WTF ! If the US decides to go after Bitcoin in a big and more overt way then they could disrupt transactions which go nowhere near a US bank.
Whatever makes you think that a US Dollar transfer would go nowhere near a US bank? For a brief description of how international wire transfers work, see this post on the Bitcoin Foundation's blog:
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=63It's a fiat currency after all, so it only exists because because the US says it does. And only US banks (or US branches of foreign banks) have access to the Federal Reserve system. This isn't unique to the US and the US Dollar, BTW - it's just how fiat currency works.
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Interesting read. So this goes to show that the US could interfere with many more USD transactions around the world if they wanted to.
I guess one way to get around any interference would be to have the sending bank convert the USD into a different currency in house before sending the wire.
For example a Japanese company that deals with a lot of foreign transfers could convert a USD payment into Yen and then wire the Yen to the recipient where it would be converted by the receiving bank into the accounts native currency. This would probably cost a bit more though.
As I said earlier, USD does not really exist out of the US, meaning here that your bank owns a bank account with another bank in America to deal with USD, and the same is true for the merchant's bank that you are sending money to.
The linked article is uniquely ignorant. There is such a thing as Eurodollars, which is a topic ignoramuses such as the people signing "opinions" for the Bitcoin Foundation scam are well advised to read up on.
Yes, people deal in dollars outside the reach of the US all the damned time. There's even a fucking futures on them, one of the higher volume future contracts traded. How can people be this clueless, seriously?
This is the problem of Bitcoin: nobodies make things with pompous names, such as "the official client" or "the bitcoin foundation" or what have you. These are no different in practice from a 3 inch reproduction of the Eiffel tower in masticated chewing gum.
Then nobodies go around quoting this bullshit as if it were meaningful or relevant. Then shit hits the fan and everyone is like... "oh...because Bitcoin". No. Not because Bitcoin. Because nobodies.