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1. Well, doesn't this make SWIFT sanctions the less important part, relative to getting "clearing houses" to ban transactions from a certain party? 2. With SWI

1. Well, doesn't this make SWIFT sanctions the less important part, relative to getting "clearing houses" to ban transactions from a certain party? 2. With SWIFT in place, why do banks even need clearing houses? Is that merely to save the need for bilateral verifications that transfers have been registered? 3. At the bottom line, the "transfer" is just an agreement to decrease a fixed-with decimal value on one side and increase it on the other... we're not talking about physical movement of paper or bullion, right? 4. It's still a problem that SWIFT lets the EU (or EU+US) turn unilateral sanctions into global sanctions.

atdrummond 5y ago
1. Yes but for said clearing house transactions to occur you would need to get counterparty institutions to agree to another communication method for coordinating purposes. The loss of the already agreed upon oracle is problematic. 2. A number of reasons but mainly to do with how funds interact with central banks and their capital requirements. Your later point that funds don't PHYSICALLY move means that it's less about each bank recording the appropriate addition and subtraction (that's easy enough) and more about how it is recorded, so transactions can be properly audited and transfers that would cause systemic or institutional issues can be curtailed as much as possible. There's also the issue of banks being able to more easily manipulate books using off ledger funds if Central Banks/payments systems weren't involved but that's again a systemic risk issue and not really relevant to our discussion. 3. Correct. 4. I agree but I don't think that's going to improve any time soon and I've yet to see a system that doesn't trade one point of centralized failure for another. I do hope cryptocurrencies can solve the distributed exchange issue because that's actually one very attractive (potential) feature of crypto for me, as someone who has seen first hand how these systems can be abused to target people - deservedly or not.

atdrummond 5y ago

1. Yes but for said clearing house transactions to occur you would need to get counterparty institutions to agree to another communication method for coordinating purposes. The loss of the already agreed upon oracle is problematic. 2. A number of reasons but mainly to do with how funds interact with central banks and their capital requirements. Your later point that funds don't PHYSICALLY move means that it's less about each bank recording the appropriate addition and subtraction (that's easy enough) and more about how it is recorded, so transactions can be properly audited and transfers that would cause systemic or institutional issues can be curtailed as much as possible. There's also the issue of banks being able to more easily manipulate books using off ledger funds if Central Banks/payments systems weren't involved but that's again a systemic risk issue and not really relevant to our discussion. 3. Correct. 4. I agree but I don't think that's going to improve any time soon and I've yet to see a system that doesn't trade one point of centralized failure for another. I do hope cryptocurrencies can solve the distributed exchange issue because that's actually one very attractive (potential) feature of crypto for me, as someone who has seen first hand how these systems can be abused to target people - deservedly or not.