I want to do a sanity check here. The six largest payment cards networks (Visa, UnionPay, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, and Discover) processed about 770 billion transactions in 2024 (source). That’s two years ago, and certainly as more of the world transitions to cashless payments that number has probably increased, but let’s just use the 770 billion number for the sake of calculation.

Bitcoin transactions are actually fairly inefficient in terms of transaction size because of their UXTO-based coin system. An account-based system like Ethereum can result in smaller transaction sizes. Let’s take the minimum transaction data that one would need to store for a payments-only network:

• The sending account number, which is usually 128 bits
• The amount, let’s say it’s a unit64_t so 64 bits
• The receiving account number, another 128 bits
• A digital signature generated by the sender. Let’s use Schnorr signatures, which are relatively short. A 512-bit signature will provide 128 bits of security.

We’ll ignore Segwit since witness data still needs to be stored, that’s just Bitcoin’s cheeky way of expanding the block size without explicitly declaring a larger block size.

To allow for indexing, let’s allow some kind of tree structure and say it has overhead of 32 bytes per node (it will probably require more, but let’s just roll with this for now).

Total: 136 bytes per tx

Multiplied by 770 billion gives 104.72 PB. Even if you had a block every 10 seconds like Ethereum does, the block size needed to process that kind of volume would be 33.2 MB.

Storing a blockchain that grows by over a hundred petabytes a year is impossible for all but the most well-funded organisations. That’s two orders of magnitude out of reach for the largest non-crypto open-source projects (the Wikimedia Foundation), four orders of magnitude out of reach for your average open-source project, five orders of magnitude out of reach for ordinary FOSS enthusiasts, and eight orders of magnitude out of reach of everyday users.

Blockchain is a cool technology and I grant that Satoshi Nakamoto was a pretty smart guy and a brilliant computer scientist, but it’s just not suitable for handling the types of volume we deal with in the modern financial system.

I’m sorry, but you’re describing an open-source, decentralised, peer-to-peer, permissionless digital payment network. Which is exactly what cryptocurrency is. But I think you know that if you openly advocate in favour of cryptocurrency here, you instantly get downvotes on Lemmy. So you’re doing it in a fairly roundabout way.

I don’t know where you get the idea that blockchains are no longer proof-of-work. Bitcoin is still the largest cryptocurrency and it’s still using proof-of-work. It’s not really what I’m getting at though, when I say that a decentralised system is 1000x the people each doing 100x the work. Even a proof-of-stake system will still have a lot of work that each node has to do, validation transactions, and that amount of data that has to be passed around serves as a ceiling on transaction capacity. Bitcoin is notoriously low at 1 (“virtual”) MB every 10 minutes. But even larger limits or Ethereum’s sharding strategy would be utterly overwhelmed by the transaction volumes of traditional finance.

J. P. Morgan is absolutely relevant in the modern day.

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Sometimes. But even if it is temporary, it’s still good while it lasts.

Nothing too deep about it. That’s the whole thought.

I feel like if you want to blame a company for creating the modern financial system, John Pierpont Morgan and the company which bears his name are probably 10x more responsible.

Aye, I suppose your right on the first one.

With modern fiat money though I don’t see how any model other than a centralised one could work. The Government’s backing is what gives it value. Blockchain is just a way to have 1000x the people each spend 100x the resources just so it isn’t one entity running the show.

Well sometimes in their pursuit of making money, their interests coincidentally align with those of the public and they make the world a better place as a result.

For example, Valve trying to protect their market dominance in the PC gaming industry has resulted in large improvements to game distribution, consumer protection, and convenience for computer game players.

Another example is the mail order drug company owned by Mark Cuban (the billionaire). He’s making buckets of money from it, but their profit model is to cut out the insurers to buy drugs from manufacturers at wholesale prices and sell them for cheap. So the medicines he sells are drastically cheaper. I actually am a beneficiary of this. I normally buy my medication from his company for $5 a bottle but one time I spilled it and had to get a refill from a local grocery store pharmacy which cost $100 a bottle (insurance paid $85).

