Sending USD from random bank from random country to another random bank from another random country is a network problem. While it’s solved by SEPA in EUR to EUR countries by pan european clearing and settlement systems, out in the big world it’s not as simple. Specially considering cross-border.
You have to somehow get the payment message across banks and decide on how to settle. It fundamentally a hard problem.
Stable cryptos put the message and settlement in the same system and it’s a global one (not just EU/wtv). The problem is then, which stable crypto? The moment the Fed has a USD crypto, our ECB has an Eur crypto, than that problem is solved. In the meanwhile, joining a big stable usd crypto might still provide you better remittance routes (and settlement) than sending messages over swift.
Tldr: stablecoins solve remittance routing “edge cases”, if the stablecoin is adopted enough
If Bank of America let anyone in the world easily open a checking account, this wouldn’t be a problem right? But they don’t do that, because of regulations and KYC etc.
Similarly, if BoA supported an Ethereum stablecoin but a random bank in Argentina supports a Solana stablecoin, it’s still going to be a pain to transfer money right?
I’m struggling to see how this is a blockchain issue rather than a regulatory + agreement on international standard issue.
What I have missed with stablecoins is that how they fix the final settlement. That is say you send money from USA to say Somalia or North Korea. Who in those countries will have dollars most likely to give out for the stablecoin?
Paper dollars are a common store of value in emerging markets. Trading digital dollars for paper dollars, is becoming as common as paper foreign exchange
There are already hawala / xawala money transfer services in Somalia that will exchange cryptocurrencies for physical dollars or local currency, or load value onto a local phone app. Does that answer your question?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
The final settlement inside Somalia or North Korea isn't necessary because they can buy things from other countries where those people can do the settlement. Just like if you have US dollar bills in Somalia, they have value even if there is no nearby ATM you can find to deposit them.
When did Political corruption not exist? In what system in history did the people in power have so few rotten apples that corruption was an anomally?
Blaming corruption on capitalism is silly. As long has worldhas resources, people want control of reasources, and bad actors will do bad actors thingies.
You're right, political corruption is a problem in other systems as well, not just capitalism. I guess it would be more accurate to say that power concentration causes political corruption. We should try to figure out if it's possible to manage the economy in a way that limits the amount of power any individual can have to such an extent that corruption would be impossible.
That's why we need new ways to make decisions using direct democracy. Any system that delegates decision making to an individual or small group is vulnerable to corruption. Everyone should participate in decision-making.
"Everyone" is for lack of a better word, stupid, and routinely votes against their own interests, and don't know what they actually want. Just ask Americans.
I agree, and that's why the decision-making process should be more complex than just a simple vote. It should be a process where everyone participating is forced to consider the issue from all sides.
I don't think there is exists a magical political system that we set up and it magically protects us from corruption. Forever. Just like any system (like surviving in an otherwise hostile nature) it needs maintenance. Maintenance in a political or any social structure is getting off your bottom and imposing some "reward" signal on the system.
Corruption mainly exists because people have low standards for enforcing eradication of it. This is observable in the smallest levels. In countries where corruption is deeply engraved, even university student groups will be corrupted. Elected officials of societies of any size will be prone to put their personal interests in front of the groups' and will appoint or employ friends instead of randomers based on some quality metrics. The question is what are the other people willing to do? Is anyone willing to call them out? Is anyone willing to instead put on the job themselves and do it right (which can be demanding)?
The real question is how far are the individuals willing to go and how much discomfort are they willing to embrace to impose their requirements, needs, moral expectations on the political leader? The outcomes of many situations you face in society (should that be a salary negotiation or someone trying to rip you off in a shop) depend on how much sacrifice (e.g. discomfort) you are willing to take on to get out as a "winner" (or at least non-loser) of the situation? Are you willing to quit your job if you cannot get what you want? Are you going to argue with the person trying to rip you off? Are you willing to go to a lawyer and sue them and take a long legal battle?
