> Let's say I have $10,000 in a Wells Fargo checking account. Tomorrow, they add support for Stellar. How does that play out in the protocol? Should I trust the

> Let's say I have $10,000 in a Wells Fargo checking account. Tomorrow, they add support for Stellar. How does that play out in the protocol? Should I trust them for the full $10k in my Stellar client? Some intermediate value? Why? Great question. You'd probably want to Wells up to the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit — the US government has guaranteed that funds up to that amount are safe, and so you likely feel comfortable with them holding that amount on your behalf. > Let's say that I want to cash out some bitcoins using Stellar. I'd find a Stellar gateway that supports Bitcoin, deposit the bitcoins there and trust them for the deposit amount. I'd need a USD gateway to send the funds to. Do I trust the USD gateway for the expected USD value of the bitcoins plus a buffer for variance in the price? This one is probably easier to handle just by using Stellar's baked-in exchange. As I mention at the end of the post, you can make exchanges without regard to your trust settings. So the workflow would be: - You deposit BTC with a gateway, trusting them to your deposit amount. - You create an offer with TakerGets: BTC, TakerPays: USD from your desired gateway. And you don't need to set an explicit trust line with the USD gateway. > If I trust two gateways for the same currency, the network reserves the right to move balances between those gateways. Do these moves only happen if they increase my balance? Otherwise, why would I trust multiple gateways for longer than it takes for me to complete my transactions? In the steady-state, the way to think of a gateway is as an analogue of a bank. You probably want to maintain a long-lived relationship with one or more of them. Those moves will happen at par. For example, imagine that I had $100 with Wells Fargo and $100 with Chase, and you have the same. By default, we could wake up tomorrow and find that I have $200 with Wells and you have $200 with Chase. > I'm excited to see what people build to solve that problem. Me too :).