The war on drugs is a scam, but pretty sure if the primary goal was to oppress indigenous people in another country the US government could’ve found a cheaper way (both fiscally and politically).

That’s not a technical problem - this kind of system can scale out just fine and has in other jurisdictions. SEPA is far from perfect, but is better than Bitcoin for everything but evading governments (justified or otherwise). We’ll see what Fednow looks like in a few years - the banks are definitely dragging their feet and it’s hard to tell what the UX will look like in the end.

They couldn’t get their whole balance in cash I’m sure. But the Fed is the one that handles retiring old paper currency and giving banks fresh currency to give to ATMs and tellers, and I doubt the inflows and outflows are perfectly even for each bank.

I think we’re talking about bank reserves, which is a fraction (in the order of 1%) of the total amount of money held in the customers’ transaction accounts. Reserves are convertible into cash. Not that any bank would suddenly want to do that, unless there’s a bank run, in which case it’s the customers who want the entirety of their accounts (100x the reserves) converted into cash, which is impossible not because the fed refuses to convert the money, but because the bank doesn’t have enough reserves.

The Fed manages printed currency - they’d be irritated, but they literally do provide the physical dollars people need now, and if they felt it was appropriate, they’d produce them as needed.

Just like those airplanes of bills shipped to Iraq, etc. in the past.

Only in America. The rest of the world figured it out.

Inside the same country, really? We have the aptly-named Faster Payments in the UK and it's instant. The company I work for is virtually built upon it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payment_System_%28Unite...

SEPA is among the most stable & robust payment areas globally with a lot of interesting features which a lot of other regions are jealous about :-) And there are additional layers built on top, so at least we have N=1, while I have to admit that convenience could & should be improved

Did you read the paper? The paper is arguing the exact same point I was arguing. To quote the paper:

> Finally, assuming that the parties are rational agents and the smart contract language is Turing complete, we argue that it is impossible to implement the basic sales escrow as a smart contract without trusted third-parties or vulnerability to extortion. In other words, any escrow smart contract has one of the following three demerits:

> – Assuming irrational agents who are willing to punish the other side, even if it is not in their own interest; or

> – Relying on a third-party; or

> – Enabling at least one of the two parties to extort the other.

> In summary, we illustrate that the smart contract and Dapp community is wrong in assuming that the current implementations of two-party escrows have a well-designed mechanism that incentivizes rational actors to be truthful. More shockingly, we show that the smart contracts on programmable blockchains have inherent limitations that make it impossible to implement such a contract. In a sense, this can be considered the first incontractability result on programmable blockchains.

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This is exactly what I was arguing.

I never claimed that two party escrow is ideal. I was explicitly saying that two party escrow is an intractable problem and that you must formalise your trust assumptions instead and either accept some level of trusted third parties OR without third parties accept some level of risk of exploitation by one party or the other. Even with third parties there is still risk for exploitation but depending how it is implemented that risk is lesser.

Again this is a matter of formalising trust assumptions and explicitly outlining who you are trusting, what you are trusting them to do, and how much you trust them to do it. And in doing so up front both parties can evaluate their risk tolerance based on the agreed upon contract before progressing.

They agree with your statement in another reply under this submission. So a joke on crypto hype culture, where you either put aside problems and move to next craze or next craze is shoved to everything.

I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.

You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond.

You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.

And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.

TLDR: It's low trust automation + formalising implicit assumptions into explicit ones.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181371#46192445