Comments
By wslh 2025-05-2317:34 Banks are slow in large part because of systems built to support the AML/KYC controls and fraud prevention. (Think about your wire transfer getting screened etc). New banks do this more efficiently but this is still the bottleneck.
A bank doing stablecoins will still need to implement these controls.
Stablecoins only really work because they are outside the system.
Curious what exactly differs between EU and USA to make American transfers so inefficient time-wise. In the Eurozone SEPA instant transfers are settled in seconds (usually under 10 seconds, with max 20 seconds allowed), and AML/KYC regulations are quite strong.
By hocuspocus 2025-05-2614:262 reply EU directives have forced banks to modernize at a pace that wouldn't have been possible if we just let the free market decide. There are downsides to the heavy regulatory framework, for instance the unhealthy consolidation and size of systemic banks. But we enjoy pretty advanced banking services and arguably the most flourishing fintech ecosystem by worldwide standards, mostly thanks to EU technocrats.
The EU is also looking into creating a digital euro ("eurocoin", so to speak). The basic idea being to break the power and thus risk of systemic banks.
You'd have an account at the ECB that you can keep your digital euros in and exchange to and for liquid euros. You'd get the ECB interest rate.
Then if banks want to convince you to hold your eurocoin on their wallet / exchange / stake it, they'd have to offer better features and better interest than the ECB.
Sadly banks are in full swing trying to torpedo the proposal with lobbying, to the point where there's a lot of noise about the ECB only being allowed to be a facilitator and not allowed to be actual competition to the bank, and instead it's banks that should get the sole right to hold digital euro accounts.
> But we enjoy pretty advanced banking services and arguably the most flourishing fintech ecosystem by worldwide standards
Interestingly enough the US does have very modern financial institutions: credit unions. An American woman I met in Vietnam and traveled together with for a bit had a Charles Schwab account that had more features, more free overseas withdrawals and a nicer mobile app than my Dutch bank. It was almost on par with Revolut / N26 / Bunq.
By solumos 2025-05-2615:49 > Interestingly enough the US does have very modern financial institutions: credit unions. An American woman I met in Vietnam and traveled together with for a bit had a Charles Schwab account that had more features, more free overseas withdrawals and a nicer mobile app than my Dutch bank.
Charles Schwab is the 12th largest bank in the US by assets.
I do agree that credit unions can be great, however, the experience between them is wildly inconsistent. Some have apps that barely work, and some have decent apps that are a bit dated and clunky. The big banks generally have the best UX/support/etc.
By nayuki 2025-05-2617:13 > The EU is also looking into creating a digital euro
It's weird to call it a "digital euro" because the euro is already digitized by traditional banks! At an existing traditional bank, your balance is already a discrete number. Money can be sent and received electronically on communications networks without using physical media like coins and bills and cheques.
> EU directives have forced banks to modernize at a pace that wouldn't have been possible if we just let the free market decide
1) Is that automatically good? Damn those capitalists and their slow and steady approach to major changes, I suppose. Wouldn't want to proceed too thoughtfully.
2) The free market in banking looks pretty much exactly like the crypto ecosystem. As people often put it, speedrunning banking history. The only thing slowing the financial institutions down is the regulation (which is pretty much the pro-regulation argument of "if we don't regulate it they'll do a bunch of stupid things too quickly").
There isn't something of a free market in banking but the limitations are extreme enough that it is more of a heavily mixed to centralised one. Interest rates are managed by a central committee and banks provide any colour of service you like as long as it is black. Typically heavy KYC regulations to link the system to law enforcement and state intelligence systems. There is enough freedom to keep the fees fair and a bit of flexibility in what the money gets invested in which is pretty good. But for transaction speed I'd actually be a little surprised if the banks were allowed to control their own settlement timelines; I assume going to quickly would start running in to KYC-style compliance problems.
By mathgeek 2025-05-2618:44 > 1) Is that automatically good? Damn those capitalists and their slow and steady approach to major changes, I suppose. Wouldn't want to proceed too thoughtfully.
Considering how long it’s taken even the most progressive regulations to be enacted, it’s arguable that we’ve done anything but proceed without thoughtfulness towards how these changes affect the other 99% of the population.
We sure do spend a lot of time letting the wealthiest folks skim those points off the top without spending any more than they are required to by regulations, though.
