"UnBank you Very Much"
Yesterday I walked into a US Bank branch because I wanted someone to verify something that is completely unclear. Never mind the 'Make an Appointment' button went to a dead link online with my desktop and confirmed on my cellphone app (same site.)
The situation:
Our daughter is in France for 2 years and because of French law/rules/regulations, she has to have a French Bank Account in order for her to function over there. So she can get a French phone, deal with locals/cash for housing and some food. (People like cash everywhere, hmmmm.)
Regardless, I simply need to move money, transfer from our US Bank Account to hers or from her US Bank account to the French account.
I explained this to the US Bank employee and she confirmed what I already knew without attaching the price (not clear anywhere on their site.)
US Bank: "In order to do this, you have to do a wire transfer."
Me: "That is the only way? I need this to be ongoing for two years, sporadically but probably frequently."
US Bank: "Yes, the only way."
Me: "How much is each transfer?"
US Bank: "$50"
Me: "$50, regardless of denomination?"
US Bank: "Yes."
Me: "That's ridiculous...(me turning my back and walking out with the still unresolved issue.)"
From a previous note, I can't us Strike (they require my daughter bring in a utility bill with her name on it for part of the KYC process.)
Does anyone know if Venmo or PayPal or CashApp or any other 'mainstream' POS Fiat based online system can beat the 1950s Bank technology with a US to France simple transaction?
Bathtub Section of Extraneous
I am showing you how there are 6-7 hops in a Venmo transaction.
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While he was in front of Congress (2020) to Brian Brooks, one of my favorite Bitcoin voices. Brooks gets drowned out online by Bitcoin Maxis sometimes because he talks about Web3/Blockchain but he is freakin' smart and his Bitcoin analysis is incredible. I am going to repost more on him later.
For now, when Binance's nuts were in the vice, the Binance filing, Sam explains the previous two CEOs at Binance to CZ (Slea-Zy), known as Hostile CEO A and Hostile CEO B
CEO A is: Catherine Coley who is presumably still missing.
CEO B is: Brian Brooks (Former Head of Crypto for Trump/CEO of Bitfury)
Mr. Kustoff: (03:31:56)
Thank you, Ms. Haas. Mr. Brooks, if I could, to you, thank you also for being here. If I could, I think obviously there are people who believe that cryptocurrency is difficult, maybe even impossible to track. Can you talk about that as it relates to the blockchain? And we talk about illicit activities, alleged illicit activities, oftentimes will be investigated by federal authorities. Could you explain maybe the fallacy in that as if you were talking to our local police chiefs or local sheriffs?
Mr. Brooks: (03:32:37)
Sure. Well, thank you for the question, Mr. Kustoff. I actually do this talk at local rotary clubs and things around the country all the time. So I think I can do that pretty well. I think the easiest way to understand it is let’s contrast blockchain transactions with normal banking transactions to see how much easier it is to trace them on a blockchain than it is in a banking transaction. So let’s imagine for a moment that… I would never do this because this would be flagrantly illegal, but let’s say I bought you lunch. Okay? And let’s say that afterwards you wanted to Venmo me your payment back, right? So you hit your Venmo button on your iPhone and you sent me money. What many people don’t understand is that there’s seven or eight different steps in the Venmo transaction.
So all Venmo does is send an instruction to your bank. Your bank then receives that instruction, they write it down in their books and records, and then they then send an instruction to an underlying transfer network. It could be the automated clearing house, it could be the Fedwire system or something else. That system then contacts my bank. It inquires whether my bank has enough money to pay you. Once that’s been done, then there’s a debit from my account. It’s very complicated. And in any one of those steps, information could be lost. There could be a breach, something bad could happen.
Versus in a blockchain, there are no intermediaries. I’m not sending instructions to a third party to send instructions to another third party, to eventually send you money. I’ve sent you money. And when the block is validated, I can see that my wallet address transferred that value to your wallet address, simple as that. The easiest way for people to understand how easy this is, because we’ve had a lot of talk of hacking and cyber security issues, the reason that we found the bad guys in the Colonial Pipeline hack, was because they asked for Bitcoin. If they had asked for diamonds, if they had asked for cash, if they’d asked for almost any other thing, we’d never have caught the bad guys. We caught the bad guys because, not in spite of, because they used Bitcoin and we could tell exactly where the money went.
