[reese_john]

> Banco Central controls the core, and that's all it needs to. This is good design. Descentralized, modern, resilient and efficient.

I agree. But was that not the case before Pix/SPI? It really didn’t change the status quo.

The STR (transfer reserve system), which SPI is still fully dependent in practice btw, is decentralized, modern and efficient.

The biggest change here was scale and adoption by private banks and end users, not sovereign infra.

[gaigalas]

That is an offshoot topic which is, in my opinion, irrelevant for the sovereignty discussion.

I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned, and the Amazon downtime was lack of resilience on the part of the banks (which they could have totally designed around but decided not to).

[reese_john]

> I'm here just to clear out the confusion regarding the infrastructural pieces. The core PIX is undeniably sovereign and state-owned

Sure, I can see the confusion, I should have made that clearer.

Let me rephrase it: the "core PIX" is mostly an implementation of ISO20022 (pain,pacs, etc) messaging on top of HTTP APIs and BCB's own ledgers, plus a centralized KV datastore (Dict).

The implementation was excellent, but there is no technical moat in the "state-owned" part of the solution

The biggest technical challenges were, by design, delegated to the private sector, heavily relying on US hyperscalers to achieve Pix's operational requirements.

[gaigalas]

There is a wide misconception that state stuff needs to be fully state-developed. I don't subscribe to that view. Delegating and designing just-enough simple solutions, avoiding bureaucratic tanglements, is an immense challenge and done beautifully in this case.

The other direction (not using standards, owning parts you don't need) would make it for slower adoption, lots of new government responsibilities and very few additional sovereign control. It would be worse.

Building a "technical moat" is for companies which have direct competition. The state can solve this by making regulations. It doesn't need that technical moat, simplicity is better suited. It's acting exactly at the intersection it needs: in the regulation, delegation and coordination realm, not execution.

[reese_john]

Yes, but my point was more nuanced, I didn't mean to say that the state needs a fully owned solution.

The original article opens up with "Pix is igniting a geopolitical and commercial battle."

The point I was trying to make, specially in the last paragraph, was that: Brazil doesn't really have full control, or the capability, to operate Pix without US infrastructure. Therefore, it is not smart, to engage in a geopolitical, ideological battle against the US. If Brazil wants to tough it out and claim sovereignty, then it must be willing to walk away and build its own infra.

Case in point: the recent US-Canada tensions were enough for the Canadian government to consider cancelling the purchase of American-made F-35 fighter jets.

Is the Brazilian government willing to do the same? Is it even in its best interest to do so? In my opinion, no, hence the aggressive anti-US rethoric from Lula must stop

[gaigalas]

Brazil has not started in any ideological battle regarding this. It has developed a national technology, and it allows other payment systems to coexist peacefully in the spirit of honest competition.

The ideological and geopolitical provocations comes from the US. The government is merely defending itself, and being decisive about our sovereignty is not an act of aggression. It's just good statesmanship.

The phrase "PIX is ours" wasn't even directed at the US. It was promoted because a previous Brazilian president tried to attach is personal name to the technology. It was later adopted in that defensive posture, but it was never about fostering any grievances with other payment systems.

Data centers are a commodity, and the US gets tremendous revenue from Brazilian businesses that use it (fourth largest AWS customer location). It's a symbiotic relationship, and there are other countries able to provide computing power if we need to cut ties with it. If that happens, businesses can rent those from somewhere else.

You underestimate our ability to handle these things. Watch us.

[vitorgrs]

In Brazil case, there's actually public banks, and they use Brazilian servers.

[vitorgrs]

It was not. TED had to talk with banks, only the final settlement went thought Central Bank.

With Pix, banks don't talk with each other. They are basically using Central Bank API to send and receive money.

before it was Bank Z ---> Bank Y

With Pix it's Bank X ---> SPI/BC ---> Bank B

[reese_john]

I don’t even understand what you mean by “banks had to talk to each other” and why you are referring to TED in the past tense when it’s still the largest settlement method by BRL amount

[vitorgrs]

Because TED is not the only way to send money now...? It's basically legacy, although yes, still used. Very rare you'll see Person to person/business using TED. Basically business to person...

And yes, literally banks had to "talk" with each other. Which is why it was paid and slower in first place and didn't worked 24/7.

[reese_john]

I suggest you go read the SFN messaging manuals from BCB if you truly want to understand how interbank communication works. It is very well documented.

You clearly don’t know what you are talking about since you are conflating the STR (transfer reserve system) with TED (one of the many settlement methods in STR)

[vitorgrs]

Obviously there's several other ways to send money. I'm talking about the popular ones... The others are niche-systems.

And yes, in TED only the final settlement were done by BCB.

[gaigalas]

Ultimately, this is all irrelevant.

The goal with Pix was not to increase the total amount of value tranfered, but the amount of small micro-transactions, increasing fluidity and bypassing unecessary bureacratic processes.

TED still wins by raw value, but that amount is irrelevant. It is what is left after the small-fry micro-transactions were liberated from complicated, archaic systems. Those small-fry transactions provided a lot of fluidity to the market, which is the realm in which Visa and Mastercard were supposed to act (incresing consumption) but were unable to compete due to their own legacy devices. They really need to catch up with the competition: those systems and their culture are ancient relics.