6 ms·

I swear to god, half of the problem with cryptocurrency is Americans not understanding what a functional personal banking system looks like. The big American b

I swear to god, half of the problem with cryptocurrency is Americans not understanding what a functional personal banking system looks like. The big American banks just never bothered to move beyond the 1970s, and so otherwise fairly well-informed Americans in tech assume you need some sort of completely mad system like "consume the power of Spain making a distributed merkel tree full of partial hash collisions" to make bank transfers work. in every other rich country, you just log in to your bank's web ui thing, click "SEND MONEY TO MY MUM", and then it sends it, for free, to your mum, with no risk of your mum being able to take more money, no random intermediary, no worry about if it actually gets there, no third party holding it in a non-bank cash account, no pre-authorisation, etc. you enter a bank identification number and an account number (and a name, usually, to avoid mistakes) and it just happens and it just works. in most countries this is quick, even, e.g. in the UK it's almost always < 5 seconds. FOR FREE. no blockchains, no multi-billion ponzi schemes, just a boring and simple service offered by every bank in the country. making the Fed make banks just introduce free, instant bank transfers could have saved the world tens of billions of dollars and apparently tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gases.

hinkley 4y ago
Snake oil comes around every couple of generations once the people who lived it are too feeble or too few to get the message out to the latest crop of people with enough income to grab the attention of con artists. These are in theory lessons that are meant to be passed along by the Public Education system but ours is pretty broken.
mjr00 4y ago
Exactly this, I'm in Canada and can transfer money to anyone in Canada (and maybe worldwide, never tried it though) for free, instantly. That's how most people pay rent up here. Most of the problems people perceive with the banking system are completely societal, 0% technical. If your bank doesn't let you send money instantly to your friend for free, that isn't because your bank needs a blockchain.
- bananapub 4y ago
  > Most of the problems people perceive with the banking system are completely societal, 0% technical. If your bank doesn't let you send money instantly to your friend for free, that isn't because your bank needs a blockchain. that's excellent, thank you for putting it better than I did.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
See also Uber vs countries that can and did simply regulate taxis well for decades, without burning billions of VC dollars.
- JamesianP 4y ago
  I've never been impressed by tech startups "disrupting" boring traditional industries. Except that perhaps some of their technology problems may be interesting. But overall, you're now working/investing in a boring industry.
JSavageOne 4y ago
> In every other rich country Let's not ignore the non-"rich" countries
- bananapub 4y ago
  yes, sorry, good point.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Most of Africa has more robust money transferring systems than the US. You can literally text someone currency, and this has been around longer than bitcoin.
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    If you're referring to M-pesa, it's an app like Venmo. The US has apps too (for example Venmo).
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      I think I'm referring to M-pesa, but I'm pretty sure implementations and uses existed in this system before app stores existed, ie before 2007
oezi 4y ago
It is not quite true that this is the way in every other country. It took Europe quite some time to adopt the IBAN. Money transfer between banks is still mostly cleared only daily (even if the transfer is shown as instantaneous). Also the name given during the transfer aside the IBAN won't make the transfer fail as far as I know if incorrect.
JamesianP 4y ago
Well I mean the US is the biggest and richest rich country by a large margin. And has maintained a continuously functioning financial system for centuries now (though I do wish they would let it crash and be replaced sometimes when it so-richly deserved to). So it is kinda hardest to implement here, especially with every state having their own banking rules. The banks are adding some instant money transfer services in the last few years though.
- bananapub 4y ago
  > Well I mean the US is the biggest and richest rich country by a large margin. And has maintained a continuously functioning financial system for centuries now (though I do wish they would let it crash and be replaced sometimes when it so-richly deserved to). So it is kinda hardest to implement here, especially with every state having their own banking rules. the EU did this, SPANNING TWENTY EIGHT COUNTRIES. they don't even all use the same CURRENCY. edit: sorry, it's 36 - EU27 + EFTA + UK + microstates > The banks are adding some instant money transfer services in the last few years though. it appears to me, judging from talking to Americans, and my own use of the US banking system, that customers do not even generally have ability to login to their bank's website and transfer money, AT ALL, forget "instant". overall, this is such a bizarre reply, but emblematic of many of the problems the US faces - "it's too hard to fix $problem_with_well_known_solution because of entrenched interests, so let's create this absolutely awful parallel system that creates a whole new world of entrenched interests who will in turn block any innovation". why do you think it would be hard? ACH exists, and lets banks transfer money. why can't banks make it better like Australia did? or have the same structure create a parallel, better transfer system banks can opt in to, like the UK did with FPS? I would have said that letting venmo/paypal/etc do it was the worst possible solution, but then I could not have imagined that another solution people would seriously propose was "cryptocurrency".
  - afarrell 4y ago
    > emblematic of many of the problems the US faces - "it's too hard to fix $problem_with_well_known_solution because of entrenched interests, so let's create this absolutely awful parallel system that creates a whole new world of entrenched interests who will in turn block any innovation". This is what happens when you build a country with a disproportionate number of the sort of people who are willing to say "Fuck it. Building a decent living in my home country is too hard. I'm going to cross an ocean in a steam ship and start a new life on a new continent where I am a complete stranger." I say this as an American who has made similar choices of questionable wisdom.
kasey_junk 4y ago
Now do a transfer between an EU bank and one in Canada. Or send money to a wallet in China. I assure you I understand the rails going on in international money transfers, and the amount of different systems, protocols and hops to make it happen is staggering. It can take sophisticated modern treasury operations years to get up and running in new jurisdictions independent of the regulatory challenges. If we could isolate it to the compliance and risk management portions of the challenge it would increase innovation dramatically.

