Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet.
Where are you getting that from? People noted as early as 2009/2010(Hal Finney particularly) that it was inherently inefficient for that purpose. And that perhaps people would build addition layers on top of it, but it was always clear that it wasn't some magic solution to payments at any reasonable scale.
Not to mention the value proposition of credit cards for consumers(cash back, fraud protection, various perks like travel insurance ect) has always been obviously superior.
Bitcoin is cool/interesting/potentially part of a well balanced portfolio as an investment with unique properties. But I feel anyone who jumped into Bitcoin because they thought it was going to be great at payments was badly mislead.
Bitcoin is old technology. Let's see how banks will compete with next gen coins.
Your proposed "better" transaction method is worse in many ways that are important to people on the Internet, namely tracking, non-psuedonoymous, not the physical representation of the money, and many other related issues.
It isn't all about speed and cost for people who transact in cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin will be supported by stores and websites only if enough people use it, and people will use what is most convenient, not what is most secure or most private.
As long as people don't care about privacy, Bitcoin won't succeed. And if people ever care about it, half the users of HN will be without a job, considering they're almost all working at Google/Facebook/Amazon/startups selling private data
Layer one will never scale to superior global currency. It's an immutable, append only database. DCS is a trade-off.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
> and uncensorable
With all the hacks, that is literally the last place people want to hold their money
Example: I got my bank routing/account numbers from a bank in a state in which I had not set up my checking account in but the bank teller put the routing number as if I had creating the account in that state. Thus, my first paycheck went to an empty account and I went to the bank that day and they fixed it for me.
Putting any of my money in a place that is irreversibly is the last place I would put it.
The reason isn't the goodness of their hearts, it's simply a government mandated program to improve the payment infrastructure.
The Eurozone has had for many years a free transfer system between bank accounts, nowadays thanks to recent upgrades it's not only free, but also instant.
And banks now have to provide an open API to all functionality as well, so that it's very easy to build technology on top to allow people to just quickly transfer money to someone, or pay online with it.
But technically, it's just international wire transfers, for free, instantly, with an open API. Like most banks already provided.
Eurozone banking is far ahead of the US in this regard :-(. Wires still cost $20-25 per here and ACH takes days.
USAA is a participant in that network. Transfers are (EDIT: mostly immediate below a certain dollar amount, next day above) between participant bank users.
https://www.usaa.com/inet/wc/mobile_banking_send_money_zelle...
I actually pay my landlady with Zelle (have since it was clearxchange with every bank using different branding), it’s not half bad - the biggest downside really is that your bank has to participate unlike SEPA where it’s expected to be there.
Zelle will improve as more banks participate and the ACH network is modernized; I expect them to compliment each other until the US reaches their version of SEPA. A shim's a shim.