[1] - "How Mainframes Keep The Financial Industry Up And Running"

"...92 of the top 100 banks use the mainframe to provide banking services to customers, and other types of financial services companies depend on the mainframe, as well. Visa, for example, uses the mainframe to process billions of credit and debit card payments every year. According to some estimates, up to $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through mainframes..."

[1] https://blog.share.org/Article/mainframe-matters-how-mainfra...

https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/ach/ and https://www.swift.com handle much of the US, and it's a system developed in the 70s (or earlier) and it works.

It could be modernized and things like https://explore.fednow.org are trying to do that.

But the problems involved are not things a blockchain would secure because there's a trusted intermediary which can just run a database.

in every other rich country, you just log in to your bank's web ui thing, click "SEND MONEY TO MY MUM", and then it sends it, for free, to your mum, with no risk of your mum being able to take more money, no random intermediary, no worry about if it actually gets there, no third party holding it in a non-bank cash account, no pre-authorisation, etc. you enter a bank identification number and an account number (and a name, usually, to avoid mistakes) and it just happens and it just works. in most countries this is quick, even, e.g. in the UK it's almost always < 5 seconds.

FOR FREE.

no blockchains, no multi-billion ponzi schemes, just a boring and simple service offered by every bank in the country.

making the Fed make banks just introduce free, instant bank transfers could have saved the world tens of billions of dollars and apparently tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gases.

Most of the problems people perceive with the banking system are completely societal, 0% technical. If your bank doesn't let you send money instantly to your friend for free, that isn't because your bank needs a blockchain.

that's excellent, thank you for putting it better than I did.

Let's not ignore the non-"rich" countries

Also the name given during the transfer aside the IBAN won't make the transfer fail as far as I know if incorrect.

The banks are adding some instant money transfer services in the last few years though.

the EU did this, SPANNING TWENTY EIGHT COUNTRIES. they don't even all use the same CURRENCY.

edit: sorry, it's 36 - EU27 + EFTA + UK + microstates

> The banks are adding some instant money transfer services in the last few years though.

it appears to me, judging from talking to Americans, and my own use of the US banking system, that customers do not even generally have ability to login to their bank's website and transfer money, AT ALL, forget "instant".

overall, this is such a bizarre reply, but emblematic of many of the problems the US faces - "it's too hard to fix $problem_with_well_known_solution because of entrenched interests, so let's create this absolutely awful parallel system that creates a whole new world of entrenched interests who will in turn block any innovation".

why do you think it would be hard? ACH exists, and lets banks transfer money. why can't banks make it better like Australia did? or have the same structure create a parallel, better transfer system banks can opt in to, like the UK did with FPS?

I would have said that letting venmo/paypal/etc do it was the worst possible solution, but then I could not have imagined that another solution people would seriously propose was "cryptocurrency".

This is what happens when you build a country with a disproportionate number of the sort of people who are willing to say "Fuck it. Building a decent living in my home country is too hard. I'm going to cross an ocean in a steam ship and start a new life on a new continent where I am a complete stranger."

I say this as an American who has made similar choices of questionable wisdom.

The new services (and the tech companies) only selling point is they can be instant and cheaper or free (though not all older approaches have fees). And serve groups like younger people with no credit.

And what is your post emblematic of with it's abuse of caps and stereotyping? I'm just talking about why they haven't replaced an older solution that "isn't broke" since it gets 99.9 percent of the job done already. No need to lose your mind.

> Problem: US healthcare is broken.

> Solution: Build a for-profit company that will generate trillions of dollars in value for its shareholders, all of which will come from payment for healthcare

These are in theory lessons that are meant to be passed along by the Public Education system but ours is pretty broken.

Or send money to a wallet in China.

I assure you I understand the rails going on in international money transfers, and the amount of different systems, protocols and hops to make it happen is staggering.

It can take sophisticated modern treasury operations years to get up and running in new jurisdictions independent of the regulatory challenges.

If we could isolate it to the compliance and risk management portions of the challenge it would increase innovation dramatically.

KYC is a feature, not a bug, so there has to be at least some sort of relationship even if it's via mutual registration with a third party.

Also, modernization of banking systems, including inter-bank transfer, has been slowing happening in the background for the last decade. AFAIK no one is using pow, pos, or blockchains (except, maybe, just in the sense that traditional databases have many of the same desirable attributes as a blockchain).

> could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages.

Innovation in mortgages didn't work out so well last time, and honestly the actual origination of a mortgage is one of the least painful and inefficient parts of real estate.

When bitcoin launched we really did need innovation in payments. Apple Pay and Google Pay solved a lot of the problem, and the recent rise of "bank/lender as an api" startups popping up now solve a significant part of the rest of the problem.