Oddbean new post about login | logout The trust was established and maintained in an impersonal, anonymous way? Senders and receivers didn't need to enter/exit the hawala system face to face?
You said Bankers 300 years ago demanded facial verification for withdrawals and now you're saying they required facial ID to do a txn? Do you know what you are talking about? It doesn't seem like it. 300 years ago, thet didn't require facial verification. It required a "key signature" from said merchant in the form of a note stipulating the amount and signature. The recipient could be anyone with the correct information to receive the money, at any time they were able to. You could send your child to collect the money, as long as they had the correct information.
Hawaladars don't issue bearer instruments afaik. The notes exchanged in a hawala system were in fact redeemable only by named parties or delegates satisfying other terms too like a secret, who would need to interact fave to face in order to receive & collect money without needing to move any money between regions (necessarily, or yet). Hawaladars enter the system through personal connections and lineage; you can't just sign up with a gmail account & build reputation ...or maybe you can and I'm misinformed about hawala? I've never used it. Surely other financial systems use bearer instruments vs promissory notes, but you mentioned hawala 🤷♂️
"interact fave to face in order to receive & collect money" what is going over your head here? At what point is this facial recognition required to verify to send and receive money? Simple. They do not require facial identification for sending or receiving money. So, what you're saying; it's not making any sense. "...or maybe you can and I'm misinformed about hawala" If your assumption is that you can use g-mail to sign up, as you've suggested, I think it'd be better to hit the books than question me.
Okay, I learned that hawaladars don't care *who* redeems their notes for local money at the receiving end. I thought their notes were more like modern bank checks that could be redeemed only by the named payee. But I guess hawaladars have a secure secret sharing system! Interesting that an honor system like that survives so long at the local exit points though
exactly. As mentioned, Hawala would operate between two trusted business men, often big traders in international routes. One person in Arabia could send money via they system to another in Tangier, without any explicit identification, only a key word or phrase. The merchants would carry the ledger of debts. Basically, zapping channels etc. A lot of what we do today is just a reinvention of the old systems.