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Cuba to suspend Visa and Mastercard transactions, citing US sanctions
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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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
None of what they said precludes centralization. You can have a centralized FOSS platform, like the Linux kernel, for example.
Also, I don't necessarily subscribe to your premise. It needs to be organized, but I don't think I agree it needs to be centralized.
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.
I don't use it, but modern blockchain isn't how it used to be. It's no longer proof-of-work, where you do a bunch of computation for nothing (with a few exceptions that still do this).
Basically, what's required is just a receipt that says "X owes Y $Z", and that needs to be accepted by nearly everyone. That's essentially what blockchain is, and it's also what banks and payment services do. You just need a system you can prove is secure and accurate. Centralization is one option for this, but I see no reason for it to be required.
Also, I disagree that this works because of government backing. That has to do with currency, and there's no reason this needs that. We just need to track value exchanged. It doesn't even need to be a real currency as long as we agree on the value and it's stable. Government backed currency is an option for this, but not necessary.
In addition, any payment provider, centralized or otherwise, can use this currency. Nothing about a government backed currency makes it unsuitable to be used for a decentralized payment processor. The only thing that matters to that functioning is that it's secure and reliable. It could use USD, Bitcoin, or cows for all the user cares, as long as it's stable and they can get their value when they need it. Payment processors usually use whatever local currency is, but they aren't actually using that money. That's a display. It's exchanged when needed, or there would be a ton of processing that isn't required.
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.
I didn't say peer-to-peer or permissionless, but that would help. Anyway, yes, those are all things cryptocurrency is, but they are not cryptocurrency. They are a set of design requirements. Cryptocurrency is not necessary for those requirements. There are other ways to potentially meet those requirements, which could be better than cryptocurrency.
This isn't to say cryptocurrency isn't the right solution for this. It might be. I don't think the limitations are as impossible as you do. Sure, costs for running the network would be higher, but what's the cost for running Visa? I have no idea, but I'm sure it isn't free. Cost is just something that has to happen. There could be a donation funded foundation that runs it, or it could be funded by a portion of each transaction, or something else. Costs are a hurdle, not a barrier.
To clarify for others bitcoins transaction limit is a choice. Bitcoin blocks originally had no limit. One was put in place to limit spam. The restriction could be lifted now but doing so would increase the storage and bandwidth requirements for nodes.
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:
unit64_tso 64 bitsWe'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.
Yeah, like I said it would increase bandwidth and storage for nodes. Credit cards themselves aren’t a feature of the u.s. dollar. Nothing prevents additional networks, like credit cards, from also processing transactions and then doing settlements in bitcoin. The ACH network processes 35.2 billion transactions per year. How many settlement transactions between banks are there? Fewer than ACH. The current US financial system isn’t really built on the dollar but numerous independent networks.
I mean good TBH modern financial systems need to collapse for us to survive.
What you think goes away when a financial system collapses: dodgy bankers, predatory financial institutions, money influencing politics, centralisation of wealth, rampant corruption
What actually goes away: access to cheap credit, the ability to transact business remotely, the ability to plan for the future financially, and your ability to save
What remains after the financial system collapses: dodgy bankers, predatory financial institutions, money influencing politics, centralisation of wealth, rampant corruption
A fixable problem.
You can start fixing that right away, financial system collapse or not.
hopefully but the point is the purported solution did not solve them
I already have none of those things? And neither do like a solid 80% of my peers. These things have already gone away for a large swathe of people.
No, you do. You just don't realise it. If you live in any developed country or even most developing countries, you have all of these. Your comment is really giving off the vibes of someone who doesn't know what they have because they've never lived in a world without it.
When I say "access to cheap credit", I mean that you can, if you want, go down to your bank and ask for a personal loan. As long as you are not already overburdened by debt and have a decent income, the bank will lend money to you at interest rates that medieval kings could only dream of.
Without the financial and legal infrastructure to facilitate, what are your options? Without the state to enforce debts and contracts through legal channels, people historically have resorted to threats and violence instead. And all that risk means interest rates get jacked through the roof. Triple digit APRs, baby.
When I say you have the ability to "transact business remotely", I mean that you can pay money, be paid money, and conduct financial business without having to physically attend in person to exchange physical objects (like coins or banknotes). The financial infrastructure in place allows you to transfer money anywhere in the world from your fingertips. You can sell or buy almost anything online, pay, and have it delivered to your doorstep without ever talking to anyone or leaving your house. Without that financial infrastructure, your options are pretty limited. Either unregulated trust-based informal systems, or you have to go and bring physical goods or money to someone.
When I say you "have the ability to plan for your future financially", I don't mean you have the ability to plan yourself into a comfortable future. Being poor doesn't negate this. You have a job (presumably), and every month you can expect some regular amount of money to appear into your bank account. You can plan on that happening. You can also plan on the fact that said money has a predictable value. You also can predict with good certainty what that money can buy. All of that is because the financial system has created an incredible amount of currency stability. Even countries with poor economies by modern standards are incredibly stable by historic ones.
When I say you "have the ability to save", I don't mean that you personally are guaranteed to have excess money to save. I mean that the very act of saving is not made impossible. If you have the money, you can put it in the bank, and you can reasonably expect to get that money back later, possibly with interest. In comparison, in a country that's in a state of economic collapse, you can't put money in the bank without risking not being able to get it back. You can store cash at home without the risk that the Government will just declare your money invalid or inflate away its value. You might not even be able to buy gold because the Government forbids "hoarding" gold. The act of saving, the accumulation of excess money, is literally impossible for the everyday person in that scenario.
This might not apply to you, but as a person whose family immigrated from a second-world country to a first-world one, I see far too many Westerners complaining about how bad they have it and how they wish everything would collapse. Buddy, if everything collapsed you'd have it even worse. This isn't even "champagne socialism" or whatever the hell the reactionaries call it, it's just plain ignorance of how the world works and what one shouldn't take for granted.
Lemmy loves open source except if it is bitcoin or Ethereum. I don’t get why so many are so happy for their government to be able to control their wealth through currency manipulation. Plus governments also use money to suppress dissent or ideas the gov’t doesn’t like, aka things like Wikileaks.
Cryptocurrency is also prone to manipulation and it doesn't have to be through the protocol. Did you think the increase in value of bitcoin to over $100k per coin was organic?
Do you have any evidence or are you just making things up?
https://quantpedia.com/a-very-influential-paper-about-tether-bitcoin-relationship-manipulation/
So their “evidence” is that people use new tether to buy bitcoin after bitcoin prices have gone down. Fundamentally they don’t show that people aren’t buying tether but they falsely claim it is evidence of manipulation. The data could also be explained by folks purchasing new tether to buy bitcoin. The paper is from 2018 and tether has gone through numerous government investigations since with no major action. This paper lacks anything resembling real analysis and does not meet the standards of a scientific paper.
Source: I’ve been on more than 40 physics papers and have personally solved more than one impossible physics problem.
I bet you claim that the dollars in bitcoin ETFs aren’t real either. Bitcoin ETF is growing far faster than gold did. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blackrock-bitcoin-etf-becomes-fastest-192152139.html
You think it's not manipulated because institutions set up financial instruments that people can throw money into? Seeing as you felt the need to reply to the same message three times in rapid succession, I can see you're very confident that bitcoin is not manipulated. Have fun with your totally-not-manipulated bitcoin propped up by printing.
I’m not worried about bitcoin. I’m tired of the same nonsensical and unsubstantiated arguments made from ignorance. Have fun being ignorant.
That paper is bullshit. Source, have a PhD.
Come on. It's 2026 dude. Not 2014.
Making things up then.