Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1.

How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system controlled by just a single entity / country.

What we may however end up with, are dozens of systems like Pix, one for each country, union, etc. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant (see point 1)

Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.

Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant

And somehow less relevant than cash.

I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my local branch in minutes, and almost any other currency in the world can be delivered to me by FedEx the next morning for a flat $10 fee.

I can take cash to any other country in the world and get it converted into the local currency, whether that's paper or digital in almost any city.

Crypto is great if you do a very few, very specific things in a vanishingly small number of places. But if I'd tied my finances to crypto instead of cash, I'd have been stuck many times in foreign lands.

To you second point, I think the pix penetration/popularity proves that the majority of the people trust the government for that. There are 2 key reasons for its success: It was mandatory for Banks to adhere to the system and there are no fees for using it.

Once multiple countries have their own PIX, they just need to build a federation structure to connect them and allow cross-border transactions.

Crypto-currencies have their place with people who don't trust the government, want to speculate and/or simply want to do tax evasion, but they are not and probably never will be mainstream as a transaction medium.

Most people want something that works well in the ways they care about.

People turned to piracy because it was a superior experience to the then-distribution-models.

Then, the majority of people didn't care that iTunes / Steam cost money and had DRM, because it provided a superior experience to piracy.

People want an outcome, easily, reliably: they don't care about the method of getting that outcome.

If you are at a institution bank, probably but that's a non-existent use case - I never had Argentinian Pesos, Turkish Lira or Bulgarian Lev I suddenly needed to deposit into my bank account !..

> Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.

I'm not sure whether you travel much, but I always travel as a digital nomad. I pay small transactions with local cash or mostly bank cards as everybody does. But big amounts? That's where crypto comes into play. I've paid in crypto transactions worth a few thousands dollars because that's the only way to do it without incurring huge transaction fees and / or long processing time.

Cryptocurrencies will likely never go away, and will remain in use for certain use cases from a cross border value transfer perspective, similar to gold; either the token moves or the ownership is updated. More interesting is offering digital wallets for a single or basket of currencies to anyone you can remotely identity proof in the world (similar to nsave [3]).

[1] https://www.volt.io/real-time-payments-world-map/

[2] https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/fmis/nexus.htm

[3] https://www.nsave.com/ | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nsave

Fine keep using crypto as a store of “value” but as a way to handle day to day transactions it has failed.

No one pays FX fees on each transfer. Single large rebalancing transfers allows them to actually move money at optimal times and rates with bulk discounts. Then they can currency hedge and get larger spreads on the actual fx rate.

You're joking right? I just did a $25,000 wire internationally with a currency exchange in the middle and it cost $75. It went through in one business day. You'll get more hassle trying to withdraw from your exchange than that.

When I bought my house and did the wire it cost $15. Where are you getting huge transaction fees?

Most people in Brazil won't do this so who gives a shit? You may as well say, "now try to use Pix on the moon!"

Meanwhile you could transfer $25k in crypto to Dubai and walk away with it in cash at an OTC desk in an hour via a wallet to wallet.

Off-topic, but: this is possibly one of the world's dumbest rebranding exercises. I forget now how many years ago they made the change, but I've never heard anyone outside the company itself refer to it as just "Wise" without adding "(formerly transferwise)".

When you use Pix, your money is not in custody of the government. The money goes to/comes from a standard commercial bank, just like a wire transfer. What the government (Central Bank) does is just the infrastructure for moving money between bank accounts.

The point about not being a global standard is valid, though. Although there are initiatives in progress to connect similar instant payment systems from different countries as other users have noted.

There's a reason Wise is a huge business and people in Canada resort to "Norbert's gambit" to exchange currency with minimal transaction costs.

You can pay with Pix in Paraguay since the largest privately owned payment processor implemented it and it's available within all payment terminals (POS) across the country.

The government of Paraguay also runs a similarly good system called SIPAP, that is replacing card payments because it's faster and free to use.

