No problem. Let's have a look at a high-qualify evidence-backed paragraph of the fine article:
> A stablecoin bank would be subject to exactly the same FinCEN and OFAC money movement restrictions and compliance checks as banks; so know your customer gating, counter-terrorism financing, sanctions enforcement, and anti-money laundering enforcement. And these compliance requirements are the almost always the bottleneck consumers may encounter when doing cross-border transactions, and it’s not a technology issue.
I'm not sure what the fine author means by "A stablecoin bank," and he doesn't really tell us, but it seems like he means a stablecoin issuer who processes creations and redemptions, but doesn't control the use of stablecoins otherwise. In this case, an example of "a completely legal and above-board stablecoin (which doesn’t exist today)" might be GUSD. I'm also not sure why he thinks DAI is illegal, because again he just throws out a bunch of claims without substantiating them.
Anyway, he was actually talking about how stablecoins don't provide any benefit for international settlements. For whatever reason, I have bank accounts in the US and Japan, and I often have to move funds to Japan to pay bills. This takes about a week and costs about 50 basis points. The fine author would like us to know that the 1-week delay and 50 basis point charge are required by law. While this is not my area of expertise, my impression is that none of the regulations mentioned by the author require this process to take 1 week and cost 50 basis points when I am remitting funds *to myself*. I am under the impression, which may be wrong, that I am not breaking the law if I pay for goods in SPL USDC instead of waiting a week to move dollars from FTX to account at Shinsei bank via my US bank and Transferwise at the cost of taking a phone call at 2am and paying 50 basis points plus 20 dollars.
> Nothing about stablecoins is either necessary nor desirable, and any alleged improvement these systems may offer at the moment are purely illusory and derived only from the unstable situation that they temporarily inhabit a yet-unregulated shadow banking system that is either non-compliant or entirely scofflawing.
This seems like an unsubstantiated claim that it's a crime to pay for goods and services using SPL USDC in every country. I don't think that's true, but maybe if the fine author could elaborate I could learn more here.
> A regulated stablecoin bank is just a bank, but with a core ledger built on a terribly inefficient and bizarre piece of software not built for that purpose. All this while guzzling entire nation states worth of energy for no reason. Using inefficient blockchain as core banking software makes old legacy core banking solutions like Jack Henry look like a Ferrari by comparison. Our European allies all built extremely reliable real time payments like SEPA that work marvelously and they didn’t need any stablecoins.
The fine author seems unaware that there are currently deployed blockchains that can process the transaction volume of Visa and use less energy than Visa. That's discouraging, given that the fine author has chosen to write in such an authoritative tone about these technologies.
SEPA might be fine if you live in Europe and everyone you ever need to pay or accept payments from lives in Europe and has never lived anywhere else. It just doesn't do much for me personally when I have to move money from the US to Japan to pay living expenses, my lawyer is in Dubai and wants to get paid in Switzerland, and my developer in Japan wants to get paid in Hong Kong. So I just keep paying like $60 and taking phone calls at 2am to send wire transfers to my lawyer and dreaming of the day I can pay less than a penny and not take any phone calls at 2am if my lawyer adopts existing technology. The fine author would like me to know that this isn't actually a problem and I'm just delusional. That's not particularly helpful.
> A stablecoin bank would be subject to exactly the same FinCEN and OFAC money movement restrictions and compliance checks as banks; so know your customer gating, counter-terrorism financing, sanctions enforcement, and anti-money laundering enforcement. And these compliance requirements are the almost always the bottleneck consumers may encounter when doing cross-border transactions, and it’s not a technology issue.
I'm not sure what the fine author means by "A stablecoin bank," and he doesn't really tell us, but it seems like he means a stablecoin issuer who processes creations and redemptions, but doesn't control the use of stablecoins otherwise. In this case, an example of "a completely legal and above-board stablecoin (which doesn’t exist today)" might be GUSD. I'm also not sure why he thinks DAI is illegal, because again he just throws out a bunch of claims without substantiating them.
Anyway, he was actually talking about how stablecoins don't provide any benefit for international settlements. For whatever reason, I have bank accounts in the US and Japan, and I often have to move funds to Japan to pay bills. This takes about a week and costs about 50 basis points. The fine author would like us to know that the 1-week delay and 50 basis point charge are required by law. While this is not my area of expertise, my impression is that none of the regulations mentioned by the author require this process to take 1 week and cost 50 basis points when I am remitting funds *to myself*. I am under the impression, which may be wrong, that I am not breaking the law if I pay for goods in SPL USDC instead of waiting a week to move dollars from FTX to account at Shinsei bank via my US bank and Transferwise at the cost of taking a phone call at 2am and paying 50 basis points plus 20 dollars.
> Nothing about stablecoins is either necessary nor desirable, and any alleged improvement these systems may offer at the moment are purely illusory and derived only from the unstable situation that they temporarily inhabit a yet-unregulated shadow banking system that is either non-compliant or entirely scofflawing.
This seems like an unsubstantiated claim that it's a crime to pay for goods and services using SPL USDC in every country. I don't think that's true, but maybe if the fine author could elaborate I could learn more here.
> A regulated stablecoin bank is just a bank, but with a core ledger built on a terribly inefficient and bizarre piece of software not built for that purpose. All this while guzzling entire nation states worth of energy for no reason. Using inefficient blockchain as core banking software makes old legacy core banking solutions like Jack Henry look like a Ferrari by comparison. Our European allies all built extremely reliable real time payments like SEPA that work marvelously and they didn’t need any stablecoins.
The fine author seems unaware that there are currently deployed blockchains that can process the transaction volume of Visa and use less energy than Visa. That's discouraging, given that the fine author has chosen to write in such an authoritative tone about these technologies.
SEPA might be fine if you live in Europe and everyone you ever need to pay or accept payments from lives in Europe and has never lived anywhere else. It just doesn't do much for me personally when I have to move money from the US to Japan to pay living expenses, my lawyer is in Dubai and wants to get paid in Switzerland, and my developer in Japan wants to get paid in Hong Kong. So I just keep paying like $60 and taking phone calls at 2am to send wire transfers to my lawyer and dreaming of the day I can pay less than a penny and not take any phone calls at 2am if my lawyer adopts existing technology. The fine author would like me to know that this isn't actually a problem and I'm just delusional. That's not particularly helpful.
For the rest of the things the fine author has ever written, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law