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Fintech dystopia

fintechdystopia.com

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Re: Fintech dystopia

#211

Post by imtringued »

nlitened wrote: post #204
fireflash38 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these people in 3rd world countries that have 200k USD cash? You make it sound like they've scrounged to make it happen... But its far far more likely to be people either trying to wash the money or they were from less than legitimate sources. Definitely not lower class people like you seem to imply (or perhaps I'm just reading into it?)

I only know the situation which touched dozens of my friends and acquaintances. Say, you’re a relatively successful software professional in Russia, who has a small apartment and a car in a big city. Then the war with Ukraine starts, and all Russians are automatically sanctioned and blacklisted from the international financial system. You don’t want to make drone software or facilitate black-market oil trading, so yo…

His entire point is that Russia is not a third world country.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#212

Post by throwaway290 »

dmantis wrote: post #210
throwaway290 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He "just checked for me" online and he thinks I'm the one naive I'm from Russia. People who get paid tether travel out to cash in anonymously. I know because I know them. Believe me you don't want to gamble on this > That would be an impossible country to live in. Really? I have no words. Not being able to use crypto and it's now an impossible country to live in? How about this, people just use cash. 99.9999% of peop…

Impossible to live in complying with all the Russian laws, not particularly a crypto one. Well, possible, but quite miserable experience. So are you saying that people get paid in tether after the sentence that it's used 99.9% by the government only?

Yes, I say government (or let's just say criminals) is at least 99.9% of all crypto moved. The war machine needs feeding. Sanctions. Think about it will other countries use worthless ruble that is pretty much not convertible? Will russia use winnie pooh money (also not convertible)? People who move tether because maybe they found some real work abroad or because they are helping a family or something is rounding error

Re: Fintech dystopia

#213

Post by jajko »

ItCouldBeWorse wrote: post #202
dmantis wrote: post #148

This is a very American-centric post. E.g."Stablecoins won’t bank the unbanked, because people get stablecoins by purchasing them on a crypto exchange, and no crypto exchange will open an account for a customer unless they have a bank account." Well, I understand that US has dystopia level of financial surveillance, but in many places in the world you can change cash in person to crypto without many issues. And you d…

But how does crypto police the sexual morals of others?

question of time, where there is power the political pressure and corruption will try to find its ways

Re: Fintech dystopia

#214

Post by imtringued »

smsm42 wrote: post #84
_9ptr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a lot of people don't understand the old money system either

In fact, there's probably less people who understand the old money system than those that understand the crypto math. After all, the latter can be readily learned from books and whitepapers, go figure where do you learn how actually the real monetary system works, in all its complexity, and how would you even get such level of access without being member of the Fed board.

Central banks publish reports on how money works. It's the economists teaching students at universities who refuse to read them. (looking at you Gregory Mankiw)

Re: Fintech dystopia

#215

Post by dmantis »

throwaway290 wrote: post #212
dmantis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impossible to live in complying with all the Russian laws, not particularly a crypto one. Well, possible, but quite miserable experience. So are you saying that people get paid in tether after the sentence that it's used 99.9% by the government only?

Yes, I say government (or let's just say criminals) is at least 99.9% of all crypto moved. The war machine needs feeding. Sanctions. Think about it will other countries use worthless ruble that is pretty much not convertible? Will russia use winnie pooh money (also not convertible)? People who move tether because maybe they found some real work abroad or because they are helping a family or something is rounding erro…

> Sanctions

They also affect businesses, not only the government.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#216

Post by ItCouldBeWorse »

actionfromafar wrote: post #207
ItCouldBeWorse wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how does crypto police the sexual morals of others?

They'll find a way to police the sexual morals of the Other, no matter the technology.

Introducing - the bhurka-bitcoin. Should you try to buy sexual services, like OF-subscriptions or similar filth, the coin will automatically buy a bhurka for all content, hiding those models behind decency textile filters. Halal and wholesome! Bhurka-bitcoin! Now with the first bodymounted organic cellphonestand for loyal customers!

Re: Fintech dystopia

#217

Post by imtringued »

ta12653421 wrote: post #169
smsm42 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, there's probably less people who understand the old money system than those that understand the crypto math. After all, the latter can be readily learned from books and whitepapers, go figure where do you learn how actually the real monetary system works, in all its complexity, and how would you even get such level of access without being member of the Fed board.

Founding banks, working in banking back office infra (central bank connectivity etc.); there are for sure places where you can get this knowledge. Also there dedicated central banking degrees in lot of countries.

Founding banks has essentially become impossible in Germany and more and more financial services have been moved under the umbrella of the banking license.

It's very disturbing to me that the possibility of grass roots reform is essentially gone. You need a a two digit million amount of equity, proof of both formal academic and real life experience, you need a large team of trained professionals, easily at least 10 core employees who essentially aren't allowed to know anything other than banking and worst of all, you must keep these employees employed for the duration of the application, which may take a year or two and even if you did all of that, you can still get rejected anyway. Oh, and by the way, you're not allowed to earn money (as a bank) before you get your banking license, meaning that you are burning money faster than any other potential startup.

Now you might think this is fair, after all, banking is a high trust business that requires an extreme amount of caution and care or things will go to shit. Except as I already mentioned: More and more things are moving under the banking license umbrella, but applying to a subset of a banking license doesn't lower costs. The costs are the same no matter what you actually do, which favors massive banks that only have to pay for the license once and use their banking license to the fullest to provide all the services permitted by their license, which ironically increases the systemic risk by letting them become a point of single failure since all the services that ought to be separated are now combined in a single entity to minimize regulatory cost.

Most bailouts are the logical consequence of co-mingling the deposit service with the investment banking services in the same bank. The problem here isn't that losses in investment banking causes loss of deposits. It's that if the bank makes a financial loss in one department, it will also have to shut down the other department as well, because they are under the same company. The opposite is also true. If the payment services run at a loss, the bank will feel compelled to try risky investment banking bets to even the losses out. This type of cross subsidy essentially guarantees that the government will have to bail the bank out.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#218

Post by imtringued »

jongjong wrote: post #7

I was in relatively early in the web as a developer, I was in early on the crypto movement, also as a developer. These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological. Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career f…

The third paragraph hits too close to home for me.

You want to be a good person doing good things for other people and getting along peacefully? Sorry, but happy planet is that way. Don't come to earth.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#219

Post by bko »

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.

It's not just places with hyperinflation. It's any country. Why should anyone be restricted from holding USD or have to pay crazy fees to buy dollars?

> I agree that a centralized US dollar CBDC that isn't run by scammers would be a simpler way to do this.

I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that the government would ban all other stable coins and strictly control what "valid commerce" is allowed to be done with the centralized coin (see Operation Choke Point)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Re: Fintech dystopia

#220

Post by BobbyJo »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #112
BobbyJo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That means you would have given up on the internet in the 80s. That is what I mean by point 3 in my comment.

This ignores that the internet exists now, and ideas spread millions of times faster. No other tech has needed that much time to mature and find use since.
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