I tried to use VS Code but just couldn't stand it. I don't want to say it's sluggish but it definitely isn't snappy, not even with a M1 laptop. It's fine, but it isn't good.
I ended up purchasing the upgrade to Sublime 4, definitely worth the price.
Let’s not get to crazy with politics on HN. Remember this is not meant for us to get heated, it’s to have open discussion. Check yourself before you write, very easy to be blindsided by anger with issues like this.
If VR doesn’t pay off, there might be a Ballmer/MS situation. Zuck leaving might boost the stock and at the end of the day, he is just one big investor (with voting power).
Today, I am sharing the news that after 14 years, I will be leaving Meta.
When I first met Mark, I was not really looking for a new job – and I could have never predicted how meeting him would change my life. We were at a holiday party at Daniel L Rosensweig's house. I was introduced to Mark as I walked in the door, and we started talking about his vision for Facebook. I had tried The Facebook, as it was first called, but still thought the internet was a largely anonymous place to search for funny pictures. Mark’s belief that people would put their real selves online to connect with other people was so mesmerizing that we stood by that door and talked for the rest of the night. I told Dan later that I got a new life at that party but never got a single drink, so he owed me one.
Many months later, after countless – and I mean countless – dinners and conversations with Mark, he offered me this job. It was chaotic at first. I would schedule a meeting with an engineer for nine o’clock only to find that they would not show up. They assumed I meant nine p.m., because who would come to work at nine a.m.? We had some ads, but they were not performing well, and most advertisers I met wanted to take over our homepage like The Incredible Hulk movie had on MySpace. One was so angry when I said no to her homepage idea that she slammed her fist on the table, walked out of the room, and never returned. That first summer, Mark realized that he had never had a chance to travel, so he went away for a month, leaving me and Matt Cohler in charge without a ton of direction and almost no ability to contact him. It seemed crazy – but it was a display of trust I have never forgotten.
When I was considering joining Facebook, my late husband, Dave, counseled me not to jump in and immediately try to resolve every substantive issue with Mark, as we would face so many over time. Instead, I should set up the right process with him. So, on the way in, I asked Mark for three things – that we would sit next to each other, that he would meet with me one-on-one every week, and that in those meetings he would give me honest feedback when he thought I messed something up. Mark said yes to all three but added that the feedback would have to be mutual. To this day, he has kept those promises. We still sit together (OK, not through COVID), meet one-on-one every week, and the feedback is immediate and real.
Sitting by Mark’s side for these 14 years has been the honor and privilege of a lifetime. Mark is a true visionary and a caring leader. He sometimes says that we grew up together, and we have. He was just 23 and I was already 38 when we met, but together we have been through the massive ups and downs of running this company, as well as his marriage to the magnificent Priscilla, the sorrow of their miscarriages and the joy of their childbirths, the sudden loss of Dave, my engagement to Tom, and so much more. In the critical moments of my life, in the highest highs and in the depths of true lows, I have never had to turn to Mark, because he was already there.
When I joined Facebook, I had a two-year-old son and a six-month-old daughter. I did not know if this was the right time for a new and demanding role. The messages were everywhere that women – and I – could not be both a leader and a good mother, but I wanted to give it a try. Once I started, I realized that to see my children before they went to sleep, I had to leave the office at 5:30 p.m., which was when work was just getting going for many of my new colleagues. In my previous role at Google, there were enough people and buildings that leaving early wasn’t noticed, but Facebook was a small startup and there was nowhere to hide. More out of necessity than bravery, I found my nerve and walked out early anyway. Then, supported by Mark, I found my voice to admit this publicly and then talk about the challenges women face in the workplace. My hope was to make this a bit easier for others and help more women believe they can and should lead.
I am beyond grateful to the thousands of brilliant, dedicated people at Meta with whom I have had the privilege of working over the last 14 years. Every day someone does something that stops me in my tracks and reminds me how lucky I am to be surrounded by such remarkable colleagues. This team is filled with exceptionally talented people who have poured their hearts and minds into building products that have had a profound impact on the world.