The US has almost 4,500 banks and about the same number of credit unions. They're subject to federal and state regulation. That's a lot of complexity to manage.
However, there's FedNow immediate transfers, Zelle (consortium of banks) immediate transfers, same day ach (several batches daily), same day fed wire transfers within banking hours, and that's just the faster options.
Decentralized systemd are slow to act and slow to change, which is why all of the faster banking initiatives tend to involve a centralized element.
By kevin_thibedeau 2025-05-2617:191 reply Zelle is a frontend to ACH with some creative accounting until the actual transfer clears.
By Animats 2025-05-2617:58 Right. FedNow really is "now", which makes the fraud problem worse. FedNow is currently handling about a half-billion dollars a day, which is not much for that industry.
By dboreham 2025-05-2617:45 The US has much more corruption so banks have been able to bribe politicians into not requiring they provide low cost services that would mean their executives have smaller boats.
By edgarvaldes 2025-05-2616:10 Same in Mexico. I just did a bank transfer that took longer than usual. It took around 10 minutes instead of 10 seconds. It was unusual for me.
By wbl 2025-05-2622:18 You really don't want one typo costing your entire bank account as a consumer. Settlement delays permit easy rollback.
By UltraSane 2025-05-275:31 US banks like slow transactions due to fraud concerns.
By arandomusername 2025-05-2619:04 just an additional note, the instant transfer is only up to 15k euro
Exactly. A 'stablecoin' that is regulation-compliant is undistinguishable from a bank.
Well, if you're big enough to be TBTF, then you can lever up stablecoin risk because you know you'll be bailed out after they let the little guys tank.
By ETH_start 2025-05-2717:28 This is nothing more than a trope to absolve government of its responsibility for worsening people's lives. The government imposes massive fines on huge banks, when they are found to have inadvertently banked criminals. And by criminals I don't mean people who were convicted of a crime. Just people a regulatory agency alleged — at some point in time after the bank serviced them — are criminals.
So what banks do is become increasingly paranoid about who they will they bank, meaning anyone who falls into the "high risk" category, is extrajudicially punished through systemically high risks of being debanked. In this way, the state can punish certain groups without due process.
By disgruntledphd2 2025-05-2615:211 reply Except that you can do FX and global transfers much more quickly and easily.
Nah, most banks globally have a mechanism to send and receive USD. That's sufficient for all use-cases.
> mechanism
The mechanism often involves correspondent banks, and is generally pretty expensive ($25-$65).
For scale, we’re talking about transfer fees measured in cents with stablecoins.
All of the cost is tied to compliance. A Swift message costs pennies, it's the due diligence behind it that banks charge for. Stablecoins will not change the compliance requirements
By MichaelZuo 2025-05-270:101 reply Has anyone ever provided an argument against this?
I don’t see how crypto boosters get around the fact that more than 0% of regulations are legitimately desired by most of the world. And those require some non zero amount of bureaucracy and money to enforce.
By x-complexity 2025-05-271:281 reply > > All of the cost is tied to compliance. A Swift message costs pennies, it's the due diligence behind it that banks charge for. Stablecoins will not change the compliance requirements.
> I don’t see how crypto boosters get around the fact that more than 0% of regulations are legitimately desired by most of the world. And those require some non zero amount of bureaucracy and money to enforce.
Taking the statement literally as-is: Yes, a strictly > 0 amount of overhead is required to perform said compliance activities.
But the overhead similarly can *never* be 100% of the money being transferred over. And right now, the transfer costs have only ever been shown to grow, and never shrink in isolation. They only shrink when a new competitor comes in to provide said service, which has rarely ever happened because of said regulations that progressively saddle them with more requirements.
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> I don’t see how crypto boosters get around the fact that more than 0% of regulations are legitimately desired by most of the world. And those require some non zero amount of bureaucracy and money to enforce.
Interpreting this emotionally:
You're leaving out the implicitly-made conclusion that most pro-crypto people will make: That the current banking system *has* to be accepted as-is, useless systems & fee-draining & all that jazz, *and* that they should just take it.
You've already lost all attempts to convince them with that rhetoric. By not putting in more clarifying statements, the gaps have been filled in with the negative implications that will turn them away from supporting your view.
