Hey, I don't disagree government spending numbers can be crazy, but building a system for 330,000,000 people across 50 states that works flawlessly (and is responsible for trillions of dollars) isn't easy. I'm personally okay with $15M... that's like salaries for 25 people for two years.
To put that number into perspective, TurboTax spent about that much money on lobbying alone from 2018-2012.
ACH works right now, there's no reason to think the replacement wouldn't work.
For the record, ACH is incredibly cheap ($0.002 to send and $0.001 to receive) - but with the volumes of payments going through the network, that $15M is a small fraction of revenue. There was no special tax measure passed to fund this study. It came out of user fees.
> More than 29 billion ACH Network payments were made in 2021, valued at close to $73 trillion.
What do you think has been spent on developing Blockchain/DLT from 2007 to present? Is it more than $15m? Mostly amateur open source or corporate open source contributions?
- Bitcoin has an MIT License, for example
- XRPL and Stellar can do the payments volume; the TPS report; whereas otherwise you're building another Layer 2 system without Interledger.
- Flare does EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) Smart Contracts with XRPL; $<0.01/tx, network tx fees are just burned, 5 second transaction/ledger close time.
> Peering, Clearing and Settling; The Interledger network is a graph of nodes (connectors) that have peered with one another by establishing a means of exchanging ILP packets and a means of paying one another for the successful forwarding and delivery of the packets.
> […] Accounts and Balances: The edge between any two nodes (peers) is a communication link (for exchanging ILP packets and other data), and an account held between the peers (the Interledger account). The Interledger account has a balance denominated in a mutually agreed upon asset (e.g. USD) at an agreed upon scale (e.g. 2). The balance on the account is the net total of the amounts on any packets “successfully” routed between the peers.
> The balance on the Interledger account can only change as a result of two events:
> 1. The “successful” routing of an ILP packet between the two peers
> 2. A payment made between the peers on the underlying payment network they have agreed to use to settle the Interledger account
> Relation to Other Protocols: SPSP is used for exchanging connection information before an ILP payment or data transfer is initiated
To do a complete business process, there's – e.g. TradeLens, GSBN, and – signaling around transactions, which then necessarily depends upon another - hopefully also cryptographically-secured and HA Highly Available - information system with API version(s) and database schema(s) unless there's something like Interledger SPSP Simple Payment Setup Protocol and Payment Pointers, which also solve for micropayments to accountably support creators; https://WebMonetization.org/ .
> What do you think has been spent on developing Blockchain/DLT from 2007 to present? Is it more than $15m? Mostly amateur open source or corporate open source contributions?
Are you kidding me? Hundreds of billions. a16z's last fund alone as $4.6B.
What percentage (%) of the market cap, daily volume, or price gets contributed to, OTOH: (a) open source software development like code, tests, and docs; PRs: Pull Requests; (b) free information security review such as static and dynamic analysis; (c) marketing; (d) an open source software foundation; (e) offsetting long-term environmental costs through sustainable investment?
Are there other metrics for Software Quality & Infosec Assurances?
The entirety of the investment made by VCs is given directly to developers. That's got nothing to do with daily volume, market cap, etc - that's cash in hand. Human dollars. What developers choose to spend that money on is up to them but they sure do seem to have found a way. Arbitrarily constraining the analysis to the 'free' part is disingenuous.
As for offsets, the entire model is bogus and I encourage you to look into it. It's generally just a way to prop up bad business models. You can't buy crime offsets from someone who promises not to do a crime they would have otherwise so that you can do it - and yet that's exactly how carbon offsetting works. That's to say nothing of that blockchain carbon offsetting company that set fire to the forest they were planting twice. [1]
In your opinion, high quality Open Source Software is the result of VC money?
Chainslysis sells Blockchain/DLT analysis and investigation software and services to investigative agencies in multiple countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainalysis
> In fact, with the growth of legitimate cryptocurrency usage far outpacing the growth of criminal usage, illicit activity’s share of cryptocurrency transaction volume has never been lower.
> […] Transactions involving illicit addresses represented just 0.15% of cryptocurrency transaction volume in 2021 despite the raw value of illicit transaction volume reaching its highest level ever. As always, we have to caveat this figure and say that it is likely to rise as Chainalysis identifies more addresses associated with illicit activity and incorporates their transaction activity into our historical volumes. For instance, we found in our last Crypto Crime Report that 0.34% of 2020’s cryptocurrency transaction volume was associated with illicit activity — we’ve now raised that figure to 0.62%. Still, the yearly trends suggest that with the exception of 2019 — an extreme outlier year for cryptocurrency-based crime largely due to the […] scheme — crime is becoming a smaller and smaller part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Law enforcement’s ability to combat cryptocurrency-based crime is also evolving. We’ve seen several examples of this throughout 2021, […]
> However, we also have to balance the positives of the growth of legal cryptocurrency usage with the understanding that $14 billion worth of illicit activity represents a significant problem. Criminal abuse of cryptocurrency creates huge impediments for continued adoption, heightens the likelihood of restrictions being imposed by governments, and worst of all victimizes innocent people around the world. In this report, we’ll explain exactly how and where cryptocurrency-based crime increased, dive into the latest trends amongst different types of cybercriminals, and tell you how cryptocurrency businesses and law enforcement agencies around the world are responding. But first, let’s look at a few of the key trends in cryptocurrency-based crime […]
And still, 99%+ of the market is incapable of assessing the software quality of the platforms underpinning the assets themselves, so we reach for some sort of market fundamentals technical data other than software quality and information security asurances.
To put that number into perspective, TurboTax spent about that much money on lobbying alone from 2018-2012.