This doesn’t prevent Americans from going to Cuba. I can book tickets right now online from New York to Havana for $550.

No, you do. You just don’t realise it. If you live in any developed country or even most developing countries, you have all of these. Your comment is really giving off the vibes of someone who doesn’t know what they have because they’ve never lived in a world without it.

When I say “access to cheap credit”, I mean that you can, if you want, go down to your bank and ask for a personal loan. As long as you are not already overburdened by debt and have a decent income, the bank will lend money to you at interest rates that medieval kings could only dream of.

Without the financial and legal infrastructure to facilitate, what are your options? Without the state to enforce debts and contracts through legal channels, people historically have resorted to threats and violence instead. And all that risk means interest rates get jacked through the roof. Triple digit APRs, baby.

When I say you have the ability to “transact business remotely”, I mean that you can pay money, be paid money, and conduct financial business without having to physically attend in person to exchange physical objects (like coins or banknotes). The financial infrastructure in place allows you to transfer money anywhere in the world from your fingertips. You can sell or buy almost anything online, pay, and have it delivered to your doorstep without ever talking to anyone or leaving your house. Without that financial infrastructure, your options are pretty limited. Either unregulated trust-based informal systems, or you have to go and bring physical goods or money to someone.

When I say you “have the ability to plan for your future financially”, I don’t mean you have the ability to plan yourself into a comfortable future. Being poor doesn’t negate this. You have a job (presumably), and every month you can expect some regular amount of money to appear into your bank account. You can plan on that happening. You can also plan on the fact that said money has a predictable value. You also can predict with good certainty what that money can buy. All of that is because the financial system has created an incredible amount of currency stability. Even countries with poor economies by modern standards are incredibly stable by historic ones.

When I say you “have the ability to save”, I don’t mean that you personally are guaranteed to have excess money to save. I mean that the very act of saving is not made impossible. If you have the money, you can put it in the bank, and you can reasonably expect to get that money back later, possibly with interest. In comparison, in a country that’s in a state of economic collapse, you can’t put money in the bank without risking not being able to get it back. You can store cash at home without the risk that the Government will just declare your money invalid or inflate away its value. You might not even be able to buy gold because the Government forbids “hoarding” gold. The act of saving, the accumulation of excess money, is literally impossible for the everyday person in that scenario.

This might not apply to you, but as a person whose family immigrated from a second-world country to a first-world one, I see far too many Westerners complaining about how bad they have it and how they wish everything would collapse. Buddy, if everything collapsed you’d have it even worse. This isn’t even “champagne socialism” or whatever the hell the reactionaries call it, it’s just plain ignorance of how the world works and what one shouldn’t take for granted.

What you think goes away when a financial system collapses: dodgy bankers, predatory financial institutions, money influencing politics, centralisation of wealth, rampant corruption

What actually goes away: access to cheap credit, the ability to transact business remotely, the ability to plan for the future financially, and your ability to save

What remains after the financial system collapses: dodgy bankers, predatory financial institutions, money influencing politics, centralisation of wealth, rampant corruption

I want to do a sanity check here. The six largest payment cards networks (Visa, UnionPay, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, and Discover) processed about 770 billion transactions in 2024 (source). That’s two years ago, and certainly as more of the world transitions to cashless payments that number has probably increased, but let’s just use the 770 billion number for the sake of calculation.

Bitcoin transactions are actually fairly inefficient in terms of transaction size because of their UXTO-based coin system. An account-based system like Ethereum can result in smaller transaction sizes. Let’s take the minimum transaction data that one would need to store for a payments-only network:

• The sending account number, which is usually 128 bits
• The amount, let’s say it’s a unit64_t so 64 bits
• The receiving account number, another 128 bits
• A digital signature generated by the sender. Let’s use Schnorr signatures, which are relatively short. A 512-bit signature will provide 128 bits of security.

We’ll ignore Segwit since witness data still needs to be stored, that’s just Bitcoin’s cheeky way of expanding the block size without explicitly declaring a larger block size.

To allow for indexing, let’s allow some kind of tree structure and say it has overhead of 32 bytes per node (it will probably require more, but let’s just roll with this for now).

Total: 136 bytes per tx

Multiplied by 770 billion gives 104.72 PB. Even if you had a block every 10 seconds like Ethereum does, the block size needed to process that kind of volume would be 33.2 MB.

Storing a blockchain that grows by over a hundred petabytes a year is impossible for all but the most well-funded organisations. That’s two orders of magnitude out of reach for the largest non-crypto open-source projects (the Wikimedia Foundation), four orders of magnitude out of reach for your average open-source project, five orders of magnitude out of reach for ordinary FOSS enthusiasts, and eight orders of magnitude out of reach of everyday users.