It's because of this team – past and present – that more than three billion people use our products to keep in touch and share their experiences. More than 200 million businesses use them to create virtual storefronts, communicate with customers, and grow. Billions of dollars have been raised for causes people believe in.
Behind each of these statistics is a story. Friends who would have lost touch but didn't. Families that stayed in contact despite being separated by oceans. Communities that have rallied together. Entrepreneurial people – especially women and others who have faced obstacles and discrimination – who have turned their ideas into successful businesses.
Last week, a friend saw a post about a mutual friend of ours having a baby and told me that she remembers how before Instagram, she would have missed this moment. When the women in Lean In’s global Circles community couldn’t meet in person, they used Facebook to encourage each other and share advice for navigating work and life during the pandemic. At an International Women’s Day lunch, a woman told me that her Facebook birthday fundraiser generated enough money to provide shelter for two women experiencing domestic abuse. Just last month, I heard about how in India, the Self Employed Women’s Association connects over WhatsApp to organize and increase their collective bargaining power. I’ve loved traveling the world (physically and virtually) to meet small business owners and hear their stories – like Zuzanna Sielicka Kalczyńska in Poland, who started a business with her sister selling cuddly stuffed animals that make white noise to sooth crying babies. They began with a single Facebook post in 2014 and have gone on to sell in more than 20 countries and build a workforce mostly made up of moms like them.
The debate around social media has changed beyond recognition since those early days. To say it hasn’t always been easy is an understatement. But it should be hard. The products we make have a huge impact, so we have the responsibility to build them in a way that protects privacy and keeps people safe. Just as I believe wholeheartedly in our mission, our industry, and the overwhelmingly positive power of connecting people, I and the dedicated people of Meta have felt our responsibilities deeply. I know that the extraordinary team at Meta will continue to work tirelessly to rise to these challenges and keep making our company and our community better. I also know that our platforms will continue to be an engine of growth for the businesses around the world that rely on us.
When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life. I am not entirely sure what the future will bring – I have learned no one ever is. But I know it will include focusing more on my foundation and philanthropic work, which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women. And as Tom and I get married this summer, parenting our expanded family of five children. Over the next few months, Mark and I will transition my direct reports and I will leave the company this fall. I still believe as strongly as ever in our mission, and I am honored that I will continue to serve on Meta’s board of directors.
I am so immensely proud of everything this team has achieved. The businesses we’ve helped and the business we've built. The culture we've nurtured together. And I'm especially proud that this is a company where many, many exceptional women and people from diverse backgrounds have risen through our ranks and become leaders – both in our company and in leadership roles elsewhere.
Thank you to the colleagues who inspire me every day with their commitment to our mission, to our partners around the world who have enabled us to build a business that serves their businesses, and especially to Mark for giving me this opportunity and being one of the best friends anyone could ever have.
That's the great mastery of bullshitting right here. The facade paints a picture of wise and humble leaders, visionaries even, that use their powers with humility and keep bad advertisers in check. In reality they are plant managers of a slaugherhouse who meet at a fine dining place to discuss better ways to extract milk and meat from their cattle.
CEO and co-founder of Routefusion, a global payments company. In theory yes you could just setup some other form of communicating between the banks, such as phone calls lol. What you will not get is efficiency, trust, etc etc. You dont just replace SWIFT, Ripple, has been trying for a long time, and are still not close.
I think nobody tried because there was simply no need. Now that killing financial access is used as a political tool in domestic and international conflicts, redundant lines could be established. Doesn't work in the short term of course.
As long as such sanctions are only being used against dictatorships that deliberately commit mass murder, I don't think there will be very much motivation to replace it.
Any country could be accused by that, it is the nature of politics. The US has gained access to transaction data with the threat of sanctions against Swift. While banks are naturally very forward with compliance, there might be interest in having redundant channels. Would also benefit the privacy of users.
If we "cut" off SWIFT it would hurt Europe and the States just as much as it would Russia because this is how all money moves. Think paying for natural gas, oil, commodities, etc etc.
