Hacker News Reader

Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

You must be delusional to think Bitcoin disrupts SWIFT. https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/9184/18775

> SWIFT handles about $5 trillion per day,

> SWIFT payment message volumes are usually around 11.5 million per day

Now, daily Bitcoin-USD traffic is below a billion https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/trade-volume and even at its heyday it was five billion give or take. That's 0.1% of SWIFT. And Bitcoin couldn't handle more than 600k transactions a day even if it tried and these days it's 150-200K https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/n-transactions which almost reaches 2% of SWIFT...

Also, it's unusable for legit business transfers since you absolutely have no idea how much money the other ennd receives.

SEPA has higher volumes but lower values https://www.ebaclearing.eu/services/step2-sct/statistics/ but even that lower value is a magnitude above Bitcoin -- worldwide. With SCT Inst it even beats the transfer speed of Bitcoin.

View on HN

Agree -- the major players already know their customers, so they are more interested in distributed ledger than blockchain. A distributed database with ACID transactions is a more flexible way to implement this stuff: https://blog.fauna.com/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockc...

Blockchain is a form of distributed ledgers.

The discussion was about "blockchains", not Bitcoin.

I expect that many financial institutions will be using private blockchain in the future.

Although this is much more boring than it sounds. A blockchain is just a kind of database, where entities sign their transactions with their private keys and then share the results.

You don't even need to do any "mining" for private blockchains.

> I expect that many financial institutions will be using private blockchain in the future.

What for? If you have trusted parties, why do yo need a blockchain?

2 things.

1: even a private blockchain significantly helps with trust. If someone attempted to double spend, such an attack would be immediately obvious to everyone. At which point you send in the lawyers. That's valuable.

Blockchain Purists will disagree. But the point is that it is easy to make untrusted transactions with people, if attempted attacks are merely illuminated, and you know who the attack is coming from.

And 2: even if we assume everyone is "trusted", financial settlement is a very outdated system. Mistakes are easy to make when people are looking though filing cabinets to figure out who owns what.

My definition of a "Blockchain" is merely a shared database where people sign transactions with their private keys.

The mere act of everyone signing everything with private keys, and store in a shared data as is valuable in and of itself.

> Also, it's unusable for legit business transfers since you absolutely have no idea how much money the other ennd receives.

Can you expand on this? What do you mean you don't know how much the other end receives?

> What do you mean you don't know how much the other end receives?

I am sending you 1 BTC, how much money do you have? Calling a Nakamoto scheme a "cyber"currency is just part of the scam. Money is like USD. So, how much money do you have?

I strongly agree with your GGP comment, but the point of BTC is not money is a bad one.

How much money do you have if you receive 1 BTC?

Check the spot price after several confirmations (or one to none, depending on your facilities)

How much money do you have if you receive $1MM USD?

Check DXY in ~3 business days when your deposit clears.

Now yes, of course BTC fluctuates in value substantially more than USD, but this is not a problem in BTC, but rather in the existing market conditions. Your comment is akin to saying that USD was not money in the 1930s.

Apart from that contention, I completely agree that BTC has not (and in my opinion, will not) disrupted SWIFT.

> Your comment is akin to saying that USD was not money in the 1930s.

USD has the benefit of active management from a central bank, active management from Congress, and being a government-backed currency with a minimum threshold of demand (being the currency which is used for government spending and taxation).

Insofar as a completely different universe where BTC is an actively-managed currency of a world superpower is "existing market conditions" then yes, BTC is just like the USD. /s

The better comparison is gold, which is a commodity like Bitcoin, and yet much more stable than BTC. Thing is, there is also a minimum level of demand there, for jewelry and industrial purposes. Small, but real. Nobody actually has an interest in Bitcoin stability, it's just investors who want to make money on it going up or down. So... it does.

(the real rollercoaster was back when Tether was printing hundreds of millions of dollars on a daily basis and injecting that into the crypto-economy. Ever since they knocked that off, it's been hanging around the $6000 mark.)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066

Reply on news.ycombinator.com