It will be seen by pro-crypto people as own-side points scoring.
By audunw 2025-05-279:06 But crypto isn’t the only way to change the banking system.
In many cases you can now transfer money instantly and free across European countries. If there’s a will there’s a way.
Turning crypto into an acceptable banking system is probably just as hard, if not harder, than making the existing banking system better, faster and more user friendly.
We’ve been promised crypto would revolutionise payment for more than a decade now. In the same timespan I’ve seen my little country develop a common payment app shared by all banks which has made payment to shops and between people instant and super easy. We didn’t need crypto to make progress.
If banking regulations were relaxed to the point where crypto could be used more widely, traditional banks would also be able to innovate much more quickly without crypto.
In the end, I don’t find it entirely unlikely that banks may use a blockchain to do some of their international settlement. It’s a nice algorithm in the cases where you don’t want a single master arbiter. But it’ll probably be a fairly boring behind-the-scenes kind of thing.
well, they won't change the compliance costs, but those pennies for the swift message will turn into hundreds of dollars for the blockchain gas fee
you probably hold an antiquated notion of how much transaction costs are on blockchains nowadays. It would do good for you to update your priors on this one - you'd be surprised!
By justinrubek 2025-05-2822:231 reply That tweet doesn't appear to explain anything about this at all. I take it the information is in the comments? I'm not able to view those.
By 1oooqooq 2025-05-2917:55 i don't click on x links, but i bet one trump coin it talked about offchain without taking into account opening up to double spend.
By thecupisblue 2025-05-2616:351 reply Yes, but the mechanism involves multiple banks in a chain transferring money and messages between each other like it's 1559. So if a single bank in the chain demands more KYC or has an issue, it can take ages for the transaction to sync.
By dboreham 2025-05-2617:44 Presumably on horseback with a leather satchel and a bugle.
By drexlspivey 2025-05-2615:061 reply Except you can send payments with an http request
A bank could easily provide such an API without any need for a new coin.
By sethhochberg 2025-05-2616:47 I'm curious though, what would she do with that crypto once she had it?
Presumably she'd need to exchange it for cash since retail acceptance of crypto is pretty low, and the local exchange place that takes WhateverStablecoin and hands out cash is going to take some commission. And at that point it seems like we've just reinvented Western Union or Moneygram.
In your view is the advantage of the hypothetical stablecoin way of doing this that it exists outside of the money-transfer provider ecosystem until its actually exchanged?
By conception 2025-05-2618:34 Western Union exists, yes.
By arccy 2025-05-2616:08 noone reputable would want to touch Tether and their anti-regulation stance.
By wbl 2025-05-2622:17 Or $10,000 to my flexibly financed uncle in Bogota?
Regulation-compliance is kind of a requirement for, well, everything, stablecoin or otherwise, so not really sure what the point is here...
By conception 2025-05-2618:331 reply Stablecoins don’t need to have proof of reserves or any other normal regulatory requirements banks have.
Circle has proof of reserves, fully regulated and I can use USDC like a regular ERC20, so I think they want the same.
Full attestation doesn't guarantee stable 1-to-1 valuation, even with all of those things USDC isn't equivalent to 1USD and treating it as if it were carries risk.
Definitely,but the Us dollar also carries risk so really there are no risk free assets.
By kiitos 2025-05-279:53 I mean, in the absolute sense, sure, but the "risk" carried by USD is a categorically different, exponentially smaller thing than the "risk" associated with any stable coin. They're not really comparable.
I don’t think that’s true in this case. I would assume the bank issuing the coin has to know the identity of the people they sell it to. But once those people sell it on, it’s not their problem any more. Sure they could get an order to seize those coins (/wallet) and would have to obey. But I don’t think they’d be required to kyc everyone on the network. Just their immediate counterparties…
By disgruntledphd2 2025-05-2615:22 The idea is (as I understand it) that to get fiat (which is presumably the end-goal) you need KYC, so if each node which converts stablecoin-fiat then you have acceptable KYC. (I am not a regulator though, so who knows?)
Partly it's true, but also all banks in the world are fractional reserve / printing money from thin air from the loans they got from bigger banks.
If the big US banks are successful, they can have their own one huge fractional reserve that can be used by people around the world.