Nitpick: doesn’t have to be equally - one party in a trade can gain more than the other, not necessarily proportionally to size (but both end up better off than not trading). The key is to sanction areas where the losses hurt the other side more than you.
Germany shut down their nuclear plants and built a expensive pipeline from Russia to use nat gas instead. Why?! This mistake could be one of the biggest in EU in the 2020s
CEO and co-founder of Routefusion here, a cross-border bank to bank payment API. We use the SWIFT network regularly. I can 100% confirm that all money in the world is just literally numbers, and it is balanced by the different federal reserve systems around the world to ensure no one can "create" money without notifying everyone.
I guess if I was super cool I would do an AMA because this is the only thread that is really my time to shine hahaha.
>I can 100% confirm that all money in the world is just literally numbers, and it is balanced by the different federal reserve systems around the world to ensure no one can "create" money without notifying everyone.
How does the system guarantee that nobody's creating money without notifying everyone? Furthermore, does the system guarantee that the central banks of each country are correctly adjusting their books in consequence? Is it all just a trust-based system, or are there additional controls?
> How does the system guarantee that nobody's creating money without notifying everyone?
This is a comment that's not related to SWIFT in particular.
Every asset (including money) is generally someone else's liability. The money that we hold as an asset is the liability of a bank. Anyone can issue their own liabilities, but you can't create money that's a liability of someone else. For example, I can't go to my bank and tell them I have a million dollars more in my deposit account than I actually do. They're keeping track on their end.
Similarly, a bank can't pretend that it has more reserve deposits at the Fed than it really does. The Fed keeps track of everybody's reserve accounts on their end.
> Furthermore, does the system guarantee that the central banks of each country are correctly adjusting their books in consequence?
This isn't an issue. The books of central banks don't need to adjust when other banks issue money (i.e deposits).
To be more specific, central banks are allowed to create money. Their liability is /dev/null. It's how they added trillions to their balance sheet during COVID.
Not really their liability is basically the present value of the future which is indeterminate, not null. If the future pain is greater than the present value, or billions printed, then they printed too much, otherwise it was worth it.
You can’t really know for sure if it’s worth it now though.
Yes but my point is that the liability and asset paradigm described still will hold.
It’s simply that the liabilities are held by people who aren’t born or are obsfucated to the point that people don’t realize they are holding them. Inflation is one example
> How does the system guarantee that nobody's creating money without notifying everyone?
Through a series of regulations regarding minimum liquidity/capital [1] and/or reserve [2] requirements.
> Furthermore, does the system guarantee that the central banks of each country are correctly adjusting their books in consequence?
By requiring them to periodically report on their assets and liabilities, checking for compliance with [1] and [2], and monitoring their reserve accounts.
We have to trust that all the governments of the world, who pinky promised to follow the rules, aren't secretly cheating internally and reporting false numbers to everyone else?
Not sure what you mean, but I think that’s why crypto is so interesting: you have this public ledger that is auditable and where safety is maintained by consensus.
Any time a friend or relatives asks me to explain what cryptocurrency is, the trust aspect must be front and center, axiomatic to the entire ecosystem. There is not a single thing in the implementation that makes sense without first assuming a lack of trust amongst every single party.
This is also why cryptocurrencies can never be made efficient, and will be a blight for as long as they exist. They are the logical extreme of the inefficiencies imposed by a low-trust society[0].
It seems to me like all societies are trending towards low trust. Technology that can work in a low trust environment though can alleviate some of the pain that comes with that though.
Since cryptocurrency was already mentioned recent examples of that can be seen in Ukraine. The traditional financial system there has been disrupted; you can’t get cash out of an ATM. If you have cryptocurrency you can still transact. I think I saw something earlier where a journalist was able to get out of the country by using crypto to buy a used car.
Sometimes inefficiencies are still worth it, especially when dealing with worst case scenarios. Just-in-time manufacturing and global supply chains are very efficient, but when they are disrupted the cost is enormous. Winterizing the energy grid in Texas is expensive and inefficient/expensive, but if they don’t you are accepting that people will freeze in a severe winter storm.