But at least the pills from the grocery store pharmacy were blackberry flavour.

Well, yes. The Americans have money. People like earning that money.

Unless you want to count Bitcoin (which technically is a free and open source payment network), payment networks really do need a central organisation to run the network and do the record-keeping. Decentralised payments really just don’t have the properties desirable for modern financial systems

I’m glad most countries are developing their own national payment systems to get away from those leeches. The US central bank actually developed its own instant payment system called FedNow but you’ve probably never heard of it. Wonder why? Because participation is voluntary and banks aren’t required to give their customers access to it…

Nestlé? Amazon? HSBC? The fucking VOC?

Come on, there are a lot of evil companies but it’s crazy to pretend Visa and Mastercard are somehow the worst of them.

I’m surprised Visa and Mastercard were allowed to operate in Cuba before this. Most US financial companies don’t serve the five countries on the US’s naughty list: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia.

That doesn’t prove anything. There’s no proof that the person currently using it is the same person as the person who created the account.

By the way, you might also notice this argument also works against age verification systems where the user’s age is verified only once. Unless you intend to check their identity every single time they log in.

Age verification is just a ham-fisted way for the state to try to take over a role that should be exercised by parents. Parental controls exist, people!

Governments don’t hate privacy intrinsically. They just don’t think it’s important. Violating privacy using mass surveillance has no visible downside to the uninformed public. Policy makers just notice that destroying privacy makes it easier to catch cybercriminals and decide it’s a worthwhile trade off. You probably disagree with that. But there are far too many people who just go along with it.

I’m late, but BK is Burger King, an American fast food hamburger restaurant. They are known for giving foldable cardboard crowns to kids who eat there (see picture).

I know someone who fits that description, but when he applied, the Pokémon Company dug up his past and denied his application. His wife was approved though, so he’s fine with it.

But the Pokémon Company has no way to differentiate between a genuinely changed person and someone who has a seedy past and is still seedy. So they err on the safe side. At the location I run events at, some casual events are between 50-80% children so I understand why.

I am a TCG judge, but there are also judges for the video game and Pokémon Go. I can only answer why the TCG has judges.

Sometimes, the rules present some ambiguity, so a judge is needed to resolve disputes. There are also niche edge cases which not all people are aware of (for example, you generally can’t play a card that searches your deck if you have no cards in your deck, unless the card has other effects), so it’s helpful to have a rules expert on hand.

Some tournaments have significant prizes on the line. I’ve reffed events where the total prize pool was hundreds of dollars. When that happens, inevitably, there are disputes and people make mistakes. Judges are there to enforce the tournament rules and serve as the official arbiters for disputes. Sometimes, people inadvertently break the rules, by playing cards they’re not supposed to or by forgetting to perform a required action. When that happens, a judge steps in to resolve. And sometimes, disputes are just petty adults acting like children, like complaining that your opponent did not shuffle their deck throroughly enough (but sometimes we do observe actual children not shuffling their deck well enough, but they’re children so we just go and shuffle for them)

Judges also deal with disciplinary problems too. For example, we have the ability to issue penalties to players for rules infractions or disqualify or ban them for being disruptive. These penalties are recorded on the Pokémon Company’s player database and if a player gets kicked out of too many events (especially prestigious ones like a regional tournament, North America/European Internationals, or the world championship), they eventually may be prevented from attending events.

It’s fortunately never happened at any event I’ve worked at, but an examples of some things that would get a player disqualified would be failing a deck legality check unless the player fixes it immediately, cursing excessively, annoying other players and refusing to stop when asked, being caught cheating, wearing inappropriate clothing/not exercising good personal hygiene, or drinking alcohol or being drunk/high.

The test is 100% multiple choice, so I have no idea. It’s graded automatically and if you fail, you know immediately and you can retake it in a week.

You apply online, take an exam, and pass a background check. Then you go and obtain at least one of the certs, which are just online courses.

It’s not difficult, but to pass the exam you do need to study the provided manuals and rulebooks.