Related:
- 2-1a0.1 Complacency will kill you (‘The Red Queen effect’)
- 2-1a6 ‘Incentives’ - Incentives drive (almost) everything. Understand your incentives.
- 7-1a2a3 Win at the corner then come back (傾く・バロック)
- 7-1d Create something simpler-faster-cheaper for things we’ve been doing for thousands of years
- 8-1b Look for places where we’ve taken an offline experience and put it online (physical ⇒ intermediate) but haven’t fundamentally innovated yet (⇒ internet-native)
- 8-1e You have to go beyond skeuomorphism. Native means novelty.
E.g.,
- Mr. Beast and YouTube
- Bearstone on SWIFT hasn’t changed
- The existing system is both deeply entrenched and highly profitable. Changing the underlying architecture would require coordinated upgrades to national payment systems like Fedwire in the US, TARGET2 in Europe, and their equivalents elsewhere, plus the core software and operational routines of thousands of banks. That is a massive coordination and capital-expenditure problem. Visible wire fees and invisible FX spreads together generate billions in annual revenue each year. The complexity and opacity of the current system—multi-hop routing, non-transparent pricing, and lagged settlement—help protect those margins. If every sender could see, line by line, which institution took how much at which step, competitive pressure would appear quickly. As long as people only see “I sent $10,000” on one side and “my friend received less” on the other, without a clear breakdown, the machine keeps humming.