To add to this, this is already happening. For example, you can already pay in the Middle East with India's UPI at quite a lot of places, or with China's Alipay or Unionpay.

It's a permissioned system.

Crypto is intended to be fundamentally different. Good crypto is permissionless. If you own it, you can spend it, regardless of what anyone thinks.

Eh, the money was printed by government and any value it has is based on how much people trust their government. Using government payment processor is small potato compared to those...

> How much do you trust your government with your money?

Do you trust crypto companies? Mt. Gox, FTX, Bybit…

Do you know that crypto companies must follow government rules, regulations, and laws? Russians were banned from using many crypto exchange platforms. China has strict rules for its citizens. You can buy and sell crypto in Brazil, but you must use only Brazilian reals.

Pix isn't global, but no one government person outside of Brazil can block this system.

MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and UnionPay work worldwide, but only a few countries regulate them, can block their usage, and can use data for tracking and statistics.

Pix is free to use, so no one needs to pay an additional "tax" to MasterCard and Visa (it's about 3%).

Google and Apple cannot say that if you want to pay, you must use only our devices.

> Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil

Now, try to buy ice cream from street vendors using any crypto coins.

If you’re not able to trust the government to not steal your money then I suspect you have bigger problems and should look to claim asylum elsewhere.

Similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

Could've at least gone with calling themselves "Wise.com" or something, like "Make.com" does.

Got nothing on "X" though. Have yet to hear someone in person say "on X" rather than "on Twitter".

Creating efficient payment rails for its own currency is one of the most obvious roles for government imo. If the government provisions the currency, why would they not also provision the infrastructure (like the printing of the paper money).

That said, you’ve not offered a good rebuttal to any of OPs concerns, just repeated how good pix is within Brazil…right now with their current government.

Digital payments does present a uniquely frictionless route for tyrannical governments to assert power should they ever decide to weaponize it…unlike paper money which is harder to control.

Also, international payments is absolutely an issue with these systems. So you hate crypto due to its 2010s association with annoying Twitter bros. I get it.

But what are you offering instead as a solution to global money? Paying Wise stupid currency movement fees and waiting for them to close your account because you tried to buy a house for your family in the country you moved to?

I've been a loyal user of wise for more than a decade, since I used them to pay for my cross-currency wedding, and I can accept the name change since they wanted to show they were more than just money transfer (but just make it "bankwise", ffs), but the new brand style was a disaster.

Notice they dialed it down over time,it's now more neutral than at launch, so someone must have listened to the complaints.

Which is also its primary drawback.

Transactions are non-reversable, which inherently makes it unsafe for wide-scale use. Consumer protection is so important, clawing back payments is an incredibly important part of that.

Wrong copy-paste and all my money could just be gone forever? Yeah no, that's never going to fly in countries where consumer protection is seen as an important public good and always expected.

What you tout as a plus, is a major negative for the vast majority of people in developed democratic countries. In quite a few of them, access to a bank account is even a fundamental right.

And all that just because of some abstract fear? nty.

The money that they issue? Your question is radically flawed.

That aside your main point is that crypto continues to be as relevant in cross jurisdiction payments even after the introduction of a pix like system of payments in each country.

Crypto transaction volumes across all crypto currencies are so low compared to FOREX in any of the worlds currencies (even relatively unused ones - currency speculators still drive transactions even there) that it’s basically irrelevant today in this use case. So your argument becomes it’s irrelevant today and will continue to be tomorrow.

If you’re to express the volume of all crypto transactions, not just those for the purpose of international transaction, just everything in all crypto currencies. The daily volume compared to transactions in all the other non crypto currencies ends up looking like a homeopathic dilution ratio, 0.00000000000000…%

the conversation is supposed to be about cryptocurrency technology,

but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.

Not just one feature of its existence.

Common conflation.

My assumption was that it usually comes down to finding someone else with money in both currencies (i.e. a large bank or government) and exchanging one for the other. Of course that's unsatisfying: it's not just turtles all the way down.

