The magical freedom / ideology implied by the bitcoin whitepaper is contrasted with the fact that now we're "free" to get scammed by those in power again, potentially far more, and with even more impunity than ever before.
It's all a speed run to slowly realize that the terrible system we had, in fact had some good ideas / rules of the road that even empowered the little guy to some extent.
I think this is true of all reinvention, including the good stuff - reinvent for expedience/simplification/modernization, and recognize the things that were lost and re-integrate them as you learn of the consequence.
From Walter Isaacson's Elon biography: "Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough."[0]
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11871764-delete-any-part-or...
And it sounds like this system targets global payments. Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo? Where would we see Tempo?
Very genuinely curious.
- SWIFT is really just a messaging protocol between a distributed, decentralized set of global banks that are all passing messages/money between each other. Your SWIFT wire might pass through an arbitrary number of correspondent banks, sort of like a flight route with multiple stops, until it reaches its destination.
- Consequently: money moves slowly (up to 5 days), is expensive to move (variable fees assessed either to the payor or payee, by every bank in the chain), and there is an indeterminate amount of manual ops burden, multiplied by every bank in the chain.
- As another commenter points out - services like Wise really just use massive amounts of liquidity spread out globally to try to minimize the number of true, bank-to-bank cross-border settlements required to get low-value payments from A -> B internationally.
Ironically, I think the great accomplishment of stablecoins is its "centralizing" of cross-border money movement into a single ledger -- reducing it to a "book transfer" of sorts -- where getting all the world's money to pass through a single ledger would otherwise be a very difficult (probably intractable) challenge _if it were not for_ the permissionless-ness + global neutrality of the blockchain that is tasked with doing so.
(I wrote about this in a slightly longer post here: https://text-incubation.com/The+great+irony+of+stablecoin)