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Comment by bishbosh | Hacker News Reader

How would crypto help this? Robinhood could accept crypto as payment and still turn off the buy button.

I believe OP means that a decentralized trading network (not sure how that would be implemented with lowish latency) would circumvent this, not that the transaction needs to be done in a cryptocurrency

Robinhood disables stuff because stock settlement gets wonky if there's too much volatility. This is "fixed" by crypto because there's no settlement, at least in layer 1.

What OP means it that crypto's peer to peer nature means we wouldn't have to go through gatekeepers that can turn off the "Buy" button.

But stock ownership, as a relationship between the stockholder and the company, is fundamentally not peer to peer. There's no way for you and I to settle a trade of Gamestop stock ourselves; we have to either contact Gamestop to transfer the registration or go through a trusted third party broker who holds the registration on our behalf.

The stocks themselves should be tokenized. Tradfi is an antiquated system. Thankfully Larry fink understands this.

There used to be bearer certificates for shares that could trade without a third party being involved.

They went away both because of the obvious downsides (fraud, loss etc) and the obvious upsides (efficiency) of more consolidated clearing.

What’s probably less obvious but more important for securities trading is the consolidation of the extension of credit. We no longer need to go verify the cash is available with every different counterparty pair, we can instead extend the credit just by using central rules, including the turning off of the buy button.

It’s not obvious to me how crypto equity trading, even if decentralized, solves the credit issue at the cash off ramp. Unless that off-ramp is truly a society that actually uses crypto as a currency.

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