Welcome to moderndosh.com.
I thought I’d use this first post to explore some of the common misconceptions and misunderstandings around how payments and financial technology actually work — and why getting the details right matters more than most people realise.
I was watching the latest instalment of The Night Manager last night and couldn’t help but laugh at how effortlessly money was being moved between Belize and Colombia. For most people, that simply isn’t the reality of today’s payment and banking systems — but waiting five days for a payment to clear doesn’t make for great television.
When we talk about money and the financial system, these misunderstandings — whether through lack of detail, incorrect assumptions, or limited real-world experience in the payments or crypto space — can lead to fundamental mistakes. As Jack Reacher puts it: details matter.
Too often, discussions about payments focus on what should be possible rather than what actually happens behind the scenes. That gap between perception and reality is where bad assumptions, flawed products, and real financial risk tend to emerge.
Why so much of payments is misunderstood
Some of this confusion stems from terminology being reused or repurposed. Words like beneficiary, payee, and creditor can point to the same party, but they carry different meanings depending on the context and can be interpreted in very different ways.
Another source is the “reinvention” of tried-and-tested concepts, where the underlying process hasn’t really changed — only the technology or the parties involved have.
Having spent time working with real payment flows — not just diagrams or demos — I’ve seen how small misunderstandings can cascade into very real problems.
There’s also often a grey area in how these systems are portrayed. I recently saw an example of retail payments being demonstrated on Ethereum. It looked impressive, but glossed over an important detail: the retailer was exposed. They hadn’t actually received the funds into their account — nor did they have a clear legal or operational guarantee that settlement would complete — yet the customer had already walked out with the goods.
Through this site, I’ll be dissecting much of what’s happening across payments and financial technology, offering explanations, suggestions, and practical recommendations — always with an emphasis on ensuring that the details really do matter.
In upcoming posts, I’ll cover topics such as:
- What is a wallet really
- Where crypto and traditional payments genuinely differ (and where they don’t)
- Why there isn’t one chain to rule them all
- What do stablecoins really mean for cross border payments
I have a number of posts lined up over the coming weeks that will walk through specific topics and concepts in more depth. I hope you find them useful and interesting.