Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 496 posts

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#281

Post by layer8 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #213
bakuninsbart wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There hasn't been a large change in imports of russian gas in Germany since the start of the Energiewende. [0] Gas is largely used for heating, electrical heating was never widespread and would not have been a viable alternative, even with keeping more nuclear power online, since it is uncompetititve without major subsidies. Anyway, gas consumption as a percentage of the total mix has been stable since before the sta…

By your own [2] above, Germany still consumes more than 67% of its energy from oil, gas and coal. Had it chosen to scale up nuclear instead of scale down nuclear, it would be less dependent on that 67%. France famously gets over 75% of its electricity from nuclear, and has plans to expand capacity by adding 6 more reactors [4] U.S. is not a major importer of Russian energy. U.S. is a net exporter of natural gas.[2].…

> Had it chosen to scale up nuclear instead of scale down nuclear, it would be less dependent on that 67%.

In my understanding, it wouldn’t change much for the natural gas portion, because that can’t be replaced by electricity for the most part (heating).

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#282

Post by megous »

dmingod666 wrote: post #137
m_ke wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect Russian people are the only ones who can stop Putin.

If the US citizens can't improve their own govt and get them to stop neverending wars, I think it's a tall order to expect citizens in a dictatorship to do it. Point isn't US bad -- point is, no easy way to affect change other than revolution which too ends up with bigger tyrants..

I don't think the suggestion is to wait for the next election... revolutions are a thing too, and happened in Russia several times already.

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#283

Post by supernova87a »

I have always wondered, what combination of manual vs. automatic processes are happening when one makes a bank wire (actual wire transfers, not ACH)?

Because whenever I have done wires, in addition to the bank/IBAN/account numbers, there are all these manual fields like "for further credit to" etc. that are clearly having to be interpreted by someone. And very often errors come up and the funds are held or in limbo on one end or another.

Does anyone have a good explanation of what happens both on the initiating bank side and receiving bank side when a wire is done? I imagine that this is why it still costs $25-40 to handle them.

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#284

Post by periheli0n »

sealthedeal wrote: post #257

CEO and co-founder of Routefusion here, a cross-border bank to bank payment API. We use the SWIFT network regularly. I can 100% confirm that all money in the world is just literally numbers, and it is balanced by the different federal reserve systems around the world to ensure no one can "create" money without notifying everyone. I guess if I was super cool I would do an AMA because this is the only thread that is re…

What would keep some entity that has its SWIFT access revoked from switching to China's CIPS or even crypto? Would it be merely an inconvenience, requiring the change of a few processes, or would it create hard problems?

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#285

Post by JulianMorrison »

periheli0n wrote: post #284
sealthedeal wrote: post #257

CEO and co-founder of Routefusion here, a cross-border bank to bank payment API. We use the SWIFT network regularly. I can 100% confirm that all money in the world is just literally numbers, and it is balanced by the different federal reserve systems around the world to ensure no one can "create" money without notifying everyone. I guess if I was super cool I would do an AMA because this is the only thread that is re…

What would keep some entity that has its SWIFT access revoked from switching to China's CIPS or even crypto? Would it be merely an inconvenience, requiring the change of a few processes, or would it create hard problems?

I'm guessing it depends on the kind of sanctions. If dealing with rogues makes you a rogue, internationally, then CIPS may shy away from it.

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#286

Post by wyager »

hprotagonist wrote: post #238
bally0241 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing to watch people who have never really thought about this before realize the entire banking system is built upon a handful of centralized, permissioned databases which can pretty much be turned on/off at will for certain parties by the central banks. What is even more amazing is watching these same people (no necessarily you OP, but prevailing opinion on HN...) then go on an argue that a permission-less d…

> permission-less distributed ledger like Bitcoin is a completely unnecessary waste of resources. it certainly is when it immediately de facto centralizes! which is in the event what has happened

> it immediately de facto centralizes

In what respect? Hash power is well-distributed. Consensus (formal and informal) is working as expected.

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#287

Post by _448 »

sealthedeal wrote: post #257

CEO and co-founder of Routefusion here, a cross-border bank to bank payment API. We use the SWIFT network regularly. I can 100% confirm that all money in the world is just literally numbers, and it is balanced by the different federal reserve systems around the world to ensure no one can "create" money without notifying everyone. I guess if I was super cool I would do an AMA because this is the only thread that is re…

How does one connect to the SWIFT network? Say, someone wants to start a company for providing some financial service like fund transfer across borders, then connecting to SWIFT will be very helpful. I was always fascinated by how all this works and what does it take to directly use the SWIFT network. Any insights on this will be really helpful.

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#288

Post by stef25 »

chasd00 wrote: post #183
stef25 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is they do not care for Ukraine. I've been thinking about this all day and feel incredibly upset when I see what's going on. What can we do? Have you seen what the Russians did to Grozny? It all boils down to the fact that EU simply can't start a war with a maniac that has thousands of nukes. I'd say let him have it and Ukrainians refugees are welcome here by the millions. Putin's now threatening Finlan…

> Putin's now threatening Finland and Sweden should they dare join NATO do you have a link i can read up on? I would imagine everyone is running to the safety of NATO now and i can totally see Putin saying "if you try then you're next". > ...then it's basically WW3. If that's what it takes to get rid of this maniac then so be it but the consequences for everyone will be severe. "severe" would be the mildest term poss…

It was on the Guardian news feed, can't find it again but here's another link

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-threatens-finland-sweden-nat...

Sweden and Finland probably don't feel the need to join Nato but the threat that was made is enough to put EU on edge. Scandinavia is much "closer" than Ukraine.

Severe indeed.

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#289

Post by kmeisthax »

TeeWEE wrote: post #227
lxgr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can't be just a number on a computer in a bank, right? It really is, but to answer your second question, it's important to consider *which* bank. There's reserves (i.e. balances of banks at the Federal Reserve) and bank deposits (which really are just numbers in banks' databases). Having an account at the former is effectively what makes numbers in the database of the latter "real USD". > Otherwise some Russian…

So reading this: Banks are basically a necessary "evil" to make the current money system work. When I read how banks works, their technology, and how money works in general.. It makes me think: Is this really the way we want it to work. I'm not sure if crypto is currently ready. But one BIG reason for it to succeed, is that the current system is just old... We have all these fintech startups improving money flow, and…

Well, no: this isn't the way we want it to work. It's how it has to work. Banks aren't just a necessary evil - any functioning financial system needs intermediaries. Furthermore, in all but a small handful of cases, those intermediaries need to be trusted and trust-worthy. Bitcoin, and all other protocols based on Satoshi's design[0], are limited to maintaining a secure ledger of "on-chain assets". Any interaction with the real world still requires a trusted intermediary to feed data back into that ledger; and once you do that the downsides of maintaining a distributed trustless global ledger for the virtual side of those assets becomes apparent.

[0] Including Ethereum.

Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters

#290

Post by melony »

sealthedeal wrote: post #257

CEO and co-founder of Routefusion here, a cross-border bank to bank payment API. We use the SWIFT network regularly. I can 100% confirm that all money in the world is just literally numbers, and it is balanced by the different federal reserve systems around the world to ensure no one can "create" money without notifying everyone. I guess if I was super cool I would do an AMA because this is the only thread that is re…

Pricing for routefusion?
Post reply on HN