361–370 of 496 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All currency is fiat. No medium of exchange that isn't strictly bartering is of arbitrary value.
Coinage evolved from standard weights for bars of useful metals.
Shell money predates coinage and works a lot more like fiat money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except the scientific process, which focuses on working as hard as you can to prove the other guy's work is wrong. Only if you can't do that do you start to trust and build off it. This scientific process of embedded mutual distrust is one of the most successful, generative, and important institutions humanity has ever created.
With unlimited resources, sure. But most scientists trust the peer review process and base their work on their own ideas and the ideas/results they read in journals. In short, scientists trust other scientists.
But it is critically important that we can periodically check in and verify that our trust is still well placed, and not have systems that can allow someone to massively profit from violating people's trust.
The stronger those foundations and verifications of trust are, the better off we all are as a society.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fiat currency here is obviously being used to refer to currencies created by government decree. Plenty of other moneys come into existence emergently, most obviously gold and silver without any authority mandating their use. Money is an emergent property of human society, not a gift handed down by our divinely established kings. The idea that money can only exist by government decree is patently absurd.
Gold and Silver are not “money”. Money is almost by definition based on authority mandated value. It’s true that lots of money exists outside of government decree but equating any commodity to be money redefines the term.
Money is whatever thing human society decides to collectively value in order to more easily trade goods and services across time and space.
Money has been and continues to be many things, from government decreed currencies, to gold and silver, to cigarettes in prisons, to sacks of salt paid to Roman soldiers (etymology of 'salary'), to the colloquial "I owe you one".
Money is just debt and favors and can take an infinite number of forms depending on the environment and needs of the people using it to more efficiently collaborate.
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…
You describe money as if it’s just numbers being moved around: yes, the technology is just numbers moving around, but money is a social construct not a technology, the use of technology is a very small part of what makes money money.
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…
Do you see blockchain tech eventually replacing these trusted systems with a trustless one?
Also. at a level above "money" what do the ultra wealthy (Rothschild, Rockefeller, etc) deal in as currency at their level. I believe they have another currency. These families have FAR greater wealth than Bezos and Zuck (Bill Gates is essentially family to the Rothschilds. through his father/grandfather)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except the scientific process, which focuses on working as hard as you can to prove the other guy's work is wrong. Only if you can't do that do you start to trust and build off it. This scientific process of embedded mutual distrust is one of the most successful, generative, and important institutions humanity has ever created.
With unlimited resources, sure. But most scientists trust the peer review process and base their work on their own ideas and the ideas/results they read in journals. In short, scientists trust other scientists.
We really don't. There's so much stupid stuff that gets published on the daily.
And then, you publish a paper refuting a lot of the nonsense, and people start citing your paper as evidence of the opposite of what you wrote, just because you had a keyword in your abstract and they didn't read it, just needed a citation. It's mind boggling that we aren't going backwards in science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can tell you something you can’t Google in 2 seconds: have a close friend who’s also a programmer that worked on SWIFT: the transactions are conducted through XML files on FTP(!) drops.
What the heck. I can’t wrap my head on how that would work. Can you elaborate?
Look up ISO 20022 and “store and forward”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Swift is "just" a messaging system. No money is transferred over it. Blocking Swift access makes it very inconvenient for banks to perform international settlement, because banks today rely on automated Swift messages to coordinate such transfers. However, even before Swift, international transfers were possible: by phone or telex. The banks have to find other ways to communicate, which isn't easy in practice, bu…
> Swift is "just" a messaging system. No money is transferred over it. I don't really understand this distinction. But before I can ask a question, there are some points about my understanding of how payments work, so that you can verify me: 1. All payments, no matter which payment system, can be performed only between 2 bank accounts. In order to send or receive money I must have an account in a bank. 2. A bank is p…
That's why I consider the capability to settle the individual transfers to be more important than the capability to negotiate these transfers, and the time of settlement to be the actual time at which wealth is transferred. Before that moment, the transfer is effectively incomplete, which usually doesn't matter much for smaller sums of money, but in case of large amounts that introduce large imbalances between banks you can be pretty sure the banks will want to settle among each other first before the recipient gets full access to the transferred money.
However, all of this is based on the assumption that Swift is used for inter-bank communication as in "non-central-bank to non-central-bank". I always assumed that central banks would have their own communication channels with the non-central-banks and would not have to use some intermediary like Swift, as they themselves are a central entity able to standardize message formats and such.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Or Russia's new SWIFT alternative that they stood up after the west threatened SWIFT censorship after they annexed Crimea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPFS