771–780 of 789 posts
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>You better hope that your interests closely align with those of millions of your compatriots. corporation NEVER has my interests in mind, so coordinating millions is easier >And that no one with political power has a personal vendetta against you. same argument can be used with corporations
Those points are true, but a private corporation can't take away my life, liberty, or property under the threat of violence.
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They could have always done it at your bank as well. Easy electronic transfer changes nothing in that regard.
They have done it before. The difference is you can withdraw your cash if you see it coming. The government's end game is to get rid of physical cash with Pix and soon Drex. Without physical cash, your finances are one hundred percent controlled by the government. Sure, it's convenient, but you pay for that convenience with your freedom.
I support cash and gold as well.
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Yes, it's just the banks. They have both. It's really not rocket science. It should be satisfying in the following sense - the financial system is nowhere near as complicated as it seems. There is no magic. If you find yourself feeling like there is some magic somewhere, just ask another question because there is likely just a word or a layer of indirection that is making something quite simple seem mysterious.
Well, at your suggestion I did ask ChatGPT, and it pointed to one sort of magic trick: currency swaps between central banks. That is (kind of) a machine where one type of money goes in one side and the other type comes out the other. There's even a cool tracker [1]. But yeah, it's mostly just market forces that keep things stabilized, it seems. [1]: https://www.cfr.org/tracker/central-bank-currency-swaps-trac...
The main trick that folks get hung up on (and, you might be too) is that most "money" is just an IOU from a bank. We've just created a sophisticated way to trade the IOUs and call it "money".
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Well, at your suggestion I did ask ChatGPT, and it pointed to one sort of magic trick: currency swaps between central banks. That is (kind of) a machine where one type of money goes in one side and the other type comes out the other. There's even a cool tracker [1]. But yeah, it's mostly just market forces that keep things stabilized, it seems. [1]: https://www.cfr.org/tracker/central-bank-currency-swaps-trac...
Even central bank swaps aren't magical. The ECB for example has an account for the US Fed, the same way they have an account for HSBC or whatever. The ECB can credit the account for the US Fed, the same way it can for anyone else. The main trick that folks get hung up on (and, you might be too) is that most "money" is just an IOU from a bank. We've just created a sophisticated way to trade the IOUs and call it "money…
It's not inconceivable (nor magical in any way) to imagine treaties that would allow an actual conversion from one currency to another, where USD go in one side and Euro come out the other. Situations like this have existed in the past: currencies have been converted when, for example, the former currencies in the Eurozone were converted to Euros.
No such situations exist right now: entities just hold multiple currencies and exchange them for you.
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Even central bank swaps aren't magical. The ECB for example has an account for the US Fed, the same way they have an account for HSBC or whatever. The ECB can credit the account for the US Fed, the same way it can for anyone else. The main trick that folks get hung up on (and, you might be too) is that most "money" is just an IOU from a bank. We've just created a sophisticated way to trade the IOUs and call it "money…
This is pretty much what I was asserting in my original post, my question was if there was some additional mechanism beyond simple market forces. It's not inconceivable (nor magical in any way) to imagine treaties that would allow an actual conversion from one currency to another, where USD go in one side and Euro come out the other. Situations like this have existed in the past: currencies have been converted when,…
Your mental model is falling down around the definition of "currency", "money" etc. It isn't what you imagine it is. We just have a system for trading bank receivables and call it "money".
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Don’t they need to pay for the plane ticket?
No they mean that a family member in the US gives them some of their own money, but records it to a family ledger. At some other point funds or value will be transferred, but it isn't transferred within the family for every payment. Similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
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Kind of a tangent but I have some friends that are kurdish and that's how they transfer money to and fro the US and skirting whatever limits/regulations exist. They just give money to a money family in kurdistan and the money family here in the US hands it to them out of a restaurant or whatever. I've been fascinated with it since I knew it existed. It's all the same stuff with various coats of lipstick.
Don’t they need to pay for the plane ticket?
I think the best way to explain it is an example.
My contact needs to get money to his family across the world. I happen to have a cousin that I love and trust who lives there and runs a gas station. My contact gives me 10k USD + a fee and then I call my cousin and tell him to give 10k to the contact's family member if they give the right password. At the end of the year, I meet up with my cousin and I bring him some gold or other goods depending on what our deficits are to each other.
Pix is amazing, really. The technical side is incredible—I remember reading or watching some really good content about the architecture, but I can’t recall exactly where and haven’t been able to find it again. All payments have to be completed in under 100ms, which is impressive considering how resilient the infrastructure needs to be to handle thousands of transactions per second.
I once looked at the requirements to be able to handle all the debit/credit transactions in the US, and you can do that on _one_ mid-range server easily. With regular PostgreSQL, no need for anything exotic. Of course, the real deployment will need redundancy, failover, multiple levels of audit records, etc. But still, modern computers are _powerful_.
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> I'm thinking, maybe controversially, centralized national payment service like this should be government-run based on my experience with Alipay which is a digital payment service in China. After dealing with many private sector services, I think a lot of things should be government run. For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on governmen…
In the US, just bookmark the NOAA projection maps and your local zip on weather.gov. you don't need an app.
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That doesn't particularly address the point. Say the government decides that they don't like the political party you're supporting, or maybe you've been doing something they consider morally unclean like gambling or consuming pg-13 media. Let's say the government decides that your payments can no longer use the payment infrastructure. Now imagine it's effectively the only practical payment method. It's a permissioned…
Then they can also decide you can't have a license to drive a car, that you can't fly, that you can't own a home, that you can't pass a background check, that you can't have a social security number, that you owe an exorbitant amount of tax, that you should be in jail, that your immigration status is revoked because you wrote a news article they don't let, etc etc etc Your government already has a monopoly on violenc…