The Fiat Payment Stack
summary
Fiat payments are traced as ledger adjustments across Fed reserve accounts, nostro/vostro relationships, ACH batching, Visa’s settlement bank and merchant acquirers, not as money moving; fiat money is a commercial bank liability so every payment is credit that locks capital and incurs cost. A simple Square+Verifone+Visa purchase routes through 11 third parties and about 14 payments (clearing, ISA netting, rebatching) before the merchant is paid. The system works but at measurable delay, capital cost and counterparty risk; Lightning is presented as atomic, permissionless and debit-based.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (14)
- 0:00Fiat payment stack intro
- 1:25Bitcoin vs fiat myths debunked
- 3:53Fiat money and settlement basics
- 5:38Simple bank-to-bank payment
- 9:10Fed Wire and inter-branch complexity
- 11:16Nostro vostro accounts and costs
- 11:59B2B payments and ACH clearing
- 13:25Credit card networks explained
- 16:56Visa and Mastercard roles
- 17:16Amex and Square models
- 20:28Full fiat payment flow
- 25:24Fiat payment process recap
- 28:11Fiat vs Lightning Network
- 29:14Summary and efficiency tropes
related talks
45mCrossborder Settlements Panel
24mBuilding Planet-Scale Payment Platforms
15mBuilding Stablecoin Payments at Scale
30mBitcoin's Role in Traditional Banks
48mPayments: The Next Frontier
01h 27mProgrammable Money and the Future of Enterprise Blockchain
23mEnabling Embedded Finance through Composable Architecture
26mAn interconnected Web3 economy