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Moving money internationally

bam.kalzumeus.com

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Re: Moving money internationally

#201

Post by rswail »

ggm wrote: post #117

In the end, for sufficient discount, value moves irrespective. Druglords wealth is often notional. They might have a lot of cocaine, but they have to accept massive losses. Much worse than Bezos on a bad Amazon share day. If I am a high net work person with a hundred-million property in the UK, I'm going to find a way to let my friend use it, even if the british legal system refuses to let me receive money for it. In…

Barter isn't going to pay the wages of the staff that you need to run a $100m property.

You don't think Abramovich runs a vacuum over the rug once a week at home do you?

Re: Moving money internationally

#203

Post by jotm »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #68
jotm wrote: post #3

Very nice article explaining SWIFT and some other things. Being from a country no one gives a fuck about, I have experienced the sort of "discrimination" described many times. Banks, ISPs, stores, local ad users would just refuse to sell to me. It's a sad reality, but a reality nonetheless. I still remember a needlessly lengthy email from an incorporation service explaining to me the difference between "lawyer" and "…

And if any one ever claims they haven't found any useful purpose for cryptocurrency, the answer is here. The most valuable use-case for cryptocurrency is to financially empower people in predicaments like yours. A permissioned value transfer network, like the traditional financial system, poses problems that blockchain-based finance doesn't suffer from, and the trade-offs in using it are worth it for some people.

Huh, I honestly never looked at it that way. OK, let's say I accept crypto as payments... I still need to convert it to "real" currency if I want to pay for food, housing, insurance, parts, tools, pretty much anything...

I guess that's the biggest problem with it, there's not enough people using it for "real world" transactions.

Re: Moving money internationally

#204

Post by adtac »

2143 wrote: post #159
adtac wrote: post #72

I looked a bit into the company SWIFT and found this: https://www.swift.com/swift-resource/250836/download (warning: downloads the file) Page 3 is interesting (ignore the rest, they're mostly buzzwords). It shows you the numbers behind the financial infrastructure of the world for international transactions. >FIN availability: 99.996% >Institutions connected: 11k >FIN messages: 9.5b That's about ~300 messages/sec, al…

> although I imagine it's mostly bursty and peaks during US/EU common business hours Because people in places like Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, UAE, South Korea, and many others are hibernating.

You're missing my point. I'm trying to say the system needs to handle more than 300 messages/sec.

I know there is significant traffic from those countries. I'm from one of those countries.

If you had to pick a peak (and most workloads have a peak), what timezone do you think it would be? It doesn't matter what timezone as long as there's a peak. There could even be multiple peaks and that's better.

Re: Moving money internationally

#205

Post by LittleNemoInS »

joshspankit wrote: post #200
LittleNemoInS wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To simplify heavily, is SWIFT just an accepted and legal alternative to the hawala system? No. To simplify heavily, Swift is the network on which the hawala system runs. To transfer cash from a bank to another bank, one can : * call the other bank * send an email * send a letter * send a swift message Since transfering cash is not as simple as it seems (trust is the key), using an established network with clear fie…

Another important point in the article is that cash is typically not transferred , but instead (basically) “your account at my bank is credited equal to the amount that you debit from my account at your bank”

Yes.

If I want to wire you some cash from bank A to bank B, my bank (A) will debit my account,and credit their account (called a nostro). There, we have two possibilities :

* The two banks are connected (meaning B has an account in A), A will debit their nostro and credit the account of B in A (called a loro) and inform bank B via swift. B will debit the account of A in B, credit their nostro, debit their nostro and credit your account

* The two banks are not directly connected : A will debit my account and credit their nostro. They will then debit their nostro and credit the account of a third institution (another bank or a clearing house). They will send a message to the bank B and the third institution, telling them that the cash should be credited to you. If the bank B and the third institution are connected, see above. If not, the process goes on, until the cash "reaches" bank B.

This is highly simplified, but it's the principle.

Re: Moving money internationally

#206

Post by adtac »

zoobab wrote: post #187
adtac wrote: post #72

I looked a bit into the company SWIFT and found this: https://www.swift.com/swift-resource/250836/download (warning: downloads the file) Page 3 is interesting (ignore the rest, they're mostly buzzwords). It shows you the numbers behind the financial infrastructure of the world for international transactions. >FIN availability: 99.996% >Institutions connected: 11k >FIN messages: 9.5b That's about ~300 messages/sec, al…

ZeroMQ does thousands of messages per second. It was designed for High Frequency Trading, after iMatix has a contract with JP Morgan Chase in New York. I was in the team to maximize the number of messages of OpenAMQ, the broker was the bottleneck, then iMatix bought a slovakian company to maximize the speed between A and B (without a broker in the middle). See more here: http://wiki.zeromq.org/whitepapers:measuring-p…

My point is that throughout is likely not the bottleneck in SWIFT (300 messages/sec is quite small). Why design a solution that can handle 900k messages/sec to solve a problem that likely doesn't exceed 1k messages/sec?

Re: Moving money internationally

#207

Post by craigie »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #132
listenallyall wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> moving their property across borders This seems rather naïve. If you can't leave a country because your government requires you to fight a war rather than leave, how do you get yourself, or any physical property, out? If you're in jail, justified or not, how does crypto help you move your property? Or the government you live under simply doesn't allow exiting? What if all international airports refuse to allow flig…

It helps in the case where you can move your body across the border, but not physical property.

But so does a credit card... or a deposit in a Swiss bank.

Re: Moving money internationally

#208

Post by mneubrand »

fmajid wrote: post #194
rswail wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is interesting is that revoking your US citizenship (or Green Card permanent residency) isn't sufficient to stop you being subject to IRS law. It actually costs you money, $2,350, to give up your citizenship. The filings to give up a Green Card is equally byzantine.

Yes, and a substantial exit tax.

For net worth >$2M or pretty high average income tax liability in the years before expatriation. Otherwise it's just the $2350

Re: Moving money internationally

#209

Post by CryptoPunk »

Nursie wrote: post #162
CryptoPunk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Proof of work is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers. I still prefer Ethereum's variation of Proof of Stake over Proof of Work, but it's by no means clear to me that Proof of Work based blockchains are less resource-efficient…

Proof of work does not replace labour though. There is not really an equivalent outlay in tradtional banking. And blockchains don't provide the services that the labor provides in the banking sector. This is just more nonsense.

Proof of work completely replaces the bureaucracy that maintains trust in traditional ledgers..

A bunch of automated nodes, strewn across the globe, and connected via the internet, maintain the network, with the network being able to seamlessly/autonomously manage nodes joining/leaving.

There are no legal contracts that need to be drawn up, filled out and signed for someone to start submitting PoW, or validating and propagating transactions, to the network. There is no HR department. No payroll. Just machines, and a deterministic compensation mechanism, managed by a fault tolerant network of machines.

Re: Moving money internationally

#210

Post by jaclaz »

LittleNemoInS wrote: post #205
joshspankit wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another important point in the article is that cash is typically not transferred , but instead (basically) “your account at my bank is credited equal to the amount that you debit from my account at your bank”

Yes. If I want to wire you some cash from bank A to bank B, my bank (A) will debit my account,and credit their account (called a nostro). There, we have two possibilities : * The two banks are connected (meaning B has an account in A), A will debit their nostro and credit the account of B in A (called a loro) and inform bank B via swift. B will debit the account of A in B, credit their nostro, debit their nostro and…

Should be nostro and vostro (our and your) not loro (their):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostro_and_vostro_accounts

the loro is used when a third bank is in the process or however is not as common as the two above.

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