I want to charitably assume that you're not being fatalist, but
>It seems to me like all societies are trending towards low trust.
is quite a starting point to make the rest of your points.
Your example of Ukraine is insightful and valid, but I imagine crypto fans and opponents alike would rather we not descend globally into a state of permanent war, where crypto would presumably be the only tool available to transact.
First paragraph I follow, but how do you get to the point of the second paragraph? Cryptocurrencies are an update on the current system to remove some of that trust.
many PoS distributed slowish databases are currently deployed and process comparable transaction volume to credit card networks while emitting less carbon.
> process comparable transaction volume to credit card networks
Please cite your sources.
edit for people finding this later: Visa and MasterCard do on the order of one billion transactions per day combined. As far as I can tell, Ethereum (proof of work as of today) does about a million per day and Avalance (one of the top 3 proof of stake networks according to Wikipedia) does about a million per day. That's literally one thousand times fewer transactions than the top two card networks. Three orders of magnitude.
Visa's fact sheet[0] says that they processed about 6500 transactions per second on average for a recent 12-month period. A Solana dashboard[1] says that Solana processed about 2700 transactions per second on average for a recent period of a few hours.
If we would like to pick nits, we could say that the Visa transactions are not comparable to the Solana transactions because Solana transactions let users run complex programs that Visa does not, or that Solana transactions are not comparable to Visa transactions because nobody accepts SPL USDC and everyone pays out the nose to accept Visa, or that 2700 is a lot less than 6500, or that the 6500 number is misleading because the load should have peaks, and do we really know how much peak load Solana can handle, or that only about 1/3 of the Solana transactions are actual useful stuff for users and the rest are consensus messages. But my point is that these things are only "too slow compared to Visa" by a reasonably small factor now, like 6500 vs 900. Thanks.
With lightning you can have infinite tx per day while having final settlement. In contrast Visa and Mastercard have delayed settlement and operate on many layers of trust
With lightning you can send many txes per day to people who already have as much bitcoin as you want to send them, have their wallet online as you send them the funds, and regularly check in to contest fraudulent channel closes.
> Yep! This is the fundamental "disruption" blockchain tech introduced. It doesn't require trust.
Not a native English speaker, so I may miss some nuances, but can you explain how you do not need trust that you find tomorrow someone fool enough to give you something valuable against your token? Where else does the "store of value" come than trust that there are greater fools tomorrow?
Surely this can only be true if a blockchain based currency can replace fiat currency end-to-end. The moment any part of your economy is reliant on the exchange of (say) BTC back to fiat, all the attributes and constraints of fiat come back into play.
>But most scientists trust the peer review process
We really don't. There's so much stupid stuff that gets published on the daily.
And then, you publish a paper refuting a lot of the nonsense, and people start citing your paper as evidence of the opposite of what you wrote, just because you had a keyword in your abstract and they didn't read it, just needed a citation. It's mind boggling that we aren't going backwards in science.
Agreed. When I was doing science, we had a weekly lab meeting where one of our lab members would pick a piece of published literature in our field and break down how bullshit it was. It's hard to do good science.
Sure, trust is a shortcut we use to not do hard work, and free our time to do more useful things that constantly check on each other. That's fine.
But it is critically important that we can periodically check in and verify that our trust is still well placed, and not have systems that can allow someone to massively profit from violating people's trust.
The stronger those foundations and verifications of trust are, the better off we all are as a society.
I never suggested that every scientist independently and recursively verify every piece of previous work. Work and verification of work builds on each other. And every once in a while, we have a major milestone that verifies that much of the work that went into accomplishing the milestone (such as the moon landing) is generally correct.
That's how we teach science to people. It's not just "here's the math and the science we know and it's totally right, just trust us bro". We say "here's the math and science we think is right, now let's do experiments along the way to periodically verify that the things we're teaching you actually generate real predictions that match reality".
