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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

«everybody is HODLing, nobody is buying pizzas or taxi with it. »

Every single Bitcoin submission, an HN user like you will say this. But it's not true. Payments in bitcoins are sharply increasing. BitPay alone saw their payments volume grow by 328% yearly: https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/

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Payments with bitcoin are too expensive to be practical. Hell, with credit card perks, credit card companies pay YOU to use their payment method. Crypto is the other way around.

BitPay processes a lot of B2B payments which are typically in the multi-thousand dollars range. For that amount a user has no problems paying a ~$20 txn fee.

I can wire a hundred thousand bucks for $25 through my bank and it clears in an hour or so, quicker if I call them. And the recipient can immediately withdraw that as cash. This doesn't seem like a killer application of the tech, am I missing something other than the fact that banks aren't always open?

You have to trust the banks not to freeze the funds.

«banks aren't always open»

There you have it. In an always connected world, it's practically an anachronism to have to wait the "next business day" to send a wire when you missed the cutoff time of the day :-/

Plus: irreversibility of txns, escaping corrupt governments seizing funds, escaping inflation, etc.

really an hour? maybe inside the country, internationally is days and more expensive of course depending of the bank, then you add the bank commission for having an account with them, all the paperwork, and all the time, you don't really own the money, the bank owns the money.

so, in the UK and EU things are pretty reasonable for electronic funds transfers. in the EU area SEPA instant (~10-20s) payments have been available since november this year between a limited number of member states, and should be rolling out to others during 2018. as for standard SWIFT style international payments, from the UK they should reach the destination the next day, although this will cost more - most banks have charges of tens of pounds. inter bank transfers inside the UK are free, and instant, even for large ones.

Really ? Cause I can't. Can you explain which (European) bank allows this, because I don't know a single one, and I'd love to have this option available.

I'm American, sorry :/

Really? I can transfer $20K with one click, $0 cost if im fine waiting for one of 6 daily Elixir sessions, ~$2 if I want Elixir express.

https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/insight...

Credit card companies aren't really paying you to use their cards. You're still paying the fees; it's just that they're being collected by the merchant.

Some merchants do offer discounts for going the debit/cash route. It’s usually in the 3% range and negating the 2% cash back popular credit cards provide, the 1% is rarely worth it to lose the consumer protection.

You're assuming they are used for "payments". If something doubles in value, the transaction fees melt away.

The most funniest part of this oft-repeated argument is that currently bitcoin blocks are full, the mempool of pending transactions is at record highs and people are happily outbidding each other in fees.

Though apparently no one is using it if you listen to the internet.

There's a massive dichotomy between the cryptographically provable transactions and commentary. Someone is obviously using bitcoin. It's at max capacity.

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