
2020: $4.5 billion
2021: $8 billion+ in first three quarters
$SQ $BTC
Signalâs gone blockchain crazy. Now Squareâs gone the same way. It makes me a little less confident in Square. Hopefully this wonât affect their core products.
Did Jack jump from Twitter onto the end of the Blockchain train? So more money and employees are sacrificed onto the altar of blockchain hype.
Else theyâre successfully trying to gain attention by pretending to move into blockchain.
I always confuse them with Square Enix so I'm glad they're finally changing their name.
Is this a blank page for anyone else?
It loads after a long, long time. It will transfer upwards of 10mb of who-knows-what before displaying a useless morphing cube and zero information.
All I saw on mobile was a play button
Why couldn't twitter be integrated into one of these blocks and have square run them all?
It's Square for the metaverse. (A block is a 3D square, you see...)
It shows that they aim to focus on Blockchain ;)
I think it's awesome that Flash intros are back
Except now it's a layercake of JavaScript / HTML / CSS salad that doesn't work in all devices.
Flash had a lot of faults, but they could have been fixed (and open sourced). The Flash editor was by far the best animation tool for the web and it got murdered by Apple to protect iOS from foreign runtimes.
WTF is with all the Twitter replies?
Is it a verb?
A Block is a three dimensional Square. How is that confusing for most here?
Name change makes sense, especially in cryptocurrency services.
It looks like a turn of the century art project or album launch site at first: there's nothing on the page mentioning Square until you click on the arrow at the bottom which does some animation before showing the copyright notice and the pseudo-Python on their home page doesn't look like a $100 billion dollar company or a tech company (it'd be valid syntax).
That makes sense in a Brand pitch meeting, but there are _so_ many things called Block in this space I think they could have been more unique. I thought this was about _The Block_ (the news site) at first glance.
No, we get it. It is just dumb.
I had no idea it was affiliated with square. Now it makes more sense
>A Block is a three dimensional Square. How is that confusing for most here?
I'd agree if all their services were financial related but don't think Tidal fits.
Is it April 1st again?
A 2D to 3D migration?
Chain
Tech company -> holding company rebrand/restructure is so hot right now
Itâs interesting comparing Facebook to others; Facebook sought to leave their main brand behind while others generally seek to keep brand equity.
Google => Alphabet
Square => Block
Facebook => Meta ??
For Facebook they were dealing with the opposite, trying to shift past a torrent of negative press, the move to an Abstract name has been highly effective in turning down the (short term) negative press heat. Yes they announced new things but arguably it was critical timing from a PR perspective.
You forgot We!
and Snap Inc. which pre-IPO was Snapchat Inc before it was under the parent company.
has it been highly effective? do new articles about meta not mention facebook?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29391726
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29395518
Two examples here -- When I read both titles and took a min to realize "OH FACEBOOK!"
This is a very stupid website.
This is stupid! I don't wanna be boosting crypto indirectly so our nonprofit is leaving Square now!
I am sorry to inform you that you may have trouble finding fintech outfits that are not playing with Bitcoin moving forward. Good luck with that fiat.
You're wrong! We have both SumUp and Intuit! Both are cheaper and better than Square anyway!
I'm not super bullish on crypto and frankly it terrifies me a bit, but Intuit charges rent to the US population by lobbying to maintain complicated tax forms and processes...is that what you'd rather support?
Intuit is a pretty big company with some old mentality, but they contribute back a lot, too. For example, the whole Argo ecosystem is pretty much maintained by them. If Clover was not requiring you to go thru a bank, they would have been much more successful, and we'd be a client of theirs already.
Ironically, intuit and SumUp did have BTC payments in 2014 but stopped it due to low demand. (Of course⌠what people donât get is BTC is not for spending. It is for saving.)
Maybe early to the pre party and late to the after party?
Square is hoarding Bitcoins; can't recall SumUp getting involved and popularizing Bitcoin the way Jack is! Yes, sometimes companies accept Bitcoin, but that's a totally different story, and are not directly involving themselves in this scam and eco disaster!
s/saving/speculating/ ftfy
I think that's fine, but why create so much chaos with a rebrand on a product that currently has very little to do with blockchain tech? Why not spin off a separate entity, "Block (powered by Square)" to prove the idea and slowly migrate?
This name change is going to be extremely confusing to end users who are out of the loop given the current dominance of the Square brand.
Because they need to offload their crypto assests on the unsuspecting masses before they loose all value. And the hope is that driving crypto front and center would help that
The key public brand cash app tidal etc is the same. Square was vendor facing mostly so the name isnât that important as b2b names change frequently. I donât think as big a deal as Meta name change, being a consumer brand, and thatâs not really a problem with consumers so far.
The Square product is not being rebranded. Nothing is really changing here.
Have you tried using cryptocurrencies? What made you so polarized on this topic?
I used to mine Bitcoin before it was cool.
And you still have some today?
I tend to sell at peaks. I occasionally use it to make payments, but it's the most expensive is slowest method of payment in 2021!
Come now, most expensive! Thatâs ETH for sure, btc is never more than $1 at peak times of multiple MB of mempool and currently at 1sat/vB which is $0.08
The environmental impact.
Pretty, but Iâm clueless what this is for