Perhaps the hardest part to move away from are Visa and Mastercard - billions of bank accounts linked, many billions of automatic deductions happening, global acceptance & ATM access. I doubt we want to move to a Chinese system.
It used to be safe to immediately switch off when someone talked about gold, but I wonder if that's still true. The price soared in the second half of Trump I, and has taken off again since T2 became likely (and then a certainty). Maybe everyone is a gold bug in a foxhole?
The gold standard, I think, remains unspoken in polite company. However, the gold standard is not the same thing as gold in an investment portfolio. The latter may make some sense, although my own preference is for boring non-US assets.
Not all institutions can be decentralised. Some will have to be moved. The interbank Forex market turns over $7 trn a day, and is cleared through a specialist cooperative bank in New York. You can imagine the damage that Musk's oprichniki could do if they gained access to the servers.
There is an interesting technical problem here. Anything like CLS bank has to be located in the New World, because the New World countries are the closest ones to the east of the International Date Line. In other words, the western-most country is at the end of the world's business day, so daily payments must settle there. Of course, Vancouver is a nice city.
If banks ever move to 24/7 settlement, this constraint will go away.
Perhaps the hardest part to move away from are Visa and Mastercard - billions of bank accounts linked, many billions of automatic deductions happening, global acceptance & ATM access. I doubt we want to move to a Chinese system.
It used to be safe to immediately switch off when someone talked about gold, but I wonder if that's still true. The price soared in the second half of Trump I, and has taken off again since T2 became likely (and then a certainty). Maybe everyone is a gold bug in a foxhole?
The gold standard, I think, remains unspoken in polite company. However, the gold standard is not the same thing as gold in an investment portfolio. The latter may make some sense, although my own preference is for boring non-US assets.
Not all institutions can be decentralised. Some will have to be moved. The interbank Forex market turns over $7 trn a day, and is cleared through a specialist cooperative bank in New York. You can imagine the damage that Musk's oprichniki could do if they gained access to the servers.
There is an interesting technical problem here. Anything like CLS bank has to be located in the New World, because the New World countries are the closest ones to the east of the International Date Line. In other words, the western-most country is at the end of the world's business day, so daily payments must settle there. Of course, Vancouver is a nice city.
If banks ever move to 24/7 settlement, this constraint will go away.
we are in the prequel to Lionel Shrivers’ “The Mandibles“