Science is all about being suspicious and verifying. Many (if not all) of the greatest scientific discoveries came from people questioning the established "truth".
> Work and verification of work builds on each other. And every once in a while, we have a major milestone that verifies that much of the work that went into accomplishing the milestone (such as the moon landing) is generally correct.
Right- that's called trust. I can't independently launch my own lunar program, so I trust those that did... did.
"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust." -- Satoshi Nakamoto
And yet countries have tamed his "anti-fiat" currency and make virtually all of the advantages of bitcoin useless. Bitcoin basically the walking dead right now.
Fiat currency here is obviously being used to refer to currencies created by government decree.
Plenty of other moneys come into existence emergently, most obviously gold and silver without any authority mandating their use. Money is an emergent property of human society, not a gift handed down by our divinely established kings.
The idea that money can only exist by government decree is patently absurd.
Money is whatever thing human society decides to collectively value in order to more easily trade goods and services across time and space.
Money has been and continues to be many things, from government decreed currencies, to gold and silver, to cigarettes in prisons, to sacks of salt paid to Roman soldiers (etymology of 'salary'), to the colloquial "I owe you one".
Money is just debt and favors and can take an infinite number of forms depending on the environment and needs of the people using it to more efficiently collaborate.
I think not quite just debt and favors. In my mind at least the key differentiator is that with money, I can take some money from Paul for some good or service, and expect to be able to get a similarly valuable good or service from basically anyone for that same money.
If I give Paul a loaf of bread and in exchange he writes "Paul owes you one" on a piece of paper, that's money. I can trade that with someone else for some good or service and we'll have to haggle over how much "one" favor from Paul is actually worth.
The dollar is just "the US government owes you one". How much is "one" worth? That's for the market to decide, and largely depends on how much real world goods and services there actually are along with how many "ones" the US government has issued. Although, before 1971, it was explicitly defined as "for every 35 'ones' you have, the US government owes you 1 oz of gold". Now, the value of "one" floats in the market and is constantly devalued by design.
In recent days, the world's markets have decided that "the Russian government owes you one" isn't worth nearly as much as it did last week.
Commodity money like gold or bitcoin don't rely on trust in a government's ability to pay it's debt, but rather trust that a sufficient number of people will always desire the commodity for whatever reason. That's still debt, but more a more indirect, coercion free form of debt.
For gold, that reason is because it has a long history of established scarcity and has some utility as jewelry to signal wealth to others.
For bitcoin, that reason is because it has theoretic perfect scarcity, can be instantly transferred to anyone on the planet with a phone, can be stored in your brain by memorizing the dozen words of your seed phrase, and many other fascinating programmable properties that have yet to be fully explored.
Money has lots of properties and you seem to be struggling to understand 2 fundamental ones.
Money is a) fungible, 2 units of the same money are worth the same thing and b) general applicability. You can use money as a medium of exchange most places.
Brent crude futures contracts are fungible at the monthly contract value. I can literally swap 2 same month contracts with no change in count. I can’t buy coffee with them though (or even Brent crude oil without a lot of toil).
MasterCard debt is generally applicable. It’s spendable all over the world, but I can’t trade it for Amex debt without a conversion.
That makes money status contextual but not undefinable. Rubles are not usable where I live. That means they aren’t money here, I have to fx them, but they are money somewhere else, even places where the government says they are not, like Brighton Beach.
Long story short, you must have external validation of value for something to be money.
Yes, it’s all trust based. I.e. if some random bank in Iowa decides to just create $10,000,000 out of thin air, the Fed will eventually find out and then they would lose banking license, lots of penalties.
Same goes for countries. If a countries fed just creates new money out of no where and acts as if it’s always existed they risk everything. I.e. losing access to the global banking network, insane currency fluctuations, use your imagination.
The premise is the same though. Our entire financial system as it stands today is based off of trust with auditing oversight and harsh penalties for breaking that trust.
