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Comment by malthaus | Hacker News Reader

Switzerland does not 'embrace' digital currencies per se. We (or rather: our politicians and ecosystem shovel-sellers) are looking desperately for a new focus area after having lost most of the historical wealth management appeal and since some of the early crypto companies settled here they kind of ran with it.

The robust political system and wealthy quite egalitarian society is a nice environment to run your company in but is also the reason that the next step of the cryptocurrency revolution will not happen here.

Cryptocurrencies are still 100% hype & speculation; a solution in search of a problem. Unless it delivers some real-world applicability i'm not very happy about the reputational risk we expose our country too as i'm strictly in the camp of that it will all come crashing down in a big bang soon.

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> Cryptocurrencies are still 100% hype & speculation; a solution in search of a problem.

Without any sarcasm: I saw them in use twice during the last 6 months in a very real use case, ie, hackers requesting a ransom (in the first case it was BTC, in the second it was Monero, which makes even more sense AFAIK).

Might depend on your social circle, some groups might use it more then others. I have seen them being used much more frequently (and way beyond ransomware scenarios). For instance Bitcoin debit cards (e.g Ten X) are quite common and for those that got in the market early, it's a cheap way of buying anything. In some countries it's not even a taxable event to spend it. Still not perfect in the sense of having to use Visa, and down the road transactions will be much more direct when more merchants will start directly accepting crypto currencies.

my friends and I send BTC, LTC, ETH to each other instead of paypal, bank transfer, or cash

typically one of us pays the bill with a credit card and the others send him crypto to settle. same with selling electronics to each other and paying rent.

Isn't it incredibly expensive to send BTC for this?

Me and my friends use Venmo. Why would I want to send my friends crypto if I expect its value to increase? I wouldn't also want to receive crypto if I expect it to crash soon. It's simply not practical to adopt crypto in large scale.

I disagree. Plenty of people use cryptocurrency without caring about the current value, but merely as a medium of exchange. If I want to buy something with bitcoin, it really doesn't matter it's current price. I just buy some bitcoin at the current price and buy what I want leaving 0 bitcoin risk.

For what though? If I don’t have to make that conversion then what’s the point?

Whilst there is a lot of hype and speculation I think you are mistaken about there being no real-world applicability. My bank has so many fees and loopholes for sending money even within the EU and they can take days.

I owed a friend some money and I sent him BTC which arrived in a couple of hours with fees that were about 10% of what I pay using the banking system. Real-world applicability and a satisfied user.

> so many fees and loopholes for sending money even within the EU

Get yourself a bank which does SEPA properly.

Easier said than done at least in Spain. Poor opening hours and poor customer service. It's one of the reasons I'm a fan of crypto for the ease of transferring.

But the issue is lack of competition, not something that can only be solved by crypto currency. The original statement was that crypto is still looking for an actual problem to solve. Lack of competition and slow transfers isn't something related to crypto. Meaning, at a point Bitcoin took hours to work as well which a really high fee. SEPA apparently is 1 EUR and 10 seconds.

Ease of transferring seems dubious as well, crypto can also be slow or quick.

These are fair points, my reply was to the OP who said crypto was 100% hype and speculation which I didn't agree with. I'm giving a data point of crypto being useful for me, yes BTC has been slow at points but I've also had with each bank I've ever used (Natwest/Santander/Banco Sabadell/Barclays) points where my accounts were under maintenance and couldn't be moved.

  But the issue is lack of competition

And cryptos brings competition back in the financial space

Probably because historically banking licences where handed out to those sympathetic to the Franco regime.

Well, with BTC you don't need a bank at all.

With the new SEPA instant a transfer takes 10 sec max [1]

[1] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...

In the EURO Zone, SEPA transfers worked really well for me so far: - SEPA fee is less than 1 EURO, regardless of the volume (e.g. with UBS, but some banks might rip you off) - it takes at most 2 banking days, but half of the payments made before the bank day opening, are transferred during the current day in my experience

SEPA is completely free (as a customer), in my experience.

In the Eurozone, SEPA transfers are free. Outside Eurozone, but within EU, there are typically small fees.

SEPA is made free by a law, not by good technical design. It means it is not free because the banks would like to charge us and can't, so maybe the whole bank account fees are superior in some way we can't see.

It's the same with the EU law for mobile roaming data. It looks like laws made for the riches cosmopolitan against the poor that don't travel much in Europe

1) I don't what bank you're using but it's really bad

2) It's been a LONG time since we can transfer money really fast at a really low cost

really? what can you use to transfer money from the US to the Philippines "really fast at a really low cost"?

>>2) It's been a LONG time since we can transfer money really fast at a really low cost

Transferring money from many places in the world is not cheap or easy (think of third world countries) - but even in more developed countries it can take quite long and have heavy fees. Crypto enables people to be their own bank.

I transferred nearly 1000€ worth of BTC yesterday and it took one hour and cost cents.

Those problems are not technical though. Centralized systems using banks are more efficient in theory. It's just databases talking to each other, there is no technical reason why transfers can't be near instantaneous and basically free. Cryptocurrencies might provide incentives for banks to lower their fees and polish their crusty legacy code, but I can't see them displacing banks for everyday use.

