I remember read somewhere SWIFT can handle any currency, it's just most banks process US dollars only. US can audit every transaction after 911. EU invented INSTEX to buy oil from Iran to avoid the SWIFT ban.
A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
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Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#402[flagged]
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Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what they were referring to was Germany prematurely decommissioning nuclear plants only to start replacing them with coal and (more importantly) Nord Stream 2, which I never understood either. I can't comment on whether Greta Thunberg had anything to do with that, but I do see in a recent article that she appears to be anti-nuclear: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/21/eu-in-row-over...
Replacing them with coal would have been a good idea, at least as far as Russia is concerned, since it’s a local source of energy. In reality it was, indeed, natural gas and renewables. Bringing Thunberg into this discussion serves no purpose except making conservatives giggle because they love hating her. She had nothing to with the decision, and being anti-nuclear isn’t what she’s known for. Northstream 2 was, inde…
Replacing them with coal would have been a good idea, at least as far as Russia is concerned
Did Russia have some involvement in Germany's nuclear power infrastructure? I'm not aware of that, but interested to know more.
Bringing Thunberg into this discussion serves no purpose except making conservatives giggle because they love hating her. She had nothing to with the decision, and being anti-nuclear isn’t what she’s known for.
Sure, it was probably a bit forced. I wouldn't have chosen to bring her up. Either way, her anti-nuclear stance is now a relatively widely publicized recent event; I don't see that GP did something particularly wrong in referencing it.
Northstream 2 was, indeed, a terrible idea. But it never became operational and therefore does not affect the current situation.
Huh? It's directly related to the current situation.
Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
not only are first series euros still valid, but you can still exchange pre-Euro currencies for the original rate. The purpose of the new series is just to keep up with counterfeit money, to include newer security measures. But yes, countries in the world have revoked currencies from time to time.
No, you can't. They were only valid for 20 years, and 20 years have passed since 2002.
> They were only valid for 20 years, and 20 years have passed since 2002.
I'm trying to search for this, but I can't find anything about a 20 year validity.
Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a dumb take. 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…
I think not quite just debt and favors. In my mind at least the key differentiator is that with money, I can take some money from Paul for some good or service, and expect to be able to get a similarly valuable good or service from basically anyone for that same money.
It's transferable debt.
If I give Paul a loaf of bread and in exchange he writes "Paul owes you one" on a piece of paper, that's money. I can trade that with someone else for some good or service and we'll have to haggle over how much "one" favor from Paul is actually worth.
The dollar is just "the US government owes you one". How much is "one" worth? That's for the market to decide, and largely depends on how much real world goods and services there actually are along with how many "ones" the US government has issued. Although, before 1971, it was explicitly defined as "for every 35 'ones' you have, the US government owes you 1 oz of gold". Now, the value of "one" floats in the market and is constantly devalued by design.
In recent days, the world's markets have decided that "the Russian government owes you one" isn't worth nearly as much as it did last week.
Commodity money like gold or bitcoin don't rely on trust in a government's ability to pay it's debt, but rather trust that a sufficient number of people will always desire the commodity for whatever reason. That's still debt, but more a more indirect, coercion free form of debt.
For gold, that reason is because it has a long history of established scarcity and has some utility as jewelry to signal wealth to others.
For bitcoin, that reason is because it has theoretic perfect scarcity, can be instantly transferred to anyone on the planet with a phone, can be stored in your brain by memorizing the dozen words of your seed phrase, and many other fascinating programmable properties that have yet to be fully explored.
Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any time a friend or relatives asks me to explain what cryptocurrency is, the trust aspect must be front and center, axiomatic to the entire ecosystem. There is not a single thing in the implementation that makes sense without first assuming a lack of trust amongst every single party. This is also why cryptocurrencies can never be made efficient, and will be a blight for as long as they exist. They are the logical ex…
many PoS distributed slowish databases are currently deployed and process comparable transaction volume to credit card networks while emitting less carbon.
> process comparable transaction volume to credit card networks
Please cite your sources.
edit for people finding this later: Visa and MasterCard do on the order of one billion transactions per day combined. As far as I can tell, Ethereum (proof of work as of today) does about a million per day and Avalance (one of the top 3 proof of stake networks according to Wikipedia) does about a million per day. That's literally one thousand times fewer transactions than the top two card networks. Three orders of magnitude.
Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How does the system guarantee that nobody's creating money without notifying everyone? Simple answer is balanced books. Longer answer is public reporting and reconciliation. If a bank shows its Federal Reserve balance at X on its asset side and the Federal Reserve shows its bank balance at 0.9X on its liability side, that will raise issue on reconciliation. The system lazily evaluates, however, which makes it nimbl…
So, the bank can't flip a few bits in its databases and go "actually I have a quadrillion dollars now" because other people know how much money that bank should have based on transactions it has made? Do I have that right? Seriously I have wondered about this for decades. I don't know why this would be obvious to anyone.
Ultimately it comes down to trust and verification layered on top of the explicit threat of banking license forfeiture.
Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#408Canadian PM Trudeau just publicly announced his government's support for booting Russia out of the SWIFT system a few minutes ago. So the international pressure is there.
Countries who don't matter generally don't matter.
Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep! This is the fundamental "disruption" blockchain tech introduced. It doesn't require trust.
Any time a friend or relatives asks me to explain what cryptocurrency is, the trust aspect must be front and center, axiomatic to the entire ecosystem. There is not a single thing in the implementation that makes sense without first assuming a lack of trust amongst every single party. This is also why cryptocurrencies can never be made efficient, and will be a blight for as long as they exist. They are the logical ex…
This is a video outlining why the greek financial crisis happened, and why it's mainly due to it being a low-trust society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=404IeUzGNZ4
i think this low-trust is actually a root cause of many problems in society.
Re: A quick breakdown of what SWIFT is and why it matters
#410CEO 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…
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