US Treasury to Allow Blockchains, Stablecoins for Bank Payments | Hacker News Reader

US Treasury to Allow Blockchains, Stablecoins for Bank Payments

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> the speed, efficiency, interoperability, and low cost associated with these products

These are generally not considered features of Bitcoin.

These will be private blockchains, not the public bitcoin network.

They don't really have any benefits over a centralised database except sounding good to management.

Exactly, and they have no incentive to make random public stablecoin bagholders rich.

I can assure you that no one is "bagholding stablecoins" in hopes to become rich.

Have you read anything about Bitcoin upgrades or new second or third layer solutions of the last four years?

Liquid is a side chain that works with “blinded” amounts (so you can see a transaction but not an amount) and works with blocks every few seconds.

Lightning is another second layer tech that allows transaction within seconds.

RGB is a third layer tech on top of Lightning that allows you to create stable coins or other useful banking applications.

True, but have you see the current state-of-the-art? It’s ACH.

ACH is free to the user, convenient, safe, well understood, and the energy requirements aren't insane.

Any banks foolish enough to process cryptocurrency transactions will have to meet all the same banking requirements for anti-moneylaundering, anti-terrorism, rogue states, etc. These sort of requirements are part of the reason for delays. International transactions can also get delayed because of shoddy foreign banking servers which may simply be down.

All of these problems remain, but an additional constraint of requiring consensus and hashing is imposed.

This is a version of second system syndrome where even the naive variant doesn't sound good on paper.

Agreed that crypto and banking seem like oil and water for the issues you mentioned.

ACH is far from safe. The keys are printed on every check, the transactions aren't reversible, the settlement times are practically untenable for business. I've sold and bought payroll services, charged my customers with ACH, paid vendors with ACH, read the gawdawful spec, and I haven't much good to say about it, other than it mostly works, and enough people know it well enough.