If people keep choosing the easier way, there will always be people taking advantage of that. Sure, we have laws but laws also need maintenance and anyone wielding power needs active check! It doesn't just magically happen but the force that can keep it in check is every individual in the system. Technological advances and societal changes always lead to new ideas how to rip others off. What we would need is to truly punish the people trying to take advantage of such situations: no longer do business with them, ask others to boycott such behaviour (and don't vote for dickheads!, etc.) -- even in the smallest friends group such an issue could arise.
The question is: how much are people willing to sacrifice on a daily basis to put pressure on corrupt people? There is no magic here, just the same bare evolutionary forces in place for the past 100,000 years of humankind.
(Just think about it: even in rule of law, the ultimate way of enforcing someone to obey the rules is by pure physical force. If someone doesn't listen, ever, he will be picked up by other people and forced into a physical box and won't be allowed to leave. And I don't expect that to ever change, regardless of the political system. Similarly, we need to keep up an army at all times. If you simply go hard pacifist, someone will take advantage of that... Evolution. )
Democracy is an active game to be played and not just every 4 years. In society, people's everyday choices and standards are the "natural forces of evolution".
Stablecoins are actually the future of remittances, the problem is which stablecoin is safe and has enough adoption. (When a big or central bank decides to have a stablecoin, things will change a lot)
I work in “traditional” (as in, non crypto) payment systems, and i can tell you that plenty of companies are looking into using cryto rails for complex remmitance routes.
The problem is swift network/correspondent/intermediary banking. When you want to send money abroad to badly connected banks of badly connected countries, you might have a big route chain (multiple times intermediaries), fees can be huge , and settlement can take a long time. For these “small” banks it can be extremely hard to get better banking partners for better network (as in banking not IT) connection (multiple reasons, from price to available business partner, and company bandwith to go with the project)
Stable coins are much simper by comparison, you just need a wallet, and you ate a n a global network with automated settlement. Now whats lacking is standardizing how to send a message “ your crypto X received money from our crypto wallet Y, from our customer with acct number yyy, intended to your customer with acct number xxx”
Still some guys send iso message via swift to semd those intents and then settle via crypto.
This is a non existing problem for intra-eu payments due to all eu members being part of TARGET settlement system, and there are pan-EU clearing systems, but as soon as you get to more “disconnected “ countries, or “smaller” banks cross continent, it’s a pain.
> The problem is swift network/correspondent/intermediary banking. When you want to send money abroad to badly connected banks of badly connected countries, you might have a big route chain (multiple times intermediaries), fees can be huge , and settlement can take a long time.
But why is this complicated? Isn't it mostly about regulations / KYC / AML, rather than anything technical?
Stablecoins are much simpler because they don't do anything with respect to regulations, they're just a dumb ledger. For those who don't want to bypass regulations and the legal system, stablecoins bring as much as yet another database / ledger, which are not the problem in the first place.
Payments basics:
Simplest scenario (details overly simplified) When you send money from account A on bank X to account B on bank Y, what happens is that Bank X debits account A on its system and credits bank Y’s account on bank X (let’s say it’s Xy account) Then bank X sends message to Bank Y to credit account B, so Bank Y debits X’s bank account (Yx) and credits B.
As you can see this is an issue, it means that every bank has to have an account on every other bank in order to have funds moving around, and even keep liquidity there.
That’s where Clearing And Settlement system comes in, they act as a centralised force.
So instead of bank X having an account (with enough liquidity ) on bank Y so that its customers can transfer money to Bank Y customers, both of these banks have an account on some Clearing/Settlement third party (usually it’s a system by a Central Bank) and interact with that system instead, so instead of N*N bank accounts on outer banks, you have N accounts on central system.
EU has TARGET from ECB for settlement of euros across EU.
But there is no central bank of the whole world of every currency.
So what happens when too far away banks interact?
They have to search through the graph of all the world banks how they can get money to a particular bank. Add currency conversion as an extra complexity, because every connection is on a currency.
So it’s quite the graph search with many constraints, clearing and settling such stuff is hard because of that.
Regulation and AML is just one of the difficulties in linking nodes, but other exists, for example liquidity, a small bank can’t just spread multi currency accounts on many places.
