In this episode, Sunny Ray sits down with Faisal, a cross-border payments specialist and host of the long-running podcast Around the Coin, to unpack why bitcoin was never destined to be the remittance rail many expected. Faisal, an electrical engineer who spent sixteen years running an IT firm before a sabbatical led him to Quora and eventually to bitcoin in April 2013, argues that bitcoin has become digital gold, a store of value rather than a fast-moving transactional currency. He walks through the hidden mechanics of how money actually moves internationally, explaining that dollars physically sit in New York ledgers and that cross border payments are really just correspondent bank bookkeeping. The conversation ranges across the history of the Federal Reserve, the hidden tax of inflation, Turkey and Venezuela's currency crises, and why bitcoin's real power is forcing people to question what money even is. Faisal predicts a future of interoperable blockchains connected through something like the interledger protocol rather than a single winner. A rich, wide-ranging monetary history lesson wrapped inside a bitcoin origin story.
A cross-border payments veteran explains why bitcoin is digital gold, not a remittance rail, and how money really moves.
Do you think bitcoin itself is going to change remittances?
No, I do not think bitcoin per se will change remittances. We have discovered bitcoin is the equivalent of gold, which is not really used for cross border transfers but for balance of payments and building reserves and wealth that stays locked up in one place. I think remittances will be handled by smaller, nimble, decentralized values that can move instantly and settle at scale, not necessarily bitcoin itself.
Are you intrigued by the Lightning Network?
The Lightning Network is meant to improve the bitcoin network itself, but asking if I am passionate about it is like asking if I am passionate about the Atari or the IBM 8088. There are improved projects like Cardano, Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Cosmos, and others rethinking the fundamental equation. Eventually we will have an interledger protocol connecting different blockchains, and it will not be the Lightning Network specifically but variations of that idea.
Wait, what happened, did something happen with inflation in Turkey?
Yes, the lira lost about fifteen to twenty percent of its value over the year. So the lira became much cheaper compared to the dollar, going from about six lira per dollar to eight. If you earn in dollars everything got twenty percent cheaper for you, but if you live in Turkey and earn in lira, anything dollar based became twenty percent more expensive.
What is your story, what eventually brought you into bitcoin?
I am an electrical engineer, studied electromagnetics and quantum electrodynamics, and ran an IT firm for sixteen years working with financial institutions and governments. Around age forty, tired of 3am server crisis calls, I quit and took a year and a half sabbatical to study payment systems, which accidentally led me to Quora. I discovered bitcoin in April 2013, read the whitepaper twice, and had a eureka moment realizing private money had been solved and nothing could control it.
Where is the dollar physically? Where is my hundred dollar balance actually located?
I asked bank friends where my balance physically exists and they said it does not exist physically, it is digital, and effectively all dollars exist in New York. If you have ten thousand dollars in a Canadian account, it is not really in that account, it is under a Federal Reserve account that provides correspondent banking to the Canadian bank. The master record of truth sits in New York, which is also why sanctions work the way they do.
How does the international settlement system actually work between central banks?
There is no plane flying billions of dollars around. If India, Pakistan, and the Philippines each get a billion dollar loan, the Federal Reserve register just credits each country a billion and debits the Treasury reserves. Then it credits a correspondent bank like Deutsche Bank for India, which debits itself and credits RBI, which then credits ICICI. The total in India always has to match what Deutsche Bank in New York shows, because the ledger in New York is the record of truth.
What comes after bitcoin, is there a grand unification of cryptocurrencies coming?
In money there has not really been a grand unification, just acceptance, similar to different coordinate systems in mathematics connected by boundary conditions. In plain terms that is the interledger protocol. We will end up with different protocols, different ledgers, and different blockchains talking to each other through that kind of connective layer, with many colors and tastes, not one single dominant chain.
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