alt Hacker News> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.
These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.
I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe
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You are questioning the method when people just see the need.
If you're an engineer, no matter what you say about the method, you know a country at war will make you lose all your savings. Or if you're a foreign citizen in a country that will seize your assets, even "by accident".
I think the key difference is the inability to be (easily) deplatformed / locked out which can happen in traditional banking
It is not an engineering problem, it is a geopolitical and legacy banking problem. Yes sending an encrypted message somewhere in the world in under a second is solved.
> If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.
The promise was to make this available for everyone, to send money everywhere.
For example for me in Sweden it's really, really hard to send money directly to people in Ukraine since the Swedish banks simply refuse to send money there.
Because you don't trust or don't believe in the legitimacy of governments.
The cross border not about technical capacity but legal control. For example if you are a refugee you might not be able to pull your bank savings and liquid stock with you from your home country to another without it being seized or taxed, but your crypto is always yours as long as you are the only holder of the keys. This scenario is one of the rare real world utilities I see with crypto.