Bitcoin, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and NFTs

This did me.
We’re back to Web 2.0 era where some websites give you an annoying notification if you try to right-click anything.

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What could go wrong!

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I’ve been banging on about this for ages. Feels like an inevitability at this point.

For people who’ve basically stopped using cash, I don’t think this will be a big step? It’s money, issued by the same people as always, that can be used in all the same ways, with the same value as the standard version.

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At the risk of sounding dense, what’s the difference between this and the way my money works now? If it’s the same as a pound and I’m transferring it digitally between accounts when paying for things, then that’s the way a lot stuff works now isn’t it? (With caveats for cash being used more by lower income people and all that)

This is going to send the WEF/Bilderberg/Plandemic folks into Defcon-1.

I imagine it might mean that funds are registered on blockchain - so potentially it could reduce money laundering, and also mean that digital transactions are a lot smoother too. IF it’s implemented properly, which is another matter altogether. It shouldn’t change cash usage - my understanding is that banks are well aware of the need for this (even if they don’t like it)

This would reduce Bitcoin’s ability to pump or dump quite a bit, which is why 95% people that hold Bitcoin now hold it.

So, possibly good. I don’t know.

Is there actually a blockchain technology that could reasonably handle the volume of transactions that happen day-to-day in the country, in realtime, at a negligible financial cost though? (Genuine question - I know bitcoin, Ethereum etc don’t, but there’s a bunch of more modern less known technologies now that might?)

If we’re running a distributed set of validation nodes, then how will the BoE protect against a 50% + 1 attack on the currency? If not and they’re controlling all validation nodes, then how does this provide better availability than existing financial systems?

How do they propose to help people keep their digital wallets safe, in a world where a single click on a dodgy link is all that’s needed for Crypto experts to loose all their assets?

I’m sure all this stuff is solvable with time and money, but the BoE’s explainer reads like a typical Crypto project - lots of statements about the things it’ll achieve, without nothing saying how it would actually achieve it.

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How much capacity would a Blockchain need to process the required level of transactions? I know the BoE has been trialling Ripple as an alternative to SWIFT for international payments (although Ripple is currently subject to legal action by SEC in the US).

About 1bn transactions a month to handle banking transactions (Bacs, swift, faster payments) according to Pay.uk and another 2bn or so to handle card payments.

So that averages out at 1120 transactions per second if you wanted to replace the existing digital payments infrastructure wholesale. And you’d need to be able to handle a peak transaction rate several times that - after all, people are making more purchases at lunchtime on a weekday than at 4am and more people are paid at certain times of the month than others.

Not that my back of a napkin maths necessarily reflects what the BoE are actually planning for their digital currency.

(For what it’s worth, Ripple claim to be capable of 1500 transactions a second, so while it could theoretically do the UK’s transactions from day to day, you’d experience delays in transaction completion at peak times.)

Feels like this has been going on for a couple years now

At its best, the project could usher in a cheaper, safer way to replace cash payments with electronic transactions. If it goes wrong, the entire banking system could teeter.

made me laugh

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tbf, isn’t the entire system of money-transferring in this country based on software that’s absurdly outdated?

The financial sector likes stuff that works even if it’s old. (One of our insurance software packages dates to the early 90s and they’ve been expecting to sunset it for over 20 years.)

Yeah, one of the main bits of software where I work was built in house and they were trying to sunset it when I joined over 20 years ago. Rather than re-write it, they’re just outsourcing more and more stuff :grimacing:

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In our case it was written for the old IBM AS/400 System/3x mainframe family and I think the expected death was partly because it was assumed IBM would discontinue the hardware as mainframes got lost…but then they came back and IBM called it an iSeries.

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Still rocking financial software here that’s twenty years old and totally unsupported anymore. Some elements have to be even older as they’re using an interface that looks like MS-DOS and can only accept keyboard commands.

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Yeah, this still has the look of a proper old school green on black text terminal. It’s crazy that nothing better has come along in that time that could be used

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We have also written many modern replacements, it just depends on customers. Also insurance is quite modular so some companies use several different packages for different lines.

Not really. Stuff like Bacs has been around for decades, but there are other systems like Faster Payments that are much more recent. It’s all very arcane but I think the UK is generally seen as a leader in most respects.

Payment systems - Pay.UK.

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