Ultimately if I'm running out of, say, USD, and have a lot of CAD, I have to to buy a bunch of something for CAD and sell it in USD. If you wanted a "zero banking" currency transaction I guess the way to do it is to park on the Canadian side of the border, buy imports to the US, walk across to the US, and sell them.

Or maybe there's a magic money shredding / printing machine that I didn't know about. I guess an international treaty could actually authorize such a thing.

Thats a use case 99.99999999999999999% of humanity does not care at all about.

Lol It's not that we may ended up like that, systems like Pix are built for the sole purpose of domestic transaction.

Globally, Visa / Mastercard trumps crypto.

This is exactly what I'm talking about and I'm not certain whether you're sarcastic .. Paying $75 on a 25k amount with a transaction time of 24 hours to complete is absolutely insane. You'd have used USDT or USDC or any other stable coin, you would have paid <$1 of fee and got the transaction done in seconds.

If you drill far enough... well anyway

> I don't know of any machine where dollars go in one side, are destroyed, and euros are created on the other side.

The Treasury is the machine you're looking for. And the wire transfer, SWIFT, usually, is the tool of choice. In a sense, yes dollars are "destroyed" in that they leave that monetary system. Banks like BoA hold a few kind of ledgers with the country's central bank one which gets discounted during the outflow.

So euros are then credited to whatever institution you transferred it to. That country just became that much richer.

This is why places like HSBC, CITI have free transfers for intra-bank but you still pay $15 for the same via wire transfer? Why would you ever want to do that? beats me, but the point is you can and it has a very real affect on the system other than some internal database going +/-.

But in the end, it's the country's central bank credit/debiting any institution and then just... printing? when it wants? but other countries... m1... foreign debt.

so yea, turtles.

Money is (for the purposes of this conversation) created and guaranteed by the government, and regulated by law, so I think it’s a little weird to not trust the government with my money.

Nuclear Energy is great, but governments and international organizations want to control it because it is too dangerous. So, if we need to use Nuclear Energy, we must play by such rules.

Money is the same thing. Each government wants to control them, regardless of their form.

If someone wants cryptocurrencies to be widely adopted, there is no option but to give them to businesses and governments.

So, crypto would be regulated like usual money. Major blockchains have records for all transactions, which can be tracked and used by businesses and governments to implement more strict control over the whole world. Therefore, the more people use crypto, the less privacy they have.

The Internet and Web were designed to be anonymous, but cookies, IP addresses, data collection, ML/AI, IMEI, MAC, and the control of registration in ISPs and mobile operators have led us to a situation where the government and companies can easily track people. The same situation would be with crypto, which was designed to be anonymous but used in another way.

Don’t lie to yourself, bro.

If we want to have global money and a global payment system, they would be controlled by governments, international organizations, God, Devil, Cthulhu, Spaghetti Monster...

There is no magical solution. We, as a society, need to establish competing social institutions, and try to control them, and try to force them to compete. There is no solver bullet.

Don’t lie to yourself, bro.

Who I don't trust completely with my money is banks and financial institutions. That's why I have a government who regulates them. And hey, it has worked where elsewhere it has failed (see 2008 global financial crisis).

This is true, and there's already a proposed law to ban paper money in Brazil.

I cannot fathom the reasoning that would lead you to believe this question is a big gotcha.

The value of any currency comes from the trust in the economy and military of the governments that stand behind it. The USD's value is backed by the economy and military of the United States. The Euro's value is backed by the economy and military of the Eurozone countries. If you live in the US and the economy collapses to the point the USD loses its value, the value of the USD will be your least concern - same if the US were invaded by a hostile military force and unable to defend itself.

Your currency is literally backed by your country. Your country issues the currency and your country sets the rules for how much additional currency banks can conjure into existence. Whether you use that currency in cash, bank transactions or payment systems doesn't affect that point. Cash is the only one of the three that's meaningfully different in that it allows the physical transfer of money without a "paper trail" because you can exchange it for goods and services directly (which doesn't apply to e.g. handing over keys to crypto wallets as part of a transaction because you can't move the balance off the wallet without leaving a digital trail).

