I understand all of this and I stand by my claim of pointlessness.

Stripe, nor any other bank or bank-esque thing needs this because they have already well solved their problem of "trust."

"Blockchain" is pointless overhead here.

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paperpunk 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I wouldn't really say trust is a solved problem in cross-border transfers. Why only today I've seen transactions where:

- an intermediary credited another institution only to realise later they didn't have the money, and have to beg pretty-please to return the payment over a SWIFT message (there is no guarantee here, at best there is "market practice" which is basically just manners, but for banks)

- an intermediary failing to credit the next institution because of a processing error, but when inquired from remitter claiming they had in fact credited it

Many of these cases are very expensive to resolve. Far more expensive than the value of the payments in question. And for that reason they are often left unresolved.

Now I don't know if I'm convinced on stablecoin remittance, I find many of the counter-arguments extremely compelling, but some days I sure do think gee it would be nice if everyone was transacting on a shared public ledger and I could have some certainty of the status of a transaction.

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degamad 5 days ago | parent [-]

> an intermediary credited another institution only to realise later they didn't have the money, and have to beg pretty-please to return the payment over a SWIFT message (there is no guarantee here, at best there is "market practice" which is basically just manners, but for banks)

But this situation is not made any better by a blockchain - there's still no way to reverse a transaction except asking nicely and hoping the other party obliges, right?

	▲	paperpunk 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was only disputing parent assertion that trust is a solved problem and that banks don't "need" a solution. I haven't the foggiest if stablecoins solve these problems any better. In theory I think all participants having visibility into the ledger would at least answer the problem of "where actually is the money", but I'm not even sure of that though because of fiat on/off ramps, custodial arrangements, roll-ups that might happen off chain, etc. I don't know if you could use smart contracts to encode a recall/dispute resolution process into transactions but that's very hand-wavey and possibly collapses under scrutiny! All in I've no idea if crypto helps us here but I do think we have a long way to go either way.

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DanielVZ 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My guess is that their solution to the problem of “trust” has enough overhead that it makes people lose money because of time or middleman fees.