West to cut some Russian banks off from SWIFT | Hacker News Reader

West to cut some Russian banks off from SWIFT

bbc.co.uk

20 pointsMobileVet4 comments

So Russian leaders will just switch to a not-sanction bank, and continue business as usual.

Similar to the confiscated vessel in France, where the sanctioned Russian bank just sold it to another not-sanctioned company a few days prior.

It's crazy how one institution SWIFT has "monopoly" in banking payment orders. Maybe something like blockchain(decentralized, distributed and transparent network) would suite banks better because they could "vote" and settle transactions in more transparent, open and democratic way. It would be kind of cool to see global banking transactions flowing in the real time and banks voting to allow or disallow each of those transactions. Also it would be interesting to see how much banks are charging to process transactions taking into account they would compete to process transactions.

SWIFT is simply a technology abstraction that runs on top of nation states and their financial systems.

The idea of banks voting on who they interact with and public transactions of funds flow seems to be fundamentally disconnected from how banking laws and financial regulatory frameworks are written and enforced.

In short, nation states have a monopoly on enforcing how money moves, because of their monopoly on force. The control of value transfer is also power, power which nation states are unlikely to cede.

I agree with you but in the world of widespread terrorism, tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, crime and rogue states and regimes, dictators etc. banking secrecy does not exist. With some kind of open and transparent banking network banks could vote to allow or disallow transactions respecting privacy just like Bitcoin does with pseudonymity and also "catch" bad guys who do aforementioned stuff. SWIFT prevailed because it standardized banking payment orders but no regulator really and fully knows what happens and flows inside SWIFT network. DeFi(Decentrilized finance) could be better than traditional finance if it implies transparency which is safe and useful at the same time.

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