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Comment by vizzah | Hacker News Reader

"near-zero transaction fees"? I wish.. it currently costs ~$1 to have your transaction executed within 10-30 minutes (next block).

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Yeah honestly, why do people keep saying this? Real life bitcoin transactions are much more expensive to users than credit card or ACH transfers.

I can move money for free between my bank accounts and the money is settled in three days. I can pay friends for free with venmo and it settles likewise.

Bitcoin needs to become significantly faster and cheaper, since there's nothing holding back the competition from getting more efficient from self-imposed limits.

>why do people keep saying this?

Because they're confusing theoretical transaction costs with reality. This isn't an insurmountable technical limitation; this is a political issue within the miner community.

"rapid clearing" as well. Takes a while to wait for the recommended number of confirms.

Not compared to wire transfers or credit card clearing, which can take 3 and 30 days, respectively.

That's still pretty great compared to wire transfers (~$15 fee, up to 72hrs). But I get your point; larger blocks can improve that greatly.

Maybe for the US, but in other western countries the fee is generally zero for individuals, or a few cents for businesses, and the time a few hours at most (often seconds).

In what western countries do you have wire transfers within hours? My experience in several EU countries is about two working days for transfers to be credited to the other person's account.

We must have different EU countries — though the EU is aiming for these systems to be available across the Eurozone by the end of the year (!) [1].

I know for certain it's very fast (around a minute, but the guaranteed time is <2 hours) for the UK, Denmark and Sweden. I think Norway and Finland have similar systems.

The British system is called Faster Payments: http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/about-us — I doubt the others have easily accessible information in English.

[1] https://www.nfcworld.com/2017/01/11/349411/european-central-...

> We must have different EU countries

Seems like it. France and Austria, in my case. If I pass a transfer in my French online banking system in the afternoon, my bank even tells me outright that it won't be processed until 8 o'clock the next morning (until which time I can undo it). It's then deducted from my account at that time, and the day after that the receiver sees the payment in their online banking as "you will be getting this money, but you don't have it yet, it's being processed".

> EU is aiming for these systems to be available

Well... it's "encouraging" providers to do it. Not holding my breath ;-)

On reflection, we might be talking about different things here. Can you use this Faster Payments service to transfer money to any bank account, like to a friend? It reads like this might only be meant for instantaneous payments to merchants. Those services exist elsewhere as well, yes.

Faster Payments is certainly used for transfers between individuals, like between friends and family. That website was mostly for the banks, sending money between friends is listed on a bank's site [0].

There's a mobile phone-base service, called PayM [1], which uses Faster Payments. I don't think it's used much, but the systems in Sweden (Swish) and Denmark (Mobilepay) are pretty much the same and are used a lot, probably the majority of payments to friends, and at least 25% of payments to small businesses.

[0] http://www.halifax.co.uk/onlinebankinghelp/fasterpayments.as...

[1] http://www.paym.co.uk/ or http://www.halifax.co.uk/aboutonline/things-you-can-do/pay-a...

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