Hawala
en.wikipedia.org
Hawala
1–10 of 57 posts
Re: Hawala
#2why do people post wikipedia articles as news?
Re: Hawala
#3why do people post wikipedia articles as news?
Why do you hate wiki? Many people don't know this exists, it's interesting and disruptive. This could be a great startup idea too.
Re: Hawala
#4This is what bitcoin is great for and will be used for. Medium for transfering the purchasing power, not for storing it.
Re: Hawala
#5Re: Hawala
#6Interestingly, the word for wire transfer in Turkish is "havale", which I imagine is borrowed from this.
Re: Hawala
#7I almost linked to this, too, in the "Western Union says Bitcoin is not ready for international transfer" discussion[1].
The interesting thing about Hawala is that it provides a ready source of liquidity in local currencies. If someone was to link the two (ie, a local Hawala agent accepted a Bitcoin transfer from an untrusted source, and then moved the money via the trusted Hawala network) then almost all the problems of Bitcoin would go away.
It would also set just about every TLA agency in the US looking at you (Semi-anonymous crypto-currency which has been used in drug markets + untracable Islamic money transfer network? There's a techno-thriller plot right there). OTOH, Hawala agents seem to ignore US laws at the moment, so they might not care about this either.
Re: Hawala
#8>After the September 11, the American government suspected that some hawala brokers may have helped terrorist organizations [...] since confirmed that the bulk of the funds used to finance the assault were not sent through the hawala system, but rather by an official inter-bank wire transfer to a SunTrust Bank in Florida, where two of the conspirators had opened a personal account.
>However as a result of intense pressure from the U.S. authorities, widespread efforts are currently being made to introduce systematic anti-money laundering initiatives on a global scale, to better curb the activities of the financiers of terrorism and those engaged in laundering the profits of drug smuggling.
The interesting thing about this line of logical failure is the possibility that a Hawala wouldn't work to transfer funds to terrorists, they had to use a de-personalized banking system that doesn't really care what they're doing with the money, unlike the Hawala system where the agents have to consider the impact of their actions on their network/family.
Of course, such a logical failure that just happens to further secure the power of established banks against other systems, "logical failure" is a generous judgement of what was going on.
Re: Hawala
#9http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit-fi...
The first few pages are a very readable, understandable description of how the system works in layman's terms. Recommended read.
Re: Hawala
#10Guess West just learnt about it despite of Asians have been using this to transfer money back to home.