The benefit of stablecoin on a blockchain, is that it kinda gives you “whole world central bank”, more correctly, it makes everybody share the same ledger, instead of each bank having its own that needs reconciliation with everybody else.
The only thing extra needed for stable coins, is space for encrypted messages is a transfer(so that a bank can tell other bank to credit customer B) and a public mapping from Bank Bic to crypto wallet id.
> As you can see this is an issue, it means that every bank has to have an account on every other bank in order to have funds moving around, and even keep liquidity there.
I don't see how a stablecoin solves this. You still need all the actors involved to agree on the stablecoin, just like you'd need them to agree on any non-blockchain-based system. You added an extra step, namely going through this new currency, which presumably is backed 1:1 to an existing one, but that adds some overhead on its own. Every country using USD (or equivalent stablecoin) would remove some friction, but it's not like this will happen.
> EU has TARGET from ECB for settlement of euros across EU.
> But there is no central bank of the whole world of every currency.
So how come one exists and not the other yet? And why do you expect the whole world to agree on a stablecoin-based solution if they can't or don't want to agree on a TARGET-like one?
Besides, we usually don't even know how much it'd cost to just use a stablecoin for everything, since there are so few actual legit uses. I'm not sure you'd even end up being competitive with current solutions.
Right now as a consumer (meaning for lower amounts), I can trivially convert between most currencies using wise.com. The fees are not negligible but fine for one-offs, and I can get much lower going through IBKR and I guess others. I'm still to hear of a stablecoin-based solution beating that.
> Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.
In other words, the solution you seem to describe could have been implemented way before Bitcoin was even invented; the fact that it's not indicates that it's not actually the missing piece.
> And why do you expect the whole world to agree on a stablecoin-based solution if they can't or don't want to agree on a TARGET-like one?
I didn't read anything about tm-guimaraes "expecting the whole world to agree on a stablecoin-based solution" and you didn't bother to quote him, if he did say it. In fact, multiple stable coins and quick arrangements between individual banks are a big part of the value provided by stable coins.
The point here is that stables do provide a lot of value and convenience for banking, two banks can agree and use a stable in no time at all, they are traded 24x7 on multiple exchanges where every bank has accounts.
I'm not sure what are you trying to argue, the convenience and speed of stables is there for all to see. They have one slight problem, namely they might not be properly regulated and introduce some risks. However, how much can you trust regulations themselves, given that unstable coins, being de facto criminal fraud, are not only legal but perpetrated at the highest level of government.
> I didn't read anything about tm-guimaraes "expecting the whole world to agree on a stablecoin-based solution" and you didn't bother to quote him, if he did say it. In fact, multiple stable coins and quick arrangements between individual banks are a big part of the value provided by stable coins.
Why would that go faster than agreeing on existing currencies? If you want to go from, say, EUR to USD, going through more currencies just adds overhead. And again, why do you expect quicker arrangements when stablecoins are involved (and all the other elements still are)?
> two banks can agree and use a stable in no time at all
If they can (meaning they're also legally allowed to) agree to that, then they can agree to using their main currencies as well. Let's not pretend that EUR -> EUR-based stable currency -> USD-based stable currency -> USD is somehow simpler than EUR -> USD.
> the convenience and speed of stables is there for all to see
Where can we all see that? Which product has stablecoins as part of their implementation instead of as a marketing point? I gave examples above that seem to do what you both seem to argue stablecoins are good for, namely transferring money independently of currencies. AFAICT Wise does not use stablecoins, and I'm pretty sure they would if it could make things more efficient to reduce their fees while still increasing their margins. The fact that they don't and are still in business years after stablecoins have been out (and again, legal stablecoins traded by known actors could have existed before proof of work was created anyway) indicates that it's not the competitive advantage you think it is.
OP was talking about legal money and how banks could use stablecoins to improve their connectivity for legal money flows. Regulations are a given constraint for them, so the risk and lack of compliance you mention is actually a deal-breaker here.
I also fail to understand this notion of "unstable coin" to refer to currencies "stable coins" are pegged to.