It seems like the linked regulation is not yet implemented. Further, your response to a question about a guarantee is regulation and reports? How does anyone know the reports of another central bank are true? When a central bank fakes numbers, what are the consequences, if any, and who adjudicates them?
Basel III was agreed upon by the members of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in November 2010, and was scheduled to be introduced from 2013 until 2015; however, implementation was extended repeatedly to 1 January 2022 and then again until 1 January 2023, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
> Further, your response to a question about a guarantee is regulation and reports? How does anyone know the reports of another central bank are true? When a central bank fakes numbers, what are the consequences, if any, and who adjudicates them?
Money, especially fiat money, is a social construct. The conformance with and violation of it is therefore within the domains of law and politics.
> How does anyone know the reports of another central bank are true?
Monetary theory is not my expertise, but I'm curious how a central bank report can even be "false" (assuming it is issuing fiat currency and isn't falsely claiming to be backed by foreign reserves or commodities, for example).
> How does the system guarantee that nobody's creating money without notifying everyone?
Simple answer is balanced books. Longer answer is public reporting and reconciliation.
If a bank shows its Federal Reserve balance at X on its asset side and the Federal Reserve shows its bank balance at 0.9X on its liability side, that will raise issue on reconciliation. The system lazily evaluates, however, which makes it nimble but also corruptible--if that bank never tries to spend that money, it may not come to light until audit.
So, the bank can't flip a few bits in its databases and go "actually I have a quadrillion dollars now" because other people know how much money that bank should have based on transactions it has made? Do I have that right?
Seriously I have wondered about this for decades. I don't know why this would be obvious to anyone.
> other people know how much money that bank should have based on transactions it has made?
Approximately. Everyone keeps a running total of their bilateral transactions. This summing and sharding reduces information. But it also decentralizes accountability in a robust way.
Add occasional audits (which allow trusted persons to evaluate the transaction record), and some of those parties' books (in the aggregate) being public record, thereby permitting every party (including third parties) to compare their books to theirs, and you get a system which tends towards accuracy.
The system can’t do that. As a matter of fact I know someone who works for a French bank, and they fucked up and created a bunch of money. They had to work overnight with a bunch of accountants going through the books to make sure they reverted everything.
EDIT: apparently they use some old XML protocol, where twice a day a correspondant bank send them a list of accounts to debit or credit. They didn’t send something once, so my friend’s bank just replayed the previous settlement list.
I read the other responses to your question, and I feel like they're all using complicated language and are still ambiguous.
Can we have a simple "for dummies" answer that explains how does the system guarantee that nobody's creating money without notifying everyone in practice?
Is there some kind of a public ledger? Do banks automatically broadcast their money creation operation to other banks?
Well the simple way to look at this is that usually when you transact with another bank, you're required to have an account at that bank. Just as a consumer can't magically change their balance, a bank simply can't magically increase their balance at other banks. To perform increased transactions, you have to send money to that bank.
What would keep some entity that has its SWIFT access revoked from switching to China's CIPS or even crypto? Would it be merely an inconvenience, requiring the change of a few processes, or would it create hard problems?
When people say "revoking somebody's SWIFT access", I think they really mean putting them on national or international sanction/embargo lists that prohibit them from doing any kind of business with them (in particular, sending payments in their name or for their benefit), rather than actually, technically removing their SWIFT network access.
Since SWIFT is not the only, but certainly the largest financial/interbank messaging network, I suppose the effects are similar, but "disabling SWIFT" to me always sounds like an implementation detail.
I don't think anyone would arbitrarily just ban all trade like that. And if that's what they did intend, that's what they would say and the consequences are much bigger.
It's kind of a 'de facto' ban however, in that, it's hard to pay people otherwise.
I'm sure a Swiss bank or two could immediately broker transactions 'by hand' though, that would be a pretty easy way around things.
That said, you could be right. If that's the case, I wish they would make it more clear.
Yes. This whole thing is just once more revealing the cluelessness of our political classes. SWIFT is just a messaging system with verified identities, some schemas and a bit of business logic on the side. It exists because wire transfers predate the internet, not because it's clever or actually critical infrastructure.
