Comment by miki123211

3 hours ago

I have said this many times, and will probably have to say it many more: Stablecoins are nothing but a face-saving measure for the US government.

It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system, even if some of them were perhaps a bit too ill-advised. It's much easier to say "this is shiny new tech, very different from that old tech over there; we support innovation so we won't impose KYC requirements on it", even if there's no logical reason to do that.

As it stands, stablecoins let you make a keypair in the privacy of your own home (or your own agent sandbox, as it were) and immediately start transacting. They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default, with the US government still able to block you if they have a specific reason. No traditional bank I know of, in any country, works like this. This is a valuable capability to have, technologically, even if there's no technical reason why a Postgres database and a REST API couldn't provide the same service, but faster and more easily.

> It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system

It’s politically irrelevant more than impossible. Most Americans simple aren’t visibly encumbered by KYC/AML enough to make it a priority.

> They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default

So were banks in the wildcat era.