The Apple value pack comes mostly from brand value, deep ecosystem interactions, and being pretty much the only big corp ONLY focused on high end personal computing devices. Almost all their revenue is from B2C, their incentives are more aligned than most other big corps.
Any split to not actually harm the customers would be more focused on services such as apple card, icloud, the apple plus services (music,tv,…) etc.
Tbh, even EU mesures i think would be better if apple was instead forced to open the hardware (provide docs and bootloader, and no penalty for an user that takes advantage), rather than opening the OS or store. Not needing such openness on store and OS/core libs, actually allows apple to be more nimble and providing de better service (or bigger margins :( ), buto opnning hardware could actually give other OSs a chance, for once there could be a linux phone, as iphone has few hardware configs, and the device is very wide spread, 2 factors making it very attractive to devs (as example, check asahi linux, how quickly it became usable on a platform without docs)
This would play much more into “i bought this device i run wtv software I want” without restricting software vendors, Apple could keep the benefit of tight integration (that consumers like me like), but would have to provide the docs (and boot) for alternative OS to rise.
I’ve watched both the original british “Ghosts” sitcom and the still running american one. And to be honest this is the american quirk that i found the most odd.
I’ve actually like the fact they have created different characters to make more sense to be stuck in an american manor, but the main ones dont hide the beautifull actors appeal, which is weird.
Also, the american ghosts chatecters seem to have less depht, or at least their deph is rarely shown, ie, deph is there, but ignored or forgotten in most eps.
I miss the “cavern ghost” that while he had very primitive behaviours, he was actually smart, but more than that, he showed the pain, experience and how he grow detatched from partimgs and the lime due to the millenia he has been stuck, his mirror “thor” also has noce things, but doesn’t compare, or at least they dont play to them enough.
The english boy scout is a more mature and melancolic as well, and acts as a father feature to the female lead occasionally, while the american younger seems much more steriotipical.
I really like the american finance bro, it is no way similar to his british politic counterpart, and they do show his nice guy side often, I think the fact that they made them so opposite made me enjoy it more.
I guess that the difference in episode count per season might also justify why in most eps the americans are just steriotypes.
But the “beauty” of the american ghosts is just silly american obsession.
Don’t most games with expensive cosmetics lock them behind paywalls?
I assume there is lots of cheating because of every game having matchmaking system for fair with rankings. And there’s a huge amount of people that feel locked into low ranking because of bad teammates (which makes no sense statistically speaking), and if they just bump something they would do well.
There’s others who just want to showoff an high ranking.
And the guys that just want a cheap win, at the expense of ruining everyone else game.
And then there’s the business of this. Cheat tool makers making money of these lind of people. High ranking players selling boosting services or high ranking accounts (smurfing and cheating feels very similar on the loosing side). And even the high ranking players selling player providing boosting can cheat to perform the service in less time.
Skill based matchmaking with any form of public ranking (showing a number or tier) will always be full of people trying to game the system instead of trying to get better at the game. Specially in team games.
And Europe is actually resisting better than US due to election system. Here in best case scenario they are number 2, and took them a long time to get there after Trump
In the US, a populist just needs to win a primary, ie 50% of 50% of the American votes, and he is immediately at least nr2 in the run, and they get the support of one of the major parties.
Saying that populists / extremists also exist in Europe is just a bad comparison.
The extreme right won the Dutch elections though - and they’re not the only country - so your argument that “best case (...) number 2” isn’t true. They can and do win elections.
What did winning mean, though? Is it Republican-style minority rule where they can work the system push through policies which a majority of Americans oppose, or a coalition government where half of his coalition is pledged to rein in his more extreme positions?
> its own philosophical tradition, and the Christianity that merely influences Japanese thought, it doesn't swim in savior narrative like the West's cultural canon.
Really? I see Japanese works with as much if not more savior narrative than western’s.
Maybe you don’t see it due to you mostly consuming romance anime, have you also tried western romance?
Western romance, kill me now. It's the same idiot misogynistic white dude trying to woo the same hotter, smarter, better in every way woman and conquering her into marriage.
