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Comment by uobytx | Hacker News Reader

I don't think USD -> Bitcoin -> USD is really the way to go on this. If you are trading in USD, why would you move it into bitcoin and back again? You already had it in USD.

If you need to buy some groceries in the US, you wouldn't trade your USD for CAD (Canada money), then bring CAD to a grocery store that also accepts USD. You would only bring CAD if you already had CAD.

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The point of the article is really that using bitcoin means using a lot of wildly dysfunctional intermediaries. USD to bitcoin and back again is, almost certainly, the most liquid market there is. It's a scalding indictment of bitcoin when part of the promise of bitcoin was that it would be quick, easy and cheap to perform these kind of transactions

to be fair to bitcoin, the primary point of bitcoin is that it's a decentralized ledger not under the control of a government or bank. Ease-of-use was an afterthought.

(but then again, it ended up not being very decentralized, either)

> to be fair to bitcoin, the primary point of bitcoin is that it's a decentralized ledger not under the control of a government or bank.

Which, as we can see, costs a lot of money and doesn't add much value for legal uses.

USD to EUR and back again is the most liquid market there is but if you do it in the stupidest way possible (like at the kiosk at the airport) you'll also lose way more than 4%.

OP is either an idiot who thinks he can day trade but can't plan ahead and calculate fees or (more likely) he has an agenda against Bitcoin.

It does in his use case, which seems to be a relatively dodgy day trading firm, they are the ones who instigate the fees not the bitcoin network. Funding this by using localbitcoins would have cut down his wait time and his fees on the buy side, however for funding his account that firm would charge those fees whether it was bitcoin or bank transfer. Sure he would have paid small transaction fees on his bitcoin transactions but they would still be a fraction of the $35 international transfer fee from the bank.

Because one of the espoused values of Bitcoin is the ease of transferring it across international borders.

Where "it" is Bitcoin and not USD.

But bitcoin needs to be transformed back into a currency at some point to use it. There is no point in a wire transfer if the person at the other end isn't going to use it.

Yes, some retailers accept bitcoin, most don't.

Even those that do price in their local currency.

Looks like Bitcoin still hasn't achieved unit-of-account status yet, even among those who use it as a medium of exchange.

I always felt the dream with BTC was to trade without the need to convert back. That BTC be a competing but decentralized currency - in its own right.

Then what about comparison to the cost of getting dollars into a country whose government is very hostile to them, like Venezuela?

But the goal is to transfer USD across international borders...

Usually you need something other than USD on the other side of an international border. In which case, USD to BTC to XYZ is very likely to be cheaper than a wire transfer.

I've been doing it myself for years. You have to use limit orders on cheap exchanges (not brokers!) and sometimes wait for the spread to close but you can usually get it within 25 basis points of spot.

totally agree. the author of that article completely doesn't even mention the fact that his bank wire is already in the proper currency and doesn't require a currency conversion. currency conversion from your bank will definitely cost you money - min is 1% fee for the bank, usually a bit more. So while the banking wire is a flat fee, a currency conversion would have cost him a fair amount.

if he already owned BTC he would have avoided the first two steps and saved himself $180.

> if he already owned BTC he would have avoided the first two steps and saved himself $180

and still ended up paying $20 more as for using a wire.

That was my first thought as well, but:

If I really was converting from USD to CAD and back, would the experience be better? Would the fees be lower? I suspect they would. Would it take as long?

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