Disconnect Russian banks from SWIFT? OK, submit your SWIFT formatted messages to banks via this helpful REST API instead. The outcome is the same.
The politicians know what it means. They need 'something' they can do publicly.
Russian Oligarchs have their massive yachts in ports in Europe. They are talking about 'no safe haven' but it's BS.
If they want to do something, they can go after those ships. That said, many of them hold dual citizenship which makes legal problems.
Also, the corrupt oligarchs serve as a conduit for money fuelling out of Russia to the West, I mean, they are kind of doing the West a favour to Russia's detriment.
Europeans need to come together right now and pledge to absolve themselves of Russian Oil. It means major investment in Nuclear.
Germany also has to start assuming responsibilities of leadership. They are benefiting the most from the Euro, and frankly European integration as they are sucking jobs and talented workers in form Spain, Italy etc. they have to share the burden of things like military leadership.
Poland right now is supporting Ukraine in all sorts of ways, it's amazing to see, and they are not a rich country.
Unlike the wave of migrants in 2015, these neighbouring refugees are being welcomed.
It exists because banks need a way to know that money is coming to them, it more or less balances books. You are right, a Swiss bank could just call a Russian bank and say “hey we are sending you this money”, but A it would be a pain in the ass, and B, they could risk getting in trouble, but they are Swiss so they can do what they want hahaha.
The two systems aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be a SWIFT member or participant and also use CIPS or cryptocurrency, though I think switching to crypto for payments would create a ton of procedural issues for most financial institutions.
Fair, but if the US pulls the trigger on SWIFT censorship, that may not be completely destructive, and will only incentivize further expansion of the SPFS network to make the SWIFT attack less powerful next time.
In the short term, both. Longer term yes, many countries would migrate to other systems which mitigates the value of SWIFT. Fear of that happening is part of the reluctance to use it as a political weapon.
It would come down to people would not be able to send money to them, I.e. they would say you can’t send money to Russia anymore, and if an institution went around SWIFT to send money and they get audited they could get into a lot of trouble.
Could you explain this to me like I am a complete moron? I understand that SWIFT allows for international payments, but I don't understand exactly how it differs from a normal bank account transfer within the same country.
When people say SWIFT, they usually mean "international payments via correspondent banking". SWIFT is just a messaging layer to enable that.
Look into correspondent banking if you're curious how all of that works – SWIFT is just one (very popular) way correspondent banks can communicate with each other and/or look up paths to facilitate international payments for their account holders.
When I worked for JP Morgan 08-10, I used swift and after learning about it on college was very disappointed. It was just an email inbox where other banks/fi’s scanned in orders, trades, etc. think fax2email where the fax came over as a TIFF file. There was no metadata, ocr, or anything, I’d have to manually read the image file to get the account number dollar amounts etc to key in on a piece of proprietary custodian software. This meant there was also no way to parse the inbox. Looking for a specific transaction? Ask them when they sent it and read the hundreds of messages that came over within +/-5 minutes and hope they remembered the time right.
I always wondered about the security behind it, because it seemed like anything that hit our inbox that was a tiff and have a recognizable letterhead got acted on, no confirmations, 9-10 digit amounts were moving around based on that alone. Also Not sure that I saw the whole system or just a piece.
Not too familiar with that process, but as far as I understand, these routes (i.e. correspondent banks per currency/country and their reachability over settlement networks) are called "Standing Settlement Instructions". SWIFT does seem to offer these as a service [1].
But just like the messaging layer, this can be done via other means. For example, here [2] is Citibank Poland declaring their reachability for various currency transfers.
As for the messaging service itself, I believe that cutting off SWIFT SSI access would help in disrupting payment flows in the short term, but in the long term, sanction lists are the real enforcement mechanism.
As others in this thread have already said, these are a very powerful indirect stick when implemented as "you must adhere to our embargo lists, or we will prohibit all of the banks in our jurisdiction to do any kind of business with you, whether for embargoed clients or others".
