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by lukifer 2255 days ago
It's often forgotten that the only real benefit of blockchains is that they are distributed; one can implement all the same functionality using centralized databases.

What I find really surprising is that the government hasn't created a set of standardized APIs for financial transactions, flowing through traditional web/cloud/mobile tech. From a tax collection/enforcement perspective, it would seem to be in their interest to make "smart money" with convenient P2P digital transactions. Given the transparent corruption between Washington and banking institutions, I wonder if they don't want to risk being disinter-mediated, or if no politicians have even tried to pursue such a thing (the closest being Warren's plans to add banking services to USPS, which I think is a great idea).
1 comments
ashtonkem 2255 days ago
I think blockchain fans consistently overstate the utility of distributed processing from the end users perspective. Any blockchain payment system I’ve seen was strictly inferior to existing mechanisms.

I don’t really see why the govt. would need to create such a system; the private banking and consumer finance space has been doing an acceptable job so far.

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lukifer 2255 days ago
While I favor "distributed all the things" from a political/ideological perspective, it indeed carries massive performance and utility tradeoffs, compared to centralized solutions, and is very difficult to sell to end users without a critical mass of adoption / network effects.

Moreover, as BTC mining consolidation demonstrates, it's certainly possible that distributed systems tend to devolve to quasi-centralized systems with extra steps (Exhibit B: GitHub massively dominating the "distributed" git ecosystem).

> the private banking and consumer finance space has been doing an acceptable job so far

...really? Can I join you in your alternate universe? :) The fact that none of the consumer payment systems (PayPal/Venmo/etc) interoperate with one another is nothing short of embarrassing in 2020. Or the fact that ACH doesn't operate on weekends or holidays, as though all transactions were still processed by humans working M-F 9-5. And that's saying nothing of the missed opportunity for smart money / smart contracts to be baked into USD itself.

We don't need blockchains to upgrade money; just government mandates/incentives for standardized APIs to be implemented by banks and user-facing applications.

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ashtonkem 2255 days ago
I’ve never really struggled to send money where necessary. The distributed nature of solution creation has created a quasi monopoly around Venmo (see what I did there?).

The unavailability of ACH on the weekends is less of a protocol problem and more of a habitual problem; bank transfers used to require people doing work by hand, and that habit remained.

I think smart contracts have proven themselves to be significantly less useful than originally anticipated.

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