Most of the big banks and credit card companies are already using block chain on the back end or internally to track funds and transactions. I expect that settling and transfer of funds will be instantaneous in the next couple of years.
A buddy has been doing it longer than me. But Coinbase can do direct ACH transfer to and from your bank so its approximately 2-3 business days for funds to transfer. Though recently I've seen where its been taking a week in some cases.
The part that worries me there is that transactions can't be reversed. Banks reverse transactions all the time, some as part of operating procedure. "Oh, your account information was entered in as part of an untrusted ACH payment for your car payment? No problem, we'll reverse it, and now the other side is delinquent. No big deal." That goes away with blockchain thingy. (This happens more frequently than it should--banks really don't know shit about what happens in their organizations, they have a core processor for that.)
That's actually want got me thinking about the international wires. If I wanted to hide a lot of money that might be soon under Federal control, blast that to my buddy in Sweden and it's gone.
The ledger is normally immutable. There have been groups that have made modifications to the underlying algorithms in their instances to be able to reverse transactions, but that really flies against the whole concept. The reversing of a transaction, is really just another transaction. At the end of the day, the block chain is simply a ledger shared between multiple parties with no inherit trust in each other. In order for trust to exist everything must be recorded without modification, because once the ledger is no longer immutable all trust is lost.
The most untraceable way to move, spend, and make money has and always will be through the physical exchange of hard currency. Ask the Silk Road guys how anonymous they were using BTC.
The guys weren’t anonymous. But the bulk of the money was. Suppose you’re involved some pump and dump scheme. Suppose you are Jordan Belfort. You make $100 million, and launder $20 mil over. You do your 22 months in prison or whatever and get out. You didn’t get away. You still have access to a a sizeable fortune, if you managed to maintain access. And I bet keeping that access through crypto is easier than it would be otherwise.
A reversal is currently a second transaction in standard payments. But they don’t act like cash. That’s not true of the blockchain. Someone fat fingers something in a manual transaction, and it’s gone.
It's not gone. It's in the ledger. Forever. Divorce digital currency from the block chain. Block Chain is simply an immutable ledger. Bitcoin uses that ledger as a financial transaction engine.
How did they prove illicit buys and sales? Transaction forensics. It's easier to track digital sales than cash payments. It might be easier to move massive sums through a crypto, but you leave a trail.
They hard a starting point and an end point. They didn’t track every buy and sale. The trail isn’t the problem, it is finding the needle in the haystack, or the 100s of thousands of needles in the haystack. If not all are found, then you’ve successfully hidden. The percentage you hid is the question.
The monetary sum is gone. Who cares that the transaction is forever? That’s just history. Unless the recipient initiates a return transaction, to return the money, it’s a he said she said over who actually should have the money. The ledger doesn’t speak to that, just that a transfer occurred. And possession is important. That’s true even in standard transactions today.
You're talking about possession, that's a bitcoin or crypto concern, not a block chain one. The ledger is the ledger. It simply states a transaction occurred. Whether that transaction mistakenly transferred too many assets is immaterial. The transaction occurred, therefore it is logged. This is all block chain is, a mechanism to accurately store all transactions between parties in such a way that the record cannot be modified providing transparency and trust. It's the layer that rides on top of block chain that's responsible for recovering from errors or mistakes. The block chain simply logs and persists in perpetuity all transactions that occurred.
I'm pretty sure that's understood. I'm thinking the issue was that in case of error or theft or what have you, there's no safety net to reverse the malfeasance like there would be with a banking transaction -- no authority to govern.
It is the governing body of the transactions, and cannot, by design, undo what is done. That’s dangerous when moving money.
My co-worker was buddies with Brian Armstrong in college. Every time we see him on CNBC it goes something like - ‘Hey, there’s Brian. [uck fay]!!!’ I think my colleague feels like he missed out on a golden goose. Haha.
I wish I had been smart enough to follow the Winklevoss twins years ago, they’ve now been on the sidelines of two billion dollar industries. Basically, whatever venture they are looking into, put a small bit of money into it...