How does one connect to the SWIFT network? Say, someone wants to start a company for providing some financial service like fund transfer across borders, then connecting to SWIFT will be very helpful. I was always fascinated by how all this works and what does it take to directly use the SWIFT network. Any insights on this will be really helpful.
You generally need to be a bank or regulated financial institution.
SWIFT is just a messaging layer for correspondent banking. If you're not a bank, SWIFT access is about as useful as suddenly learning your country's president's cell phone number: Definitely cool, but the two of you would probably not have much to talk about.
I used SWIFT messages as part of my first real job (finance rather than tech). The format itself is comically loose, ill defined and fugly by any reasonable measure.
When something really screwed up you resorted to sending MT599 messages around, free format text messages.
I believe it's all SWIFT over IP this century so probably not dissimilar to any other API you might use.
You can go online to swift and apply. Large corporates can actually be members. We access the SWIFT network through a myriad of different banking and financial institutions we have created partnerships with.
I.e. if you go and create a neobank through a baas provider you will inadvertently get access to SWIFT, it won’t be direct but you have access.
To get true access you have to go through and insane process and have a ton of controls and policies and create trust with the governing body of SWIFT.
So am I right that SWIFT not only gives you a protocol that you can use to interop with other banks, but also some sort of DNS system that tells you how to send money to almost any other bank? This makes me think of the Bitcoin lightning network a bit as well. To reach bank Z, bank A needs to find a route of pairs of banks that can perform settlements, so there must be some sort of routing table to do that. That routing table is probably a service that swift provides and thus if they cut the russian banks from accessing this, they wouldn't be able to figure out how to reach other banks.
The beauty of bitcoin is I can compile a open source program, and my own hardware will verify that all the rules of the blockchain have been followed, and no one has spent any funds that they don't have the crypto keys for.
I've been banned from one bank. I have friends who are sex workers who are partially debunked (sex work is legal in Australia, but PayPal doesn't care).
The truckers in Canada are also finding it out the hard way.
Are these edge cases? Perhaps. But they seriously affect the lives of people.
If millions of Russians suddenly find themselves without access to the international financial network, I have a feeling a lot less people will think "bitcoin has no value".
I wouldn't call this consensus, as there is no global view and "total ordering" of transactions. Different parties have different views of who owns what, and extremely partial views at that.
I thought swift was just a protocol that banks used to talk to one another. If so how can it be used to cut russia? I’m guessing I’m missing a part where it is some centralized server somewhere?
I'm not sure I understand, how does "money show up"? Do you mean that bank A doesn't have an account at bank Z, so they must take another route A -> B -> Z, and thus at some point bank B might credit bank Z account and bank A needs to tell that to bank Z?
not until they can successfully, secretly, launder money and hide money in shell companies and other fraudulent activities that a very large portion of the money flow in the world relies on.
Also. at a level above "money" what do the ultra wealthy (Rothschild, Rockefeller, etc) deal in as currency at their level. I believe they have another currency. These families have FAR greater wealth than Bezos and Zuck (Bill Gates is essentially family to the Rothschilds. through his father/grandfather)
> I can 100% confirm that all money in the world is just literally numbers, and it is balanced by the different federal reserve systems around the world to ensure no one can "create" money without notifying everyone.
So how does this stack up when the CIA are purportedly printing their own currency? Or are the CIA and others exploiting the lack of security measures built into cash?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar#CIA
My understanding of money creation aka FIAT currency is banks/lenders deposit a small % with the central bank and can then create circa 90%+ of money out of thin air when someone takes on a loan.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
With this being the case, then borrowing money not only demonstrates banks have more intelligence on people in order to decide whether to lend money or not, but it also benefits some in society more than others when considering credit rating agencies.
Edit: In other words, the amount of debt someone can take on is a sign of good behaviour and nothing more, a variation of monkeys being taught the concept of money and then scientists witnessing how monkeys traded their tokens, notably, females got cash for sex, males got cash for stuff the female wanted.
Basic.