There is no inherent value in cryptocurrencies just as there is no inherent value in state-backed currencies. The value of cryptocurrencies primarily hinges on their use as a speculative investment - even stocks or futures have a more concrete value basis (representing ownership of parts of a company and future ownership of trade goods respectively). This means its value is not tied to the performance or power of any one state but it also makes the value much more volatile and unreliable and much easier to manipulate.

Cryptocurrencies also stil rely on trust: for most cryptocurrencies you have to trust the people who issued it (and in some cases the underlying code), given how many have suffered from "rug pulls" and pump-and-dump schemes before. For currencies like BTC you also have to trust that no single actor can be able to perform a 51% attack. For currencies like ETH, you have to trust the smart contracts that might be involved (and have been exploited/abused before). Most people also rely on third party services to actually trade crypto currencies, so they need to trust those as well and there have been plenty of scams involving them even where they didn't turn out to be unreliable outright.

All currency is vulnerable to manipulation by agents with control over disproportionate amounts of it - billionaires, megacorps, banks, states using it as a reserve currency, etc. But non-cypto currencies suppress some of that control with their own and they have a symbiotic relationship with their currencies (i.e. if the USD does badly, that affects the US economy, which affects the US government budget, which affects its ability to maintain its institutitions including the military).

So the question then is not how much do you trust your government but do you trust your government more than the wealthiest other actors (domestic and foreign) that would exercise influence over the currency in its absence. Given that the state is not only the only thing enforcing the idea of property rights but also able to take everything away (including your physical freedom and life) from anyone who lives in its sphere of direct influence, even if you distrust your government more it's a moot point unless you also have the ability to flee it at a moment's notice if necessary - and I'd wager that's not the case for the overwhelming majority of people.

You say we may end up with systems like Pix for each country/union - sure but there's no reason there can't be interoperability between them the way there is with SWIFT transactions. At the moment Brazil seems to offer Pix International and Pix Roaming to open the system up to tourists and Brazilians travelling abroad but there's no reason similar systems can't develop a standard for direct compatibility without having to require support by each foreign bank or POS system.

I guess that alternative scenario sounds more dystopian the more wealth you have - but with enough wealth you can also imagine having a private security force providing that threat of violence to keep the community in check.

Each transaction is somehow only known by sender and receiver

So are you saying there's an procedure where the US treasury takes USD out of circulation, and the ECB introduces the equivalent in Euro, according to some official exchange rate? How do they set the exchange rate?

Site from 4 years ago "The cheap, fast way to send money abroad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210305145221/https://wise.com/

vs now "Send money globally for less" wise.com

Like if you want to bet on "Elon out of Trump administration before July?" you kind of have to go to polymarket or similar. (current price 41c)

I like the idea of my money being my money and not just mine as long as my government isn't annoyed with me. I don't much care if other people are afraid of it. That's a great thing about crypto. You are free not to participate, unlike the corpo-fiat systems.

The classic one is some FOSS people inventing a protocol where servers can talk to clients, and declaring a problem solved, when in actual fact, most people don't have a server. Mastodon is this, but so is XMPP.

HTTP took off because there were servers you could fetch things from with HTTP, not because it theoretically allowed you to fetch things from servers.

Paper euros aren't cool because I can "have money". They're cool because I can go to the grocery store and trade them for something to eat. My bank card isn't cool because I can "have money". It's cool because I can go and swipe it and not have to count paper euros. If you want cryptocurrency to be cool, you're going to have to get it integrated into grocery stores, which is, of course, impossible because it can only process 7 transactions per second. You also need a way to convert my paychecks into cryptocurrency, but this is basically solved with crypto exchanges now.

But mostly, it's the light-green-on-dark-green text which I dislike, and I _think_ they dialed down its usage compared to e.g. the brand announcement[0] and how the blog looks[1] compared to the main site. Then again, de gustibus.

