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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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa's fact sheet[0] says that they processed about 6500 transactions per second on average for a recent 12-month period. A Solana dashboard[1] says that Solana processed about 2700 transactions per second on average for a recent period of a few hours. If we would like to pick nits, we could say that the Visa transactions are not comparable to the Solana transactions because Solana transactions let users run complex…

Other networks can achieve up to 50,000 TPS nowadays. The thing is they're still not very mature, technology wise. But it's been proven to be technically feasible to replace OldFi with blockchain, at least in terms of TPS.

Protocols like fastpay, at2, bullshark, have all claimed hundreds of thousands of transaction/s

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

#452
post #335

Earlier 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…

First paragraph I follow, but how do you get to the point of the second paragraph? Cryptocurrencies are an update on the current system to remove some of that trust.

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

#453
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 literall…

1. Ethereum is probably one of the slowest cryptocurrency

2. You’re citing avalanche numbers that are not at peak traffic

3. Avalanche is not far from being the fastest crypto

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

#454
post #443

It was always hard for me to understand exactly what SWIFT is. From what I could get, it’s a bunch of protocols that were standardized in order for banks to communicate between them. When you buy something in thailand with your apple card, barclay’s debit your account, talks to the feds, the feds talks to the BIS or some bank in thailand or some bank that might be able to talk to thailand, and so on. I think swift is…

> If it is so, I’m not sure how you can cut swift from a country. It doesn’t sound like a centralized thing.

Like any other sanctions: the government says “If you do X, don't do it with any Russian bank. If you do, people with guns will come, throw you personally in jail, and impose financial penalties on your business.”

And then transactions from Russian banks to banks in countries with that kind of sanctions suddenly have a very high rate of falling into the bit bucket without having any business effect.

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

#455
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's all trust based? We have to trust that all the governments of the world, who pinky promised to follow the rules, aren't secretly cheating internally and reporting false numbers to everyone else?

Yep! This is the fundamental "disruption" blockchain tech introduced. It doesn't require trust.

> Yep! This is the fundamental "disruption" blockchain tech introduced. It doesn't require trust.

Not a native English speaker, so I may miss some nuances, but can you explain how you do not need trust that you find tomorrow someone fool enough to give you something valuable against your token? Where else does the "store of value" come than trust that there are greater fools tomorrow?

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

#456
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 literall…

With lightning you can have infinite tx per day while having final settlement. In contrast Visa and Mastercard have delayed settlement and operate on many layers of trust

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

#457
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, they don't give you dollars, they give you a dollar denominated liability.

Just to make sure we are speaking the same language: If I have $1 in a checking account in a US bank, do I have one dollar, or do I have a dollar-denominated asset of $1 face value, backed by a dollar-denominated liability of the bank?

If you walk into a US bank and deposit $1 cash, they now owe you $1. To what extent they must have ready cash, fed deposits, liquid assets, illiquid assets, etc to back that debt is the subject of bank regulation

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

#458
post #26

I often wonder how money is stored. It can't be just a number on a computer in a bank, right? Otherwise some Russian bank could just increase that number to whatever they like. And say "Look, we own 100 Trillion USD. Now let's go shopping.". So I guess USD needs to be recognized by the US somehow? Could the US simply "void" all USD that are owned by Russia?

> I often wonder how money is stored. In a computer account. Here's a 22-second clip[0] from a 60-Minutes interview with a former chair of the Federal Reserve talking about how money is lent to banks. Literally just numbers on a computer. "...We simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have..." [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiCs_YHlKSI

How do banks do backups of this data?

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

#459
post #26

I often wonder how money is stored. It can't be just a number on a computer in a bank, right? Otherwise some Russian bank could just increase that number to whatever they like. And say "Look, we own 100 Trillion USD. Now let's go shopping.". So I guess USD needs to be recognized by the US somehow? Could the US simply "void" all USD that are owned by Russia?

Yes. It's a distributed shared ledger. If this hypothetical Russian bank attempts to add fraud to the ledger, it will cause a fork.

Shared with whom? The Federal Reserve?

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

#460
Loans create deposits. When a bank issues a loan, it creates the equivalent deposit automatically.

That's the loan department of a bank.

The treasury department of a bank then persuades the ultimate holders of those deposits to swap them for bank bonds and equity, which then fulfils the 'capital requirements' of regulation.

In other words lending is not restricted by quantity, but by price. Banks are never constrained by regulations on the liability side. All they do is change the price of money.

The way Russia will pay people is by the Russian Treasury paying whoever needs paying in Roubles. That creates an automatic overdraft for the Russian Treasury at the Russian central bank that balances the additional commercial reserves the transfer journal creates. And that's all they need to do. They don't even need to pay interest if they don't want to.

How do I know this? Because that's how the UK's Bank of England and Treasury works, which along with colleagues I have documented in very great detail[0]

People in Russia will accept those roubles because Putin will tax them in roubles and throw them in gulags if they don't pay. As long as he taxes enough, there won't be any inflation.

That's all the Russian authorities need to do to ensure a flow of real goods and services towards the Russian war machine. They are self-sufficient in everything that matters, and anything else he needs he can source via China in exchange for oil, gas and other natural resources.

What would be really entertaining is if Russia demanded that other countries settle their gas bill in Roubles. Then confiscate foreign holdings of them. How long then before the EU sues for peace?

Swift is a glorified email system between banks, and can replaced by a different email/MQ system between banks. Correspondence banking existed for centuries before we had computers. The excessive excitement over Swift belies the reality of how transactions are settled by banks on the ground.

Stopping Putin transacting in other currencies is irrelevant. Since the world is stopping selling stuff to Russia he will have no bills in other currencies to settle. The only people that suffer are those providing the transaction services in the West, who will earn less and may have to lay off workers.

Putin doesn't need our money. He has his own.

[0]: https://gimms.org.uk/2021/02/21/an-accounting-model-of-the-u...

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