RE: The Death of SWIFT and the (Engineered) Death of the Dollar
Banks are very conservative and will want to use the most proven, secure and high liquidity & market cap blockchain for large interbank transfers.
While I love Steem, Proof of Stake networks are not as secure from Nation State attack as Bitcoin's POW. I've written about this in one of my early Steemit posts here.
This is particularly important in the context of the weaponisation of existing systems like SWIFT.
Also, it would require a huge increase in Steem's market cap and liquidity for it be suitable for large inter-bank transactions.
However I can see Steem being used for smaller consumer transactions where speed and no fees are important. Steem has the biggest and best community of active users of a crypto platform for content. It is natural to use the same platform to send funds as the community grows.
I wonder if Bitcoin as it currently is would be capable of that. Seven transactions per second simply does not pass muster. There are way too many banks out there relying on being able to transmit constantly day in day out. Most funds in the Bitcoin network are rarely transmitted. A second-tier solution would be required but Bitcoin has nothing in the pipeline that would fit the bill any time soon. Could Ripple replace SWIFT?
Yes, you're right that Bitcoin isn't currently capable of doing all the transactions that SWIFT does.
But a combination of Bitcoin for high value transactions and another faster (but less proven) blockchain (Steem) for smaller transactions would do the job nicely.
I'm not a fan of Ripple because it is not decentralised and would be subject to the same weaponising takeover discussed in the main article.
In my opinion, one potential plausible future scenario is one where Bitcoin is used as a decentralized global store of value and a large number of other tokens on different blockchains are used as money of different velocities, each further away from Bitcoin in terms of the compromise between security and speed/scalability. Cross-chain atomic swaps are used to move funds from chain to chain according to need. No one or even two chains will suffice for global mainstream use. There will most likely be thousands of well-known and trusted public and permissionless chains and a number of private ones. Consumers need not bother knowing exactly which route their funds take as those decisions will be taken by apps and layers of decentralized middleware.
Exactly! There is no one ring to rule them all. It will be a long tail of coins and chains.