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I'm sure the governance and reasoning seem just fine right now but are we to trust being locked in to JP Morgan forever? It's certainly the same way I feel about Google AMP polluting the web.

Seems very buzzword friendly but I really cannot see why transfers (B2B) aren't perfectly trivial and should be instant, free and totally secure and at the tick rate of the market if in a different FX. What is stopping the banks doing this now with just normal encryption?




Money transfers happen like Person -> Bank -> Clearinghouse -> Bank -> Person

They aren't free and instant because people and systems are involved in making them happen. Funds have to be verified, systems to make sure the money is there, fraud monitoring, regulations, mistake handling, etc etc. A lot of stuff goes on in the middle during the transaction and mechanisms need to be in place to prevent crime and fix mistakes.

Blockchains make this process a little better because instead of code setting rules and interacting with APIs, the mathematical characteristics of the blockchain end up doing a lot of the "work" involved and are simply more convenient for everyone.

I'm guessing that eventually central banks (like the Federal Reserve) will issue their own cryptocurrencies for banks to facilitate transfers.

It's not sexy or rebelling against the man, distributed crypto ledgers just have better properties than crusty databases and APIs.




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