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No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

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Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#171

Post by signatoremo »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #119
wordpad25 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Fiat is backed by tax base. US has more assets than debt. Additionally US is the largest economy in the world, how much would the right to tax it be worth? A lot. It's not at all just perception and influence as you claim.

US economy has been second largest for over 10 years now [1]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...

Huh, the paper cites World Bank, but WB themselves report differently:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD

Any other official sources would tell you that US is the largest economy in the world by GDP, which is the most commonly accepted metric.

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#172

Post by Joel_Mckay »

lxm wrote: post #159
throwaway2037 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> worker 401k vulnerability to dubious ETFs Can you explain this part in my detail? Do you mean money market funds that "broke the buck"?

ETFs are a relatively recent phenomenon, the criticism I remember from 2008 era is having paycheck + employee stock purchase plan + 401k concentrated in a single stock - employer's.

[flagged]

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#173

Post by FireBeyond »

TeaBrain wrote: post #107
badgersnake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tether appear to have created a huge amount of USD out of thin air. Best not to pay much attention to Andreesen though.

On this point, I too have a really difficult time understanding how there is supposedly >$50 billion in treasury bonds backing Tether USDC sitting at Cantor Fitzgerald. It really does seem like the bonds backing tether just came out of thin air, unless tether was sponsored by an entity that gave them the wherewithal to obtain the bonds, for the sole purpose of moving money without KYC with tether.

100% - even a few years ago, Tether claimed that they were receiving USD deposits approaching $5B per week. That amount of income is at the Saudi Aramco and others level.

Of course, it was all supposedly being deposited into Deltec Bank, whose website was a Wordpress site, whose "Deputy CEO" couldn't remember the name of the country's two banking licenses, and which one Deltec held, or whether they held both.

I guess it's hard to track all of those things when you go from getting your Masters in Science at HEC Lausanne at 15, and immediately being appointed a Professor of Finance at a Lebanese university, all while running your own hedge fund, "Indepedance (sic) Weath (sic) Management" from Jacksonville FL...

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#174

Post by RayVR »

Red_Comet_88 wrote: post #3

No one is disrupting banks because the mega banks have the sole power of creating credit out of thin air, and no upstart fintech company has this power. To gain this power requires the creation of a bank, which as you can imagine, is probably the most gate-kept activity on earth. Andreesen talked about this in his Rogan appearance. The banks and gov brought the hammer down on crypto because it was a legitimate threat…

ah...I don't miss the shockingly willful ignorance of the crypto boom days. Go try your conspiracy nonsense on reddit and leave us be.

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#175

Post by bern4444 »

The most interesting tech company in the banking to me is Column[0].

No affiliation but it caught my eye when the launched.

Admittedly it still feels abstract to me, but the value proposition of having every capability supported by an API (like AWS's methodology of having all services be API first) on top of an actually chartered bank seems perfectly fitted for the creation of banking services that are significantly easier for consumers to interact with and understand.

I'm curious to see what people build on top of it.

[0]https://column.com

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#176

Post by hiddencost »

buyucu wrote: post #97
scarface_74 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and crypto doesn’t have any inherent risk like a sitting President creating a crypto currency where he has 80% of the currency, will probably make a half billion dollars and then do a rug pull. https://fortune.com/2025/01/22/donald-trump-net-worth-memeco...

[flagged]

A sitting president profiting off the presidency is a hall mark of a corrupt state. Doing it so openly suggests there's nothing stopping from doing so in much subtler ways too.

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#177

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6
scarface_74 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and crypto doesn’t have any inherent risk like a sitting President creating a crypto currency where he has 80% of the currency, will probably make a half billion dollars and then do a rug pull. https://fortune.com/2025/01/22/donald-trump-net-worth-memeco...

That’s the thing I can’t ever come to understand about crypto. It’s purely about perception of value. At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. Which leads me to believe that the only thing that could be honestly said is that a crypto is purely about winners and suckers and timing.

Are you proposing that "value" is meaningful in the absence of some perceiver? All value is the perception of value. The only difference is that it's easier to find people who value precious metals, but that sort of thing always depends on where you look. One can easily imagine situations where a position at the front of a queue is more valuable to the people nearby than a gold coin. Finding value in a blockchain is no different.

It's just that none of the blockchains have yet managed to situate themselves such that people are likely to value their effects. Instead they're focusing on scarcity, which is kind of silly because all of the competition is equally empowered to create artificial scarcities. I think they'll figure it out eventually.

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#178

Post by smnrchrds »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #135
ranger207 wrote: post #88

The products being pointed out in this article as an attempt to disrupt banks seem to be basically the same product for a different price. Like, a high-yield savings account is just a savings account with a better price, right? How do you disrupt an industry by selling the same products? The advantage of startups is that they're more nimble, can pivot to fit the market better, and can adapt to customer requests faste…

One datapoint: On /r/PersonalFinanceCanada a very common advice is to save money in WealthSimple or Questrade type of online financial institutions. And people seem to be very happy with doing this. Any financial institution that makes the act of investing money simple and legible will win some market share. I have some savings accounts in RBC Canada, and the UX seems to be designed by monkeys throwing around crayons…

Wealthsimple is a subsidiary of Power Corporation, a gigantic financial services company that has existed for 100 years. Its success is more an example of insider innovation rather than outsider disruption.

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#179

Post by lesuorac »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #177
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the thing I can’t ever come to understand about crypto. It’s purely about perception of value. At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. Which leads me to believe that the only thing that could be honestly said is that a crypto is purely about winners and suckers and timing.

Are you proposing that "value" is meaningful in the absence of some perceiver? All value is the perception of value. The only difference is that it's easier to find people who value precious metals, but that sort of thing always depends on where you look. One can easily imagine situations where a position at the front of a queue is more valuable to the people nearby than a gold coin. Finding value in a blockchain is…

> Are you proposing that "value" is meaningful in the absence of some perceiver

Yes.

Gold conducts electricity.

Bitcoin has no physically useful properties. However, I will admit a public ledger is actually probably very good for the USA so we can see all the grifting easily.

Re: No one is disrupting banks – at least not the big ones

#180

Post by lanstin »

hinkley wrote: post #81
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the thing I can’t ever come to understand about crypto. It’s purely about perception of value. At least with some precious metal, it has a floor value as a function of its practical uses and abundance. Which leads me to believe that the only thing that could be honestly said is that a crypto is purely about winners and suckers and timing.

The American dollar is also about perception of value, but via a maze of interlocking attributes that make it slow to move. A new fiat currency without a state sponsor is fragile by comparison. Always will be.

But it isn’t just the military and the taxes, it is the labor of all the people who are willing to work for US dollars that give it value. While the majority of people paid in dollars are hard working and generally honest, it seems that the majority of people paid in cryptocurrencies are scammers or criminals in one way or the other, or else financial operators. So till more people are getting paid in bitcoin or whatever I don’t see why anyone will find it something other than a speculative asset for dollar owners.
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