Blockchain is a cool technology and I grant that Satoshi Nakamoto was a pretty smart guy and a brilliant computer scientist, but it’s just not suitable for handling the types of volume we deal with in the modern financial system.

I’m sorry, but you’re describing an open-source, decentralised, peer-to-peer, permissionless digital payment network. Which is exactly what cryptocurrency is. But I think you know that if you openly advocate in favour of cryptocurrency here, you instantly get downvotes on Lemmy. So you’re doing it in a fairly roundabout way.

I don’t know where you get the idea that blockchains are no longer proof-of-work. Bitcoin is still the largest cryptocurrency and it’s still using proof-of-work. It’s not really what I’m getting at though, when I say that a decentralised system is 1000x the people each doing 100x the work. Even a proof-of-stake system will still have a lot of work that each node has to do, validation transactions, and that amount of data that has to be passed around serves as a ceiling on transaction capacity. Bitcoin is notoriously low at 1 (“virtual”) MB every 10 minutes. But even larger limits or Ethereum’s sharding strategy would be utterly overwhelmed by the transaction volumes of traditional finance.

J. P. Morgan is absolutely relevant in the modern day.

Sometimes. But even if it is temporary, it’s still good while it lasts.

Nothing too deep about it. That’s the whole thought.

I feel like if you want to blame a company for creating the modern financial system, John Pierpont Morgan and the company which bears his name are probably 10x more responsible.

Aye, I suppose your right on the first one.

With modern fiat money though I don’t see how any model other than a centralised one could work. The Government’s backing is what gives it value. Blockchain is just a way to have 1000x the people each spend 100x the resources just so it isn’t one entity running the show.

Well sometimes in their pursuit of making money, their interests coincidentally align with those of the public and they make the world a better place as a result.

For example, Valve trying to protect their market dominance in the PC gaming industry has resulted in large improvements to game distribution, consumer protection, and convenience for computer game players.

Another example is the mail order drug company owned by Mark Cuban (the billionaire). He’s making buckets of money from it, but their profit model is to cut out the insurers to buy drugs from manufacturers at wholesale prices and sell them for cheap. So the medicines he sells are drastically cheaper. I actually am a beneficiary of this. I normally buy my medication from his company for $5 a bottle but one time I spilled it and had to get a refill from a local grocery store pharmacy which cost $100 a bottle (insurance paid $85).

But at least the pills from the grocery store pharmacy were blackberry flavour.

Well, yes. The Americans have money. People like earning that money.

Unless you want to count Bitcoin (which technically is a free and open source payment network), payment networks really do need a central organisation to run the network and do the record-keeping. Decentralised payments really just don’t have the properties desirable for modern financial systems

I’m glad most countries are developing their own national payment systems to get away from those leeches. The US central bank actually developed its own instant payment system called FedNow but you’ve probably never heard of it. Wonder why? Because participation is voluntary and banks aren’t required to give their customers access to it…

Nestlé? Amazon? HSBC? The fucking VOC?

Come on, there are a lot of evil companies but it’s crazy to pretend Visa and Mastercard are somehow the worst of them.

I’m surprised Visa and Mastercard were allowed to operate in Cuba before this. Most US financial companies don’t serve the five countries on the US’s naughty list: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia.

That doesn’t prove anything. There’s no proof that the person currently using it is the same person as the person who created the account.

By the way, you might also notice this argument also works against age verification systems where the user’s age is verified only once. Unless you intend to check their identity every single time they log in.

Age verification is just a ham-fisted way for the state to try to take over a role that should be exercised by parents. Parental controls exist, people!

Governments don’t hate privacy intrinsically. They just don’t think it’s important. Violating privacy using mass surveillance has no visible downside to the uninformed public. Policy makers just notice that destroying privacy makes it easier to catch cybercriminals and decide it’s a worthwhile trade off. You probably disagree with that. But there are far too many people who just go along with it.

It’s pretty rare for good people to become immensely wealthy and stay good people. Money corrupts, and once you’re to a point where money is no longer survival but a high score, that starts to drive your thinking.

Honestly, I think there’s actually a good chance that the fine’s bigger than the profit here. What a lot of people don’t realise is that data is only valuable because there’s usually a lot of it. The value of your average Facebook user’s data is like ten dollars a year and Facebook spends a lot of time trying to increase that to eleven dollars because when multiplied by half a billion users, then it becomes something meaningful.

But still, a fine needs to hurt in order to be effective. $12 million is likely less than what they paid the lawyers.

Contabo is cheap but has some weird quirks. I pay about five euros a month. My server got mysteriously rolled by two days and they denied anything happened to it. I restored from backups but it was odd.