91–100 of 230 posts
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I am willing to bet Patrick sleeps while wearing a Covid mask.
I kind of doubt it. His entire family got covid already.
To simplify heavily, is SWIFT just an accepted and legal alternative to the hawala system?
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> can easily bypass SWIFT restrictions and transact with the affected Russian banks directly “Easily” is the squishy bit here. If they’re settling in dollars, probably not, unless someone’s carting around paper dollars. (This has been done.) If they’re settling in rubles or yuan, for most definitions of “easily,” yes.
Why does settling in dollars make any difference? Like he said, if the SWIFT secure messaging service goes down, someone at a bank in Japan has the phone number of someone at a bank in New York and can "wire" money with a phone call instead of sending a SWIFT message. Wires will be orders of magnitude slower, but money is not frozen. And the real effect is that someone in Mumbai receiving a phone call from a Russian…
Wires, as the article explains, are just debits and credits. And all non-paper debits and credits of dollars are ultimately governed by the banks’ credits and debits with the Fed. So no, you can’t wire dollars with a phone number if the other side is sanctioned. You can if they’re off SWIFT, but you need someone with an account at the Fed to make those changes.
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> If they’re settling in rubles or yuan, for most definitions of “easily,” yes. Completely agree with your comment, just wanted to add that the vast majority of international companies will require a settlement in DM currencies (mainly dollar). This ensures that the relative size of the deal stays stable, as these currencies are highly stable and not subject to domestic manipulation. For a deal to be settled in, say,…
yuan is highly stable over the past 2 decades, in fact it gained about 20% on the dollar over that time frame. The problem with Yuan are more with its low convertibility (read: usage rate outside China), but that may change eventually. Using currency sanctions to achieve political goals are simultaneously expending trust in those currencies.
Stable or gaining 20%?
Also its not stable, nor trustworthy. You can't trust china to not manipulate it.
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>>What exactly about the current state of crypto is incompatible with this critique? Ethereum is by far the most widely used cryptocurrency network, and while it consumes a lot of energy relative to the number of transactions in processes, and a lot of energy in absolute terms, it consumes on the order of a thousandths (0.1%) of the world's energy output. It will have switched to Proof of Stake long before it grows l…
Ethereum is now estimated to consume energy equivalent to or greater than mid-sized countries like Greece[1]. You can paint it as tiny, but 0.1% of world energy output is still enormous, for providing what is for the most part a highly speculative set of financial instruments to a limited audience. It's been "about to go PoS" for several years now. The fact is it hasn't. When it does, you can tell people their concer…
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sure, but there are many other things in that list i made, right?
People were saying Bitcoin was useless when it was just Bitcoin and not anything you listed
My only point was, whatever comments people are making in the past few years which fit under the umbrella of "For those saying that crypto is useless", it feels like those have been directed at all the other stuff in the eco-system - while "moving their property across borders" is something which was solved by Bitcoin along time ago.
This is one of those posts where I found very little substance compared to its length. And I didn’t really come out of it with a better understanding of moving money either (as to how correspondent banks ultimately settle the debts, which in turn becomes how countries settle their debts, etc.). I would’ve appreciated more nuance and information on that, even though it’s a vast topic. To simplify heavily, is SWIFT jus…
SWIFT is a messaging system which those trust chains use to communicate.
(Simplified because on phone, etc.)
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Ethereum is now estimated to consume energy equivalent to or greater than mid-sized countries like Greece[1]. You can paint it as tiny, but 0.1% of world energy output is still enormous, for providing what is for the most part a highly speculative set of financial instruments to a limited audience. It's been "about to go PoS" for several years now. The fact is it hasn't. When it does, you can tell people their concer…
I don't disagree with most of your comment, but I do want to point out that the code to power Ethereum's switch to PoS is actually built out now and is in its final stages of testing. The latest Kiln test network is effectively a release candidate. At no point in the past several years has that been true, so it's comparing apples to oranges to say it's been "about to go" for that long.
I'm sure it is closer than ever, if it wasn't then there's something wrong with the development process! I sincerely wish the various people involved good luck in this venture and a speedy success in moving it to production. In the mean time I'm still going to get pissed off at people saying that energy concerns are outdated, especially when they're referring to the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem.
For those saying that crypto is useless, here is a great use case. Authoritarian governments are currently preventing individuals from moving their property across borders. Crypto fixes that.
This seems like the very essence of money transfer without using the Western banking system, and it's a system that's been around for probably over a thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala The US Treasury department has a comprehensive-looking guide: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit-f...
For those saying that crypto is useless, here is a great use case. Authoritarian governments are currently preventing individuals from moving their property across borders. Crypto fixes that.