If I'm interpreting parent correctly, they're arguing that had the Chinese recently visited the Americas, the Portuguese and Spanish would have encountered native populations which were already decimated by disease. As this isn't the case, the epidemiological argument against shortly prior Chinese encounters with American populations is strong.
That post Portuguese/Spanish contact native American populations were annihilated by disease is now well established fact. That again argues against earlier Chinese contact.
>native American populations were annihilated by disease is now well established fact
Conveniently formulated historic fact absolving settlers IMO. Apropo to topic.
Convincing argument from indigenous is that indigenous in NA didn't get wiped out "because of" disease, worst historic pandemics wipe out like 50% of population over ~10 years before some sort of immunity kicks into population and gen pop rebuilds a few generations after that. Indigenous NA got wiped due to generations of increased deprivation enforced by settlers over 100+ years that made them suspectible to disease/fatality. It's like how malaria, dysentery, starvation was primary cause of death in prison camps, but really it's the fact that prison camp conditions allowed those diseases to spread in enviroment of artificially sustained deprivation.
90% population wipes over multipe generations isn't how disease operates, it's not natural epidemiologic behavior on continental scale. 90% population wipes happens because of coordinated genocide over generations across continent, blaming "contact" and "disease" is deflection. Hence if prevous visitors (can be whoever) didn't stick around for 100 years to coordinate a genocide, the indigenous people would still be around to greet Portugese/Spaniards, because they would have had ~100 years to recover/rebuild from whatever contact disease from prior meeting.
And those populations would recover within few generations, like every other continental spanning peoples that's dealt with small pox since 1500BCE and before. No disease keeps populations across large span of geography at 10% pre outbreak over 100 years. It takes human intervention to force a specific people below replacement level for that long. When smallpox epidemics explodes, it wipes out 50%+ within a few YEARS. And then population RECOVERS, within a few generations. Populations develop some level of immunity OR social learned epidemiological responses to curtail outbreaks. Of course disease can kill, but it does not explain why indigenous population levels did not recover, especially on multi generational timelines. Not debating whether disease increases mortality, but saying disease is cause conveniently ignores the fact that persistent deprivation maintained by settlers over generations caused conditions where disease spread/has increased lethality, combined with repression prevented indigenous populations from recovering.
So yes, IMO it's completely debatable 90% of population would STILL be wiped out after 100 years in event of an earlier, pre Columbian exchange where new disease is introduced to the continent. Because unless those visitors stuck around and active took effort to genocide the locals, but using disease as a weapon AND creating conditions where disease can proliferate without response, local population would recover after multiple generations (european population took ~80 years to recover from black death).
Only if spread continental scale which implies prolonged exchange. Otherwise can be isolated to small cohort. You claim there would be 10% population in prior disease exchange. You claim it's not debatable. I use too much words demonstrate otherwise. You seem to agree. Useful information was exchanged.
Time to build a new system and time to onboard a new team member without professional experience in a given language are 2 very difficult things.
Go is much more optimised for quick onboarding, fast feedback, more “code look” consistency across projects then rust.
Now a team that knows both rust and go well might have the same proditivity in rust and go (maybe even more in rust), but with lots of changes in personell, specifically in quick growing departments, go can make a huge difference.
This is obviously just an anecdote, but i’ve seen more companies or departments running mostly a go backend stack, having job postings saying “no go experience required”, than the equivalent other companies (or departments ) focused on any other lang.
Sending USD from random bank from random country to another random bank from another random country is a network problem. While it’s solved by SEPA in EUR to EUR countries by pan european clearing and settlement systems, out in the big world it’s not as simple. Specially considering cross-border.
You have to somehow get the payment message across banks and decide on how to settle. It fundamentally a hard problem.
Stable cryptos put the message and settlement in the same system and it’s a global one (not just EU/wtv). The problem is then, which stable crypto? The moment the Fed has a USD crypto, our ECB has an Eur crypto, than that problem is solved. In the meanwhile, joining a big stable usd crypto might still provide you better remittance routes (and settlement) than sending messages over swift.
Tldr: stablecoins solve remittance routing “edge cases”, if the stablecoin is adopted enough