By hocuspocus 2025-05-2614:201 reply Not only this isn't how banks work, but also completely irrelevant to moving money.
By ta12653421 2025-05-2615:131 reply Then whats your brief description of how banks create new money?
While the wording was imprecise, actually this is what banks are doing: Creating loans, based on the deposits of customers.
By hocuspocus 2025-05-2615:381 reply You wrote "from the loans they got from bigger banks" which makes little sense.
Private banks create money by extending credit, that's it. They worry later about reserve requirements, which in the case of USD or EUR are extremely low.
And I still don't understand how this relevant in any way to the topic.
By ta12653421 2025-05-2616:241 reply I wasnt the OP :)
They are expanding credit, but they need customer funds on the central banking level to actually move away the money the created on their local core banking; thats the reason why banks needs customer funds: Without them, their central bank account would be empty and they couldnt transfer any money that they created. the question regarding minimum reserve is another angle and not relevant to the question of how money is technically created and then transfered.
EDIT: for sure, they can also acquire central bank money as a credit to make the payments transfer happen, but usually its more easier and convenient to use customer funds instead of borrowing from the central bank or on the interbank level
By hocuspocus 2025-05-2616:371 reply My bad. Sure it's easier and more convenient, and also it's cheaper. But not entirely necessary.
By ta12653421 2025-05-2715:03 Sure, I know of a large corp-only/inudstrial bank, where the "customer funds" are just a bunch of some other mega-corps, each depositing 5-10 billion. (from a regulatory perspective, those are customer funds as well, even if its just 10 different parties)
I think what a lot of people are missing about stablecoins is that it's not just about clearing transactions faster than SWIFT. With stablecoins you get programable money without having to deal with the wild fluctuations of crypto.
A simple (and contrived) example: Let's say I want to send you $100 on Tuesday, but only on even-numbered hours. This is a trivially easy smart contract to write. Sure, you could do this with crypto, but if you want to protect yourself against price fluctuations it makes sense to use a stablecoin.
> A simple (and contrived) example
What about a simple but not contrived example (or if no good simple examples exist, a complex one)? Smart contracts are neat but I'm not sure there's any real benefit, especially for banks which likely don't need to do things without trusting each other.
I want to buy an event ticket from you, but we're strangers. So I write a contract that releases the money to you once you send the ticket, or vice versa.
ebay has somehow managed to support this use case for something like 20 years on the normal existing banking infrastructure
By scyclow 2025-05-2813:31 Yeah, but the idea is that you can eliminate the middleman or implement some as hoc logic that the middleman doesn't support.
The ticket would have to be on the chain and you could then see just how much TicketMaster was making and we can't have that.
By scyclow 2025-05-2618:13 Well, the good news is that you could also program event ticketing logic with a blockchain and build a TicketMaster competitor. But now we're venturing outside simple examples :)
Not sure why op didn't go with "$100 on the 1st of every month."
That's just "automatic bill pay" without a bank, etc.
By scyclow 2025-05-2617:52 I wanted to pick an example that is slightly more complicated than what existing banking software provides out of the box. But my point was that you can just write your own logic without relying on the bank or another third party.
By only-one1701 2025-05-2615:596 reply You could also do this with any other kind of API a bank might expose? Why is crypto necessary here?
By bo1024 2025-05-2617:11 One thing is stronger guarantees for the receiver, who can verify that the smart contract will automatically transfer the funds. Another is interoperability. The receiver can write a contract to e.g. always donate half of that income to a charity as soon as it is received every two hours. Another is transparency and verifiability, anyone can check that the receiver is giving half this income to charity.
Not trying to get pulled into any arguments about whether cryptocurrency is good or bad, just some potential answers to your question.
By arccy 2025-05-2616:11 crypto isn't necessary... it's just that no bank wants to take on the risk of exposing an api to the regular consumer.
By xyzzy9563 2025-05-2616:53 Crypto doesn't require 3rd party permission to send money or verifying anyone's authenticity, real name, or legal compliance. So it's much easier to build APIs around. If you created banking APIs you'd need very extensive controls and monitoring for anti-money laundering and so on.
By scyclow 2025-05-2618:17 Sure, you could technically wire something together that does this, but maybe the other party wants a strong reassurance that the payment will actually go through. They don't want to rely on your server making the right API call.
