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Why the Fed's Real-Time Payments Will Fail
Last Wednesday, the day the markets started to slide, there was a US Senate Banking hearing on crypto. If you didn't get a chance to see it I've included a link to the video below. [1]
About precisely 51 minutes in you'll hear Chris Van Hollen begin to discuss what he described as the Fed's desire to implement a "real-time" banking system because it could help people living "paycheck-to-paycheck". But that's wishful thinking no matter how well FinTech seems to work due to Shadow Banking, the dark underbelly of of the banking world which is so gross it the banking sector has tried to use MSM to change the name. Gross.
Anyway, I'm happy to report I just used crypto instead of a Chase wire transfer to move some of my greenbacks from the US and convert them into some pretty Rupiah cash money here in Bali, Indonesia and the results were surprising.
Here's what I did:
I put a limit order buy on GDAX and scooped up some BCH on a dip, sent it through two mobile burner wallets for less than a penny each, then put a limit sell at 1% above market on Indodax, then paid Rp30.000 (about $2) to withdraw the money straight to an Indonesian Bank.
And here's the result:
I saved a $40 Chase wire fee and about a week of waiting for SWIFT (that name though right?) to clear. I also ended up making about $11 dollars in the process from well-timed trades and had my money in a few hours.
So will FinTech help the Fed reach a real-time payment system so poor people can have more liquid access to their money as Dr. Roubini suggests in the video? I kindly doubt it...unless FinTech starts using Bitcoin.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFc0Um6WUU4
- Cypher 8y agoIf you're just moving money, you need to hedge your gdax long with a leveraged short with a size that covers your BCH purchase. It's no good buying a dip if the dip keeps dipping before you found a buyer. Also worth noting that the liquidity on Indodax is poor. The 24h volume for BCH is only $97,437 so selling $2,000 worth of BCH will take an hour (on average) to fill and the more people that use this method to send money home the harder it will be to get filled above market. From the liquidity point of view you'll be better off using BTC as it has 12x the liquidity.