Hello, does anybody know a Taiwanese exchange where I could sell by PAX/USDT for TWD and be able to move money to a bank account in Taiwan?
Barron’s
Square Cash app users traded Bitcoin aggressively in the second quarter, and all that volume benefited the payments company.
Shares of Square (ticker; SQ) closed up 7.1% on Wednesday for all sorts of reasons, but the digital currency appeared to be one of them. The news is good for Square, and arguably even better for Bitcoin.
When Bitcoin crashed in 2018, many young users lost interest, but clearly some are flocking back. It helps that Bitcoin is on the rise, up 62% this year to $11,700.
Square, whose core business is helping merchants accept credit cards, made almost half its gross profit in the quarter from services on its Cash app, which lets people send money to each other and to invest in stocks and Bitcoin. It appears to have benefited from a trend that has also helped brokers during the pandemic—a rise in day trading.
Square’s revenue from Bitcoin was $875 million, up 600% year over year. It accounted for an enormous portion of the company’s $1.92 billion in revenue.
But that revenue is somewhat deceiving – the company counts the total amount of Bitcoin that it sells to customers as revenue. So if people buy $100 of Bitcoin for their accounts, that $100 plus a small cut to Square goes into Square’s revenue line goes into Square’s revenue line. Square buys Bitcoin and takes a “small margin” on each sale to customers, which it records as gross profit. The company recorded $17 million gross profit from Bitcoin trading in the quarter, less than 3% of its total gross profit (but up 717% year over year).
Square benefited from people depositing their stimulus checks into their Cash app accounts. And many of those people with the Cash app also appear to have traded stocks, along with Bitcoin. Square started allowing equity investments through its Cash App Investing subsidiary last October.
The timing was fortuitous. The Covid-19 lockdowns have inspired a surge in retail trading, with privately held Robinhood Markets announcing in May that it had added 3 million customers this year. Square said in the fourth quarter that its equity investing product had the fastest growth of any Cash app product launch, though the company wouldn’t release figures on the number of customers using it.
A company spokesperson said that Bitcoin and equity volume was up but released few other details: “In the second quarter, we saw year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter increases in volume per active customer across our Cash App ecosystem, including Bitcoin investing and stock brokerage,” she wrote.
Interestingly, Square still doesn’t allow people to buy and sell items using Bitcoin. The company did try that for a while a few years back, but didn’t see much volume.
And Bitcoin, a technology that was designed to make payments seamless, is now used more as an investment like gold than as a payment mechanism. If Square ever did allow Bitcoin to be used for payments and businesses started accepting it en masse, that would be a much bigger deal than the company’s trading revenue.
It’s a shit payment method. I’ve never bought anything with bitcoin.
But there are stable coin currencies that can do the job almost instantly. It would be a much better option for international payments.
I’m trying to send Intl transfer to a friend and they don’t know how to use or exchange cryptocurrency, so we are still left with PayPal (usual hidden fees and blocked by bank payments ) and bank wire (30usd and slow ) which is really quite frustrating for me !
Fish takes the hook.
I don’t read any BC news. Thought you’d enjoy it. 
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I actually read that Square news already , I was indeed very interested to understand that trend.
The founder of Square, the Twitter guy, he’s big into crypto.
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Fortunately I kept some investment in the first true DeFi unicorn now market leader, Aave LEND.
The Justin Sun and Steem saga, this is a great read.
Odds-on Bitcoin valuation will explode within one year.
I can feel the FOMO coming. There are also a lot of positive trends (money printing , ethereum 2.0, institutional investment and the fact it will likely hit record price soon).
I’m going to borrow using a defi platform (against my existing crypto assets ) to buy some. Even if I pay a high APR I reckon I will do well.
(I still mostly hold ethereum but I need to balance ).
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I believe in the technology and also with the development of the Lightning Network, Bitcoin will be more and more valuable. I think BTC was one of the few investments that I made and I don’t regret.
Bitcoin isn’t really useful for payments and it’s development has essentially stopped…That’s ok though because it’s successfully transitioned to a digital gold with fixed supply.
Take a look about Lightning Network, it will make BTC useful with micro payments and can reach a bandwidth higher than any credit card company in TPS.
??? I keep seeing this. What is it again?
Fear Of Missing Out
Pure Greed.
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notsureiftotallyuninformedandlivinginacaveorshillingshitcoins.png
They literally just finished development on Taproot/Schnorr two weeks ago and over half of mining pools are now signalling acceptance of the upgrade. This doubles effective transaction throughput on the base layer, makes several privacy practices possible, and opens the path for the Graftroot upgrade.
Then there’s the Lightning Network that araujobsd mentioned three posts up, which has been functioning for over a year now.
So which one is it, living under a rock or trying to unload your bags of shitcoins?
I just heard this episode and it reminded me of @Andrew0409 story. The woman bought some years ago to buy pot on the dark web and thinks she has some change in a wallet somewhere. They search for it in the episode.
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A month ago, I used Wirex to transfer about 40 euros of Bitcoin, it cost me 5 euro fee + the transaction was stuck on the blockchain for 3 hours.
Next day used XRP, transaction was basically free and confirmed within a few seconds.
Obviously Bitcoin and XRP are very different projets, one is decentralized, the other not, but for actual transactions Bitcoin is utter garbage compared to other cryptos out there.
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Ok, so you’re a Ripple leghumper, good to know that you prefer something centralized with unlimited issuance that the banking industry controls.
You could have used Bitcoin over LN, sent it “basically free” and confirmed as fast as the internet sent the transaction, but you do you.
BTW, how did your July 7th 2020 “buy Bitcoin at $6600 because Bitcoin is absolutely going to collapse 30% from the current $9250 price any second now” order work out for you? Make a fortune? Champagne all around?
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BITCOIN hitting ATH 
I don’t give much of a shit about BTC but it’s massively bullish for my crypto.
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