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Fintech dystopia

fintechdystopia.com

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Re: Fintech dystopia

#131

Post by baq »

friendzis wrote: post #106
didibus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helped me to start from the problem it tries to solve. Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc. One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency. Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account t…

GP: this describes the whole crypto world so well I can almost taste it. Someone completely misunderstands how the real world works, misrepresents that even more when trying to articulate, uses convoluted wording to hide their total lack of understanding of the real world. Then create a "solution" for the problems that do not exist in the real world in the first place, in the process reinventing problems that are sol…

Yup. Exactly right.

In the meantime we can make some money off it legitimately, so why not.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#132

Post by joshtbradley »

dartharva wrote: post #120
jernejzen wrote: post #105

As someone working with African companies (legitimate businesses, mid-sized transactions), the key use case is payments in stablecoins—their banking infrastructure doesn’t allow for reliable and consistent foreign remittances. These deals would be practically impossible without stablecoins. (And to be clear, I’m someone who has never been particularly enthusiastic about crypto or blockchain.)

Why can they not just use America's banking infrastructure directly instead of using America's banking infrastructure indirectly through meaningless overengineered abstractions like stablecoins?

I am not an expert but I don’t believe most countries would allow their citizens to use American banking infrastructure, nor would most American banks accept a foreign account. Stablecoins get around these limitations, while also providing lower fees and higher availability.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#133

Post by skybrian »

dartharva wrote: post #120
jernejzen wrote: post #105

As someone working with African companies (legitimate businesses, mid-sized transactions), the key use case is payments in stablecoins—their banking infrastructure doesn’t allow for reliable and consistent foreign remittances. These deals would be practically impossible without stablecoins. (And to be clear, I’m someone who has never been particularly enthusiastic about crypto or blockchain.)

Why can they not just use America's banking infrastructure directly instead of using America's banking infrastructure indirectly through meaningless overengineered abstractions like stablecoins?

How do they open the bank account? Looks like a foreigner opening a bank account in the US would need proof that they have a US address. (Or at least, the major banks I checked did.)

Re: Fintech dystopia

#134

Post by baq »

nytesky wrote: post #102
andsoitis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. That’s not at all what happens! Transfers are done digitally, physical cash does not move between vaults or bank branches.

I remember being shocked at some point that my deposits at a bank would actually be a liability on their books not an asset. When you think about it as passing around debt, it makes a bit more sense.

The easier explanation is that your deposits are yours, not the bank’s. In terms of debt, they owe you. They make money by borrowing from you and lending long term debt to get more yield than they pay you on your cash (you may hear this called “borrow short to lend long”).

Re: Fintech dystopia

#135

Post by joshtbradley »

neumann wrote: post #32

This is a really fun well-written and on point set of articles. Thank you for sharing. I feel like at this point there isn't anybody defending stablecoins who isn't using them primarily speculative investment/trading. There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger other than niche counter-culture solutions whose users are typically blinkered to the fact that they…

Would you consider Stripe and PayPal also interested in speculative investment/trading? They seem responsible to me. Also, stablecoins aren’t speculative. Cryptocurrencies absolutely are. But stablecoins are pegged to USD, hence “stable.”

I think you’re right to criticize crypto as a techno-elite project. However I think stablecoins have a legitimate use case for billions of people who don’t have access to good banks, or a stable currency, and can’t afford traditional fees. IMO it’s one of the best things to come out of crypto.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#136

Post by troupo »

smsm42 wrote: post #117
troupo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Because no one has ever written any readily available books and white papers on old money.

Tons of books, of course. But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works. If you read 20 financial books, I am not sure you'd understand how something like US money system really works.

> But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works.

On technological level? Yes. On the bullshit scam level with sixteen layers of new invented terminology? Most likely not.

And yes, cryptoworld is easier to understand precisely because it's unbelievably primitive once you pull apart hype, scams, and layers of indirection.

Edit: oh, it's also busy re-inventing most of the concepts that the world has had for centuries, and most people understand without needing to read books and whitepapers

Re: Fintech dystopia

#137

Post by dotcoma »

ptero wrote: post #88
dotcoma wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial blow-up of what kind, in your opinion? The stock market? Loans? Real estate? Crypto? Thanks.

IMO US is heavily exporting its inflation by leveraging its world reserve currency status as other countries have to buy it's treasuries (petrodollar system legacy). No other country would be able to run 30+% budget deficits and sell long duration government bonds under 5%. This will break, sooner or later. When external buyers stop buying treasuries US will have to massively inflate its money supply, taking bondhold…

Interesting, almost inevitable (I think) and scary in more ways than one; but I agree, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow, nor in 2026.

In the shorter term...

NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market.

88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.

By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion.

And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined.

So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position.

Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

Re: Fintech dystopia

#138

Post by baq »

_9ptr wrote: post #79
seanhunter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and for people who think “centuries” is an exaggeration, the knights templar gained their power and wealth in the middle ages specifically because people could use their promissory notes to exchange for cash so that they didn’t have to physically transport valuables around between Europe and the middle East during the time of the crusades. They allowed people to deposit cash at temple church in London and withdra…

knights templar mentioned in a thread about fintechs and banking. Nice.

They were the fintech of their times, so perhaps it’d be more surprising if they weren’t.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#139

Post by joshtbradley »

wmf wrote: post #49
neumann wrote: post #32

This is a really fun well-written and on point set of articles. Thank you for sharing. I feel like at this point there isn't anybody defending stablecoins who isn't using them primarily speculative investment/trading. There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger other than niche counter-culture solutions whose users are typically blinkered to the fact that they…

The other legit use for stablecoins is allowing people in Venezuela, Argentina, etc. to hold US dollars while the US government pretends they don't know this is happening. (Officially the US does not encourage dollarization of other economies against their will.) I agree that a centralized US dollar CBDC that isn't run by scammers would be a simpler way to do this.

You think the same system that chose to bail out the banks in 08 should be fully responsible for our financial future? I believe a more distributed financial system would provide more stability for all of us. The GENIUS Act establishes some very strong standards that I believe will strengthen the economy, the dollar, and enable more people to enter the financial services industry in a competitively healthy way. A scammer would have a hard time 1:1 backing their stablecoins with bonds and equivalently stable assets.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#140

Post by vntok »

BobbyJo wrote: post #63
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #54

I think people here on HN keep underestimating the relevance of crypto for four reasons: What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox. What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s. Yes, nerds were alread…

Bitcoin was created 17 years ago. The "the use cases are coming" argument doesn't work anymore.

Have a look at the "Mother of all demos". It dates from 1968.

Some of its use cases such as having a "smart" personal/digital assistant on the computer helping organize your day are only popping up now thanks to the combination of LLM tech, model self hosting and MCP protocols.

Only took 50+ years, right?

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