If you’re making regular payments from a known wallet on a public ledger, where is the anonymity coming from?
It puts you one mistake or bit of misplaced trust away from permanent de-anonymization. In our example, you have to avoid ever using that wallet for anything else, scrupulously fund it using mixers, and hope that your VPN provider never does something which makes it possible to link your activity to that wallet.
This is not realistic for the average person.
I mean sure -- but right now there's no such thing as "realistic money anonymity for the average person."
In roughly the same way there's no such thing as "very good cybersecurity for the average person."
By acdha 2025-05-291:25 > I mean sure -- but right now there's no such thing as "realistic money anonymity for the average person."
I know HN skews hard for electronic payments but cash is still heavily used. One nice trait is that its weaknesses are highly intuitive: there’s no retroactive de-anonymization or tracking across unrelated transactions, and people are familiar with how physical objects are stolen.
By solumos 2025-05-2616:05 In this scenario, imagine that “you” are in a different country or perhaps you don’t have a bank account. Or maybe you don’t want to pay $10+ or X% to receive funds.
This is not simple at all.
What happens if you don't have the money available? If you want to provide some guarantee, how would you do it without locking up N x $100 forever? What are even numbered hours - which timezone? What happens if your transaction doesn't get accepted within that timeslot? Etc. etc.
By scyclow 2025-05-2813:35 Okay, I'm simplifying a little bit. It wouldn't work exactly like that. You'd lock up $100 (or approve the contract to spend up to $100), specify the time I'm unix timestamps, and leave it up to the recipient to claim their money.
That's sort of besides the point though. I'm just saying that you have the ability to implement whatever ad hoc or arbitrarily complex payment logic you want without relying on a middleman.
By tacitusarc 2025-05-2615:292 reply This doesn’t feel like a good thing to me. I can imagine a lot of pretty abusive smart contracts.
By NoahZuniga 2025-05-2617:021 reply How are you going to abuse sending other people money?
By viraptor 2025-05-2812:01 It's a pretty common scam already. "Sign this to receive airdrop". Haha, you just signed away all the money in your wallet. People are already losing lots of money this way and they're the ones who at least understood the concept a little bit.
Like what? It's just a streamlined and versatile way to escrow money.
By tacitusarc 2025-05-271:301 reply US govt creates a list of companies eligible to receive social welfare money, and the smart contract money will only be exchanged with those companies. They can remove companies from the list at will, on a whim. They could also do this with all money if it’s something like FedCoin. They could do all kinds of interesting, dystopian things. I bet there’s a black mirror episode somewhere like this.
By scyclow 2025-05-273:53 Sure, but we already have something similar to that in NY called SNAP. And honestly, it would probably be easier to keep doing that without getting the blockchain involved.
In any case, I don't think that's the sort of product that commercial banks are itching release when they launch their new stablecoins. I'm sure a lot of coins will have a deny list for AML/KYC reasons, but an allow list would be pretty cumbersome to maintain and probably turn off most users.
By hiddencost 2025-05-2615:21 Or they could use fed now?
Yeah, great innovation. Also allows for many amazing and useful features for us people, such as allowing these tokens to expire and disappear from your account, or programming specific tokens to be only transferable to specific accounts or for specific goods, or for example controlling all token accounts in every single country on earth from the central location. E.g. for example Trump (assuming a USA stabletoken) not only sends you to the Salvador death camp, but also blocks and confiscated all your tokens and blocks you from ever having a token account in the future, all with a single click from NY central bank. Or replace the same with any other country and central bank.
Amazing utopia awaits for us, can't wait to take part in that hell economy :)
Sure, but banks can lock your account without the blockchain, so you're not enabling any new dystopian behavior here. And if you're worried that they can restrict your transaction behavior, then don't hold that coin! Swap your money into a stablecoin that doesn't have spending allowlist logic encoded into the smart contract.
Not even close. I can have a legal USD account in some Veishnoria country and Trump has almost zero influence on it (yeah, there are clearing banks involved at the US side, but all in all the whole scheme is mostly in semi-independent blocks). At the same time I can have there an account in EUR, or any other currency. All legal, all according to the Veishnoria andd international law. But resilient and not dependent on the flavor-of-the-day madness in the USA.