hinkley 4y ago

Snake oil comes around every couple of generations once the people who lived it are too feeble or too few to get the message out to the latest crop of people with enough income to grab the attention of con artists. These are in theory lessons that are meant to be passed along by the Public Education system but ours is pretty broken.

mjr00 4y ago

Exactly this, I'm in Canada and can transfer money to anyone in Canada (and maybe worldwide, never tried it though) for free, instantly. That's how most people pay rent up here. Most of the problems people perceive with the banking system are completely societal, 0% technical. If your bank doesn't let you send money instantly to your friend for free, that isn't because your bank needs a blockchain.

bananapub 4y ago
> Most of the problems people perceive with the banking system are completely societal, 0% technical. If your bank doesn't let you send money instantly to your friend for free, that isn't because your bank needs a blockchain. that's excellent, thank you for putting it better than I did.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

See also Uber vs countries that can and did simply regulate taxis well for decades, without burning billions of VC dollars.

JamesianP 4y ago
I've never been impressed by tech startups "disrupting" boring traditional industries. Except that perhaps some of their technology problems may be interesting. But overall, you're now working/investing in a boring industry.

JSavageOne 4y ago

> In every other rich country Let's not ignore the non-"rich" countries

bananapub 4y ago
yes, sorry, good point.
mrguyorama 4y ago
Most of Africa has more robust money transferring systems than the US. You can literally text someone currency, and this has been around longer than bitcoin.
- JamesianP 4y ago
  If you're referring to M-pesa, it's an app like Venmo. The US has apps too (for example Venmo).
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    I think I'm referring to M-pesa, but I'm pretty sure implementations and uses existed in this system before app stores existed, ie before 2007

oezi 4y ago

It is not quite true that this is the way in every other country. It took Europe quite some time to adopt the IBAN. Money transfer between banks is still mostly cleared only daily (even if the transfer is shown as instantaneous). Also the name given during the transfer aside the IBAN won't make the transfer fail as far as I know if incorrect.

JamesianP 4y ago

Well I mean the US is the biggest and richest rich country by a large margin. And has maintained a continuously functioning financial system for centuries now (though I do wish they would let it crash and be replaced sometimes when it so-richly deserved to). So it is kinda hardest to implement here, especially with every state having their own banking rules. The banks are adding some instant money transfer services in the last few years though.

bananapub 4y ago
> Well I mean the US is the biggest and richest rich country by a large margin. And has maintained a continuously functioning financial system for centuries now (though I do wish they would let it crash and be replaced sometimes when it so-richly deserved to). So it is kinda hardest to implement here, especially with every state having their own banking rules. the EU did this, SPANNING TWENTY EIGHT COUNTRIES. they don't even all use the same CURRENCY. edit: sorry, it's 36 - EU27 + EFTA + UK + microstates > The banks are adding some instant money transfer services in the last few years though. it appears to me, judging from talking to Americans, and my own use of the US banking system, that customers do not even generally have ability to login to their bank's website and transfer money, AT ALL, forget "instant". overall, this is such a bizarre reply, but emblematic of many of the problems the US faces - "it's too hard to fix $problem_with_well_known_solution because of entrenched interests, so let's create this absolutely awful parallel system that creates a whole new world of entrenched interests who will in turn block any innovation". why do you think it would be hard? ACH exists, and lets banks transfer money. why can't banks make it better like Australia did? or have the same structure create a parallel, better transfer system banks can opt in to, like the UK did with FPS? I would have said that letting venmo/paypal/etc do it was the worst possible solution, but then I could not have imagined that another solution people would seriously propose was "cryptocurrency".
- afarrell 4y ago
  > emblematic of many of the problems the US faces - "it's too hard to fix $problem_with_well_known_solution because of entrenched interests, so let's create this absolutely awful parallel system that creates a whole new world of entrenched interests who will in turn block any innovation". This is what happens when you build a country with a disproportionate number of the sort of people who are willing to say "Fuck it. Building a decent living in my home country is too hard. I'm going to cross an ocean in a steam ship and start a new life on a new continent where I am a complete stranger." I say this as an American who has made similar choices of questionable wisdom.

kasey_junk 4y ago

Now do a transfer between an EU bank and one in Canada. Or send money to a wallet in China. I assure you I understand the rails going on in international money transfers, and the amount of different systems, protocols and hops to make it happen is staggering. It can take sophisticated modern treasury operations years to get up and running in new jurisdictions independent of the regulatory challenges. If we could isolate it to the compliance and risk management portions of the challenge it would increase innovation dramatically.