In all the recent news to the War between Russia and Ukraine, I always ask myself about the economic consequences.

Recently the EU and US declared a ban of SWIFT currently focused on the state owned banks (which are also the biggest banks in Russia).

What’s SWIFT exactly?

Before getting into possible alternatives to SWIFT, let’s dive into what the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication is.

It is an Organization with HQ in Belgium which defines Standards and Services for the transaction of financial information. For that it has its own Network, the SWIFTNet. Data is transferred as XML-Files (I personally would prefer JSON, but old ppl like XML) and the Software is based on Java (again, I would prefer something like Go or Rust, but however old people love Java).

I stake a Cryptocurrency based of Peercoin on a Server since years. Multiple months ago this stopped because of the following error:

Coind: kernel.cpp:372: unsigned int GetStakeModifierChecksum(const CBlockIndex*): Assertion `pindex->pprev || pindex->GetBlockHash() == (!fTestNet ? hashGenesisBlock : hashGenesisBlockTestNet)' failed.

This Error often comes when your Blockchain is corrupted. The cause of my problem was an unexpected downtime.

To fix this:

1. Stop the Daemon
2. Backup the Folder of the Coin
3. Delete everything except wallet.dat, peers.dat and *.conf
4. Start the Daemon again (/path/to/coin/src/Coind -daemon -datadir=/path/to/coin/folder/)

I also published a German blog post about compiling AltCoins.