But if it would be a token system, then ALL accounts in that token in ALL countries are fully under control of the USA central bank.
Also currently all dollars, or yen, or yuan, are fully fungible. You can spend any single dollar on anything you want and in reverse any sold good/service acan be bought with any dollar in existence, they are the same. Now tokens are not like that, they are non-fungible and can (and will) be limited in multiple ways. For example you can have 1000 tokens in your account, but out of them only 200 can be spend on the "bad" goods like alcohol or gambling or whatever (on political opposition support, on different religion donation etc.). Or for example you have 1000 but they have an expiration date and will go to 0 in one calendar year, so that you won't save them. The possibilities are endless.
In fact, all of that has been already tested in my Eastern Europe country (Ukraine). We had a pilot program of digital tokens. They required a separate account of course, they couldn't be converted o the regular digital money. Every tranche had an expiration date (for example first one was half a year, next one a year iirc). They could have been spent only on a specific list of goods defined by the government - in that pilot it was only approved entertainment like books, movies and also donations were allowed.
I'm personally horrified by this very real and very close future prospect. Like that's not even some abstract Matrix or Cyberpunk level horror. It is here, it is almost deployed. EU is talking all the time about it. It is mind boggling to me how regular people aren't protesting this shit. Don't you all see the implications?
All valid concerns for the dystopian world we already live in, but crypto doesn't make any of this any more likely. You can make all the same arguments against existing bank accounts or credit cards. What's to stop Visa from spending more than $200 on "bad" products? At least stablecoins are managed by a smart contract, so you can see if that functionality even exists in the first place. If it doesn't then they can't add it in later. If it does, then you can swap you money for a stablecoin that doesn't have spending limits.
Also, there's nothing stopping foreign banks from issuing their own stablecoins. Owning a US bank-issued stablecoin is like having an account with that bank. If you have a problem with that, then you can swap your balance for a EUR-backed stablecoin issued by a European bank. Or better yet, you could sell it for real USD or EUR.
Visa is a tiny little middleman compared to a Federal Reserve, however crazy that may sound. Visa is a) only one of similar middleman, b) it has no power over bank accounts or any other entity holding USD, it's only involved during a transaction. In fact, I could probably survive without touching Visa/MC for a long time (and without touching their Chinese or other alternatives). I can for example wire money from bank acc to bank acc directly and people can self organize to do that at scale and not involve a proxy. It's just won't be as convenient, no cards, no card terminals etc. There are multiple proto alternatives too, for example BLIK in Poland. EU has pretty robust bank system.
All that text above is just underscore this - a future Fed owned token would be on a completely different level of control. Cross border control too.
Regarding alternative token systems - a) outside of maybe 2-5 tokens all others won't be adopted and die out (unless enforced in a totalitarian way), b) the survivors will share the same traits, copied from one to another, after all they will be controlled by the same orgs - central banks.
And finally - no, you won't be able to sell tokens to money. Only if the owner of all tokens (a central bank) will graciously allow it. For example in the pilot in my country it did not. Thinking logically - if token system is created to restrict freedoms and bring more control to the govt, why would that govt allow "exiting" this new system? Everyone who cares and all potential targets will sell this token and go back to using money. So of course any bridges will be either heavily restricted (for the inner circle, corrupt officials, oligarchs etc.) or won't be allowed at all from the start.
Again, not saying this is a totally crazy scenario, but you're describing a level of control that the US government can already exercise using the current banking system. Good luck using fedwire/swift without a bank. The difference is whether the rules are encoded in public infrastructure and are easy to see, or they're hidden within private systems and institutions.
Also, you can always write wrapper coins for other stable coins that don't have any spending restrictions. And yeah, issuers can play whack-a-mole and ban those contracts. But at that point we're talking about a coin that no one would even recognize as money any more. Why would anyone use it? If they're already on the blockchain it would be a pretty seamless switch to just use the native token.
And at the end of the day, if you can exchange your dystopian stablecoins for USD (as the legislation requires) then you can functionally spend your money with the same restrictions that are on your bank account anyhow.