[0] https://wise.com/community/en/brand-new-look [1] https://wise.com/gb/blog/welcoming-libby-to-the-board

> but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.

That's because the middlemen are inevitable and they work the way they do for a reason—governments won't let them work any other way.

Cryptocurrency is a technological solution for a human problem, and you can't analyze the impact of the technology divorced from the human reality without losing so much resolution as to make your analysis meaningless.

Yes if you are poor as dirt and can just take your life savings of <$10k (probably 99% of humanity) on an airplane if you need to use it in another country, you can do so no problem and you do not care, the idea of a crypto OTC desk likely does not even occur to you. It is still solving the same problem, but by being small enough that no one cares.

The data pretty well speaks for itself. Humanity with money cares a lot about escaping capital controls. This is inviolable, the more the banking system handicaps itself the more capital flows into less regulated products.

Crypto is only worth something because you can convert it to fiat and with that fiat can sign fiat denominated contracts that are enforced by the government.

Your government already has a monopoly on violence and owns your whole life.

You mischaracterized that.

> You have bizarre logic here. For example, in a topic discussed about GPUs, someone would say that it's not possible to run databases on GPUs, so GPUs don't have any chance of succeeding.

He's saying it wont get adopted worldwide. Not that it wont succeed (which is a very ambiguous metric).

>How much do you trust your government with your money?

Well I'm in Canada, I would trust the govt and the banks with my money before I trust anyone else (yes yes, trucker protest bullshit still didn't shake my confidence)

Which is ultimately the problem. The govt and well regulated banks are the only ones you should be able to trust, but in many case you can't trust governments or their ability to regulate things.

I was a "digital nomad" before that was even a term.

I've done "work from home" in Japan, China, Macau, South Korea, Belgium, and at least ten American cities. Even way back when we did it with payphones, Telex and fax machines.

Get off my lawn.

Go ask chatgpt, it will explain it quite well.

It should be satisfying in the following sense - the financial system is nowhere near as complicated as it seems. There is no magic. If you find yourself feeling like there is some magic somewhere, just ask another question because there is likely just a word or a layer of indirection that is making something quite simple seem mysterious.

Bitcoin can never be a Pix replacement. It's too damn slow, and others have pointed out, having to manage the entire transaction history is just stupid. (A end customer might not have to do serious book keeping on transaction history, but companies would.)

Pix works great for Brazil. That's what it was intended to do. And that's what it does. Case-closed.

You'll need to provide more constructive feedback. Or are you suggesting that it's not "destroyed" and that the origin country can freely transfer money without discounting its books?

Really, it's bad form to comment on something technical where you are just miles out of your depth.

But yeah, it's mostly just market forces that keep things stabilized, it seems.

[1]: https://www.cfr.org/tracker/central-bank-currency-swaps-trac...

The main trick that folks get hung up on (and, you might be too) is that most "money" is just an IOU from a bank. We've just created a sophisticated way to trade the IOUs and call it "money".

It's not inconceivable (nor magical in any way) to imagine treaties that would allow an actual conversion from one currency to another, where USD go in one side and Euro come out the other. Situations like this have existed in the past: currencies have been converted when, for example, the former currencies in the Eurozone were converted to Euros.

No such situations exist right now: entities just hold multiple currencies and exchange them for you.

Your mental model is falling down around the definition of "currency", "money" etc. It isn't what you imagine it is. We just have a system for trading bank receivables and call it "money".

I think the best way to explain it is an example.

My contact needs to get money to his family across the world. I happen to have a cousin that I love and trust who lives there and runs a gas station. My contact gives me 10k USD + a fee and then I call my cousin and tell him to give 10k to the contact's family member if they give the right password. At the end of the year, I meet up with my cousin and I bring him some gold or other goods depending on what our deficits are to each other.

It took some prompting to get it to say "It's really not rocket science." though.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67fa2c5f-d940-800a-bdad-b723e763e0...