[Cryptography] Banks are not all the same, My Identity definitely not Satoshi Nakamoto

[Bill Stewart]

 >> It appears that iang <iang at iang.org> said:
 >>>> It is not hard to find fast cheap international transfers.

One of Bitcoin's original goals was to be able to do money transfers 
both local and international at much lower cost than credit cards,
because there isn't a non-payment fraud risk or book-entry costs.
(Volatility's not a big problem because you can avoid it by cashing out 
after every transaction, assuming the original goal of low cost had 
worked and assuming you didn't need to batch them up to obscure your 
transactions.)

It ... turned out not to scale, once BTC grew enough to be a non-trivial 
financial player; even block size issues led to a mess for a while,
and prompted the invention of Lightning Network and other side-chain 
things to try to work around it as well as giving Craig Wright another 
excuse to pretend to be Satoshi.
At the core of the problem is BTC's lack of a mechanism for updating 
protocol issues, either before-the-fact or by having Satoshi actively 
promoting the change the way Vitalik did with Ethereum's change from 
Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.

JohnL> But more to the point, #2 is actually banking without KYC or AML.
It's banking without knowing the other bank's customer (or the other 
customer's bank.)
Depending on how you buy and sell cryptocoins, your bank might or might 
not know who you are.

On 10/17/2024 1:43 AM, efc--- via cryptography wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Oct 2024, John Levine wrote:
>> It appears that iang <iang at iang.org> said:
>>>> It is not hard to find fast cheap international transfers. My 
>>>> current favorite is Wise, formerly Transferwise. ...
>>> They must have fixed their issues then, as last time I tried ...

I first heard of Transferwise in this conversation,
and today I see a friend on BlueSky who recently moved to NZ
complaining that Wise has frozen her account for a month, taken PII 
multiple times but it's still not working, and is looking for a real 
contact there :-)


>> PS: The Internet sucks because the fastest speed is 56Kb and you lose the
>> connection if anyone picks up a phone extension, so video will never work
>> no matter what the guy who wrote CU-SeeMe says.
Oh, was that you? CU-SeeMe was really cool given the bandwidth and CPU 
limitations of the day.