By StackRanker3000 2025-05-2816:481 reply > you're describing a level of control that the US government can already exercise using the current banking system
You’re handwaving this away. Just because something is theoretically possible, it doesn’t mean that it’s as likely to happen as something else that is order of magnitudes less complex (imposing the level of fine-grained control discussed in this thread on the existing system, versus building it in from the beginning in a new one). Friction and inertia matters in the context of preventing government overreach
> Why would anyone use it?
Because the government mandates it. Because the only employers that will hire you pay out wages in it. You can imagine many scenarios where individuals don’t have much of a choice. Which could be a reason for someone to want this idea to not catch on, lest the current system gets replaced by something worse. Cheerleaders and enthusiasts may take the opposite view
> if you can exchange your dystopian stablecoins for USD
Yes, if. And for how long?
I’m not saying a motivated totalitarian regime controlling all levers of powers could necessarily be prevented from implementing their dystopia anyway, but we also don’t have to expedite technology that would make it significantly easier for them
By scyclow 2025-05-2819:28 This is a very strange scenario you're describing where: a) the global economy has moved onto the blockchain; b) the government has repealed all the major points of the legislation that we were originally talking about; c) the government has also exhibited complete dictatorial control over the logic of the major stablecoins, and banned all of the functionality that makes them actually useful; d) people decide not to use the blockchain's native token to settle transactions for some reason.
Remember, issuers want people to use stablecoins because they get to invest the funds in treasuries and hold onto the interest. If everything is blacklisted then no one will want to use them and the issuer won't make any money.
By GenshoTikamura 2025-05-2617:551 reply And we can clearly see that some people are defending their utopia agressively by trying to fade your comment to gray
By Yizahi 2025-05-278:30 It's mindboggling really. And the most puzzling to me is that this forum has a large proportion of independent thinkers. Some care about privacy, some care about removing copyright (I disagree, but respect their position), some care about free access to information etc. How can these same free thinkers advocate for a single most oppressive authoritarian system we have ever seen? And a very real system currently in late stages of testing, soon to be worldwide, not some abstract future evil.
People who want independent currency, or maybe less dependent on the govt would get a currency absolutely under control of a small group of people in the govt. People who donate to privacy foundations or buy privacy tools would see that they simply aren't allowed to do that with their "money" (non-fungible tokens). People who want to pirate stuff or download some info would have DMCA strikes not on their neat little blog or youtube channel, they will have DMCA 2.0 strikes right on their bank account, because all that shit will be automated and centralized. Just imagine, downloading something and then getting all your accounts go to 0. Or maybe not to 0 but have a fine applied and subtracted from your token balance automatically, on the discretion of the megacorp across the ocean in a different country.
It is literally dystopia, no scare quotes, no ifs no maybes, it just is.
By kiitos 2025-05-272:16 stablecoins don't protect you against price fluctuations. they don't even guarantee reliable mapping to their underlying currency.
By GenshoTikamura 2025-05-2617:411 reply Sending $100 on Tuesday only on even-numbered hours is not a very likely use case for it.
Paying wages that are only valid for a month, are split into parts which can only buy specific foods and goods inside a geofenced zone and can't be tranfered to any other person are much more likely.
I said it was a contrived example! But people have really specific payment logic that doesn't seem to make much sense from the outside.
What you're describing can only be achieved by encoding specific logic into the coin's original contract, so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time. And this is tantamount to agreeing to be paid in a specific gift card with a really small payment network. No need to get crypto or stablecoins involved.
> so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time
That does not mean that you have the power to do anything about it.
You could do something about it in the same sense that you can opt to be paid in dollars instead of itunes gift cards of chuck e cheese tokens. If someone has the power to decide how they're paying you then they can screw you just as easily without crypto.
“Opt to be paid in..”
Seems like you haven’t had much time with the history of company towns and company stores.
By scyclow 2025-05-2813:16 I haven't, but it sounds like they can restrict their employees' spending just fine without crypto. Also, if they can exchange their Company Stablecoins for USD (as the legislation requires) then it makes it pretty hard to restrict their spending.
By Yizahi 2025-05-278:39 "you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time"
Yeah. We would know. We DO know it now. It is being tested now, exactly like described by GenshoTikamura. I've wrote you a longer comment about that below.
Do you see people protesting? I don't. Lol, even here at HN, at the bastion of independent thinking or close enough, people aren't protesting. Most it seems aren't even aware about the scope of the features of such token system, and the implications to the daily life.