Good point but crypto are not only new payment system but also new currencies... No more helicopter money

Within the EU and EFTA, SEPA transfers are free.

In addition to having zero real world value other than speculation and hype value, the currencies have very real negative impacts on the world.

The one that worries me the most is environmental (power cost, gpu/asic manufaturing).

It also sucks for projects that actually needs to use computational time for real world problems like folding@home and seti@home.

And it sucks big time for PC gamers.

I don't think you should be so absolute in your assessment, it has many values to a lot of people. Also the traditional banking system is hardly a paragon of virtue when it comes to illegal money laundering, currency manipulation, LIBOR scandal,the sub-prime mortgages.

As the eco-system evolves hopefully the environmental impact would be reduced significantly.

Oh no, the people trying to start a financial revolution accidentally screwed over people who wanted to play video games!!! Give me a break. Its very possible that cryptocurrencies will never make a difference and end up being a failed experiment but the majority of the arguments i see against it are so weak/tired. Large companies are ruining the environment in developing countries but you’re worried about the energy consumption of cryptos??

One thing does not exclude the other.

I am worried about both things, in fact I touched on it in regards to manufacturing all this hardware to calculate virtual numbers that have absolutely no value in reality.

Plenty of real world uses. Cash on the internet needs to exist. Centralized financial control is not a good thing 100% of the time.

It does indeed suck it's turned into such an insane hype machine and get rich quick scheme - but it solved a real world problem that is going to become more and more acute. The war on cash is real, and having a digital cash to fight back with is necessary if you value freedom or privacy on any level.

Ask wikileaks how well relying on banking access went for them. And like it or not, plenty of grey and black markets exist.

>"Switzerland does not 'embrace' digital currencies per se. We (or rather: our politicians and ecosystem shovel-sellers) are looking desperately for a new focus area after having lost most of the historical wealth management appeal and since some of the early crypto companies settled here they kind of ran with it."

I'm guessing you are referring to the end of Swiss banking secrecy here? [1]

I agree that this seems like a very successful marketing juggernaut so far with Zug. Do you or anyone else know why Ethereum ended up being based in Zug? Is Zug that much cheaper than Zurich which is only 30 minutes or so by train?

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/tax-evasion_swiss-say-...

Yes, Zug is very advantageous for tax reasons.

Interesting, tax rates in Switzerland are on a canton by canton basis correct? I have also heard that the reason for Zug's favorable tax rates is because it was once one of the poorer cantons comparatively speaking.

I have also heard that Zurich is quite favorable as well which is interesting because its also quite expensive.

> Interesting, tax rates in Switzerland are on a canton by canton basis correct?

Broadly speaking, yes.

> I have also heard that the reason for Zug's favorable tax rates is because it was once one of the poorer cantons comparatively speaking.

I don't know. Sorry!

> I have also heard that Zurich is quite favorable as well which is interesting because its also quite expensive.

I'm not sure - depends on whether you mean taxes for companies or private individuals. Also, certain tax brackets vary in the canton (almost village to village). Finally, it depends on your (or your company's) tax goals. Someone earning $30k/year will probably be better off in a Gemeinde/Canton which wouldn't be optimal at $300k/year.

Aside from low taxes, Zug is also home to Glencore and a lot of commodity trading shops. These skills translate extremely well to cryptocurrency trading.

Ah yes, Glencore - Marc Rich, the FBI's most wanted, the Mossad, Oil embargoes, dictators, a U.S Presidential pardon ...

For anyone not familiar with the story of Marc Rich and what became Glencore, it's pretty fascinating. It definitely helped put Zug on the map long before crypto-currencies. I had actually forgotten about all this.

See:

https://sites.utexas.edu/culturescontexts/2013/06/30/marc-ri...

and

https://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21580438-marc-rich-k...

>>a solution in search of a problem

Its their to enable - that's what technology is for.

> Cryptocurrencies are still 100% hype & speculation; a solution in search of a problem.

Just because you don't understand it, it doesn't mean that it has no uses. Beyond criminal activities, crypto assets have tremendous uses. I have practically moved all my assets to the crypto world and it has saved me a lot of money on international transfers, bank fees and I'm getting better return on investment.

you and i have a very different definition of 'investment' then.

if i go to las vegas, put everything i own on red (because surely, red must be the future!) and win - have i made a great investment?

your other 'tremendous' use will disappear anyway in the traditional banking sector, as they did in Europe with SEPA (see comments below).

and don't forget that some of those fees buy you (legal) stability, low volatility and a system that's pretty robust in general. of course it could be leaner and faster but evolution is sometimes healthier than revolution if a lot is at stake (i.e. everyone's wealth)

How often are you people making international transfers? The typical person surely does this only a few times in their life.

Not sure what the 'typical' HN person looks like. But I have lived in 8 countries, have had bank accounts in all of them, have had companies in 2 of them, projects in 3 (including countries in Africa where transfers are a nightmare) ... so yes, some of us do international transfers all the time. And MoneyGram / WesternUnion / your usual bank often sucks (takes a couple of days to clear / fees are crazy).

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