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> We can all agree that the current traditional and digital finance systems are broken [...]

Could you expand on that? That's quite a strong opinion to assume everybody agrees on.



Not the original commenter, but: In certain countries transactions take about 2 days to be reflected. In most digital payments, the payment networks (visa/mastercard/amex) take a cut of 1-2.5% of the total payment value which is a large percentage of profit for a small establishment. The bank APIs are inconsistent are a huge mess to manage so including the regulatory barriers, if a new payment solution wants to come up , it's a lot of money , time and work. On top of that , different countries have different API standards.

There's value to be had in payment solutions and banking solutions being decoupled . Banks should more deal with lending and deposits , injecting cash flows into the economy , insuring deposits, etc. Payments should be , well, payments similar to from a wallet, with less regulation overall.


This is evolving slowly but surely - take a look at ISO20022 [1] and its adoption by SEPA network [2] in Europe (more slowly - adoption by most other banks throughout the world).

ISO isn't perfect but most things are just a minor XML adjustment, and the schema is well structured.

Europe/SEPA has free non-urgent transfers up to a certain amount. [3]

How do you increase adoption for this except to get involved politically and lobby? Unless you plan on rolling your own - in which case good luck.

[1] https://www.iso20022.org

[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/sepa/html/...

[3] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...


Oh, I'm all for innovation here, I just don't see building the financial system back from the ground up as an effective way to innovate.

All the issues you've mentioned aren't issues core to our financial system, they can all be solved through iterative innovation - many countries are solving this, like Poland (which I use as an example cause I live here), which has free instantaneous cashless transactions both for payments and p2p use that work with all banks here (blik, slowly trying to expand to more countries).

Similar systems are in place in many other countries. Open banking standardized APIs have already spread across Europe, etc.

So tldr, no need to redesign the financial system to fix these, just disrupt it a little bit.


Also cryptocurrency hasn't actually solved any of these problems. If it did people would be using it in day to day life instead of speculation.


Bailing out Too-Big-To-Fail banks which privatise profits and socialise losses on increasingly abstract / difficult to understand financial instruments springs to mind.


If you're talking about the recent bank failures, that was in fact covered by other banks, no? It was not paid for by tax payers.

While the recent losses were in big part because of bonds and currency rate risk, so not a particularly abstract or difficult to understand instrument.

Not that being hard to understand is a bad thing. Something can be complex and still valuable.


And those problems are solved by crypto because… ?


How about - "current finance systems are broken for a lot of people across the world". And they manifest in terms of crazy inflation (Venezuela, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Pakistan), currency controls (China and many other places), despotic regimes (Russia, Iran, Taliban) etc. I see Bitcoin doing a lot more[1] for those people than traditional financial systems, either local or western.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095




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