41–50 of 223 posts
> and this additional proprietary thing that I really need to open source (I ported Datascript to FoundationDB). Yes please! I wonder how that plays out as an alternative to Datomic.
Despite the unpopularity here. I am still a fan of cryptocurrency as an alternative to traditional banking.
TradFi entities now have the ability to pick what they like out of the mix and offer that to customers while also benefiting from the convenience of trust assumptions, something cryptocurrency eschews. TradFi is building atop thousands of years worth of UX improvements in how people can come to trust each other. It's difficult for cryptocurrency to compete there.
I still love the developer convenience of blockchain since it nicely combines serverless with auth with payments. But for the most part, given the existence of trust, these benefits could also come from a system like in TFA having a Wasm runtime and maybe a dash of WebAuthn. Like a mashup of Cloudflare Workers and Stripe.
Why are these API banks always in the UK? I've been waiting to do my banking using curl for years and no one has made it available in the US.
The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years.
In short, the UK has a very active banking sector that’s been rapidly (for banks) innovating for many decades. So the environment and ecosystem are well developed for further and faster innovation.
In the U.S., it seems banks gave up on tech innovation decades ago, and decided that innovation in fees and punitive treatment of customers was their preferred approach. As a result there just isn’t an environment for new innovation, the incumbents find it much easier to crush competition, rather than compete. Why the same isn’t true in UK (which until recently had remarkably few distinct banks), is probably down to the nature of law and regulation, which gives customers lots of rights, and actively punishes banks that don’t uphold them.
Despite the unpopularity here. I am still a fan of cryptocurrency as an alternative to traditional banking.
Crypto isn't frictionless, it's not cheap and it solves problems that only the 0.1% has such as the need of transferring large amounts of "money", without tracing, in short times, across the globe but it undoes the benefits that the 99.9% has while bringing complexity.
Plus, nobody really wants a deflationary currency, they don't work, the incentive is to hoard and hold, not spend, which is why even Bitcoin's website dropped the currency narrative for the store of value.
People don't buy Bitcoin to trade or pay, but to sell at a higher price. Exception being drug dealers and few lunatic anarcho-capitalists.
Unfortunately in the UK a bank can (and do) freeze your account with no reason for up to 2 years without any recourse or access to funds. With API access you risk your money being frozen due to automatic fraud detection. The government have given up policing of finance to banks and they take the least risky options
I wouldn’t say “given up” as much as “actively delegated”. The UK has essentially made a (political) choice that rather than cover the cost of policing finance through taxes, they’ll just make the banks sort it out for them. This is not great for some people for obvious reasons. But for everyone else it’s lower taxes. Where one falls on the political spectrum largely determines how one feels about this.
Money isn’t the only motivation factor.
Despite the unpopularity here. I am still a fan of cryptocurrency as an alternative to traditional banking.
With the introduction of CBDCs, FedNow, and platforms like TFA, it's starting to look like TradFi is getting the second-mover advantage. Cryptocurrency introduced programmable money, which is great, but it also came with other features like self-custody, extreme transparency & privacy, and immutability that have ended up being more than average users are willing to accept as a bundle. TradFi entities now have the abi…
Why are these API banks always in the UK? I've been waiting to do my banking using curl for years and no one has made it available in the US.
> Why are these API banks always in the UK? I can think of 835 million reasons: https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-rbs-britain/corrected-uk-... Plus, Open Banking and Faster Payments (which were EU initiatives before Brexit) maybe helped.
"open" banking did (and accordingly you have to be a large company to participate at all)
Despite the unpopularity here. I am still a fan of cryptocurrency as an alternative to traditional banking.
The issue is always the same: traditional banking is frictionless, very cheap and convenient for 99.9% of people out there. Crypto isn't frictionless, it's not cheap and it solves problems that only the 0.1% has such as the need of transferring large amounts of "money", without tracing, in short times, across the globe but it undoes the benefits that the 99.9% has while bringing complexity. Plus, nobody really wants…
Unfortunately in the UK a bank can (and do) freeze your account with no reason for up to 2 years without any recourse or access to funds. With API access you risk your money being frozen due to automatic fraud detection. The government have given up policing of finance to banks and they take the least risky options
Yet another example for why Ethereum is needed
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet another example for why Ethereum is needed
Can you specifically describe how Ethereum, where all transactions are public, would prevent this kind of surveillance?