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Comment by onion-soup | Hacker News Reader

Sending money without fees and delay? Have you ever tried a normal bank transfer? How long did it take? Have you ever tried, say, nano? It literally takes seconds and 0 fees. Here is some value.

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Bitcoin has both fees and delays. You can see what they are now:

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

Who knows what they would be if bitcoin was actually used to buy things.

He's not talking about Bitcoin, do people realize there's literally 1000+ projects (Most irrelevant) with some clear innovation going on. We're already way past bitcoin and PoW as the future of blockchain tech.

The delays have little to do with technology, and a lot to do with regulations and bureaucracy. Largely put in place to combat money laundering, fraud, terrorist financing, etc etc. Yes, there's some small banks that have horrible APIs and shoddy servers, but for most transfers the delays come down to things that if cryptocurrency were ever mainstreamed would be tacked onto it.

That is why it takes time to get approved on coinbase and other exchanges that try to follow the law.

There is literally no place to tack on a middleman with nano/btc. Yes it will take some rethinking of how we combat what society conceives as improper use of funds.

> There is literally no place to tack on a middleman with nano/btc.

BTC is just a widely distributed set of middlemen imposing delays and costs (both mining rewards and transaction fees are costs to everyone holding or using BTC that run from holders/users to miners.)

So the people I have to go through to convert my crypto to real money aren't middlemen?

I plan on only accepting crypto for consulting this year, it filters out clients and I have limited time.

At some point I will exchange to USD to pay whatever I owe in taxes and to pay any vendor that does not take crypto. I imagine if I were an unscrupulous actor I would skip the tax step and avoid vendors that don't accept crypto.

Good for you. I have rent to pay, so I need to be paid in USD. That brings us back to my original question: Are the people I have to go through to exchange crypto to USD not middlemen?

That was an example of how to avoid conversion to 'real money' through spending and accepting only crypto.

Why can't you build on top of these protocols, nothing is stopping them from being underlying technology that new banks and financial institutions can be built on top of.

> Have you ever tried a normal bank transfer? How long did it take?

For less than $5,000 it is free and instantaneous in the United States (e.g. Zelle). For more, it is free and instantaneous (wire; my bank waves the fee; most charge $15 to $35).

The number one thing holding back the blockchain from becoming a proper database technology is its proponents insistence on applying it to problems that already work faster and cheaper.

Or Dwolla! Funny - searched google for Dwolla and Zelle came up as the first match

In the UK we can do that without the blockchain, in many situations, thanks to the real-time payment system [0]. So for me, a normal bank transfer is free and easy, whereas every time I've tried to do something involving blockchain it's meant delays, fees, and messing around on shady-looking websites.

I take the point that in other places the norm is a lot worse and blockchain systems are producing better results, but it won't be long before banks get their act together and improve their services to match modern expectations (for fear of becoming obsolete), and then the blockchain competitive advantage is gone.

[0] http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/

SEPA Instant Pay allows transactions of up to 15k in 10 seconds (bigger transactions fall back to the 1 day SEPA rule, I think), and some banks provide it for free. This is only relevant within the EU and associated regions, obviously.

The delay and cost is a function of mandatory compliance and recourse, rather than anything to do with technology.

I’m glad some people get it. Banks do zero delay and zero cost transactions between themselves already. The idea that “if only we coukd figure out where to use blockchain, everything would be FREE” is really naive. You take away a banks ability to charge for X, don’t be surprised when Y gets a new fee.

As to decentralized, there seems to be a wonderful libritarian ideal around cryptocommodities but I’m reality they are much more centralized than anyone wants to admit. There are probably 10 people that if they wanted to could absolutely demolish bitcoin.

Too much hype around all of this. Not even getting into the massive waste of power and potential.

Just about everyone that's worked in finance professionally gets it - netting, collateral calls etc all happen daily and instantaneously and have been for decades.

Having worked in computational finance the entirety of my career, I still don't totally understand how this combination of Dunning-Kruger and Libertarian leanings somehow became a thing.

The financial times while back had an interesting take: there's a structural reason why VC throws money at seemingly non-nonsensical ideas (Theranos, wireless charging etc) - many have a policy portfolio mandate to shoot for 100x returns and as such they will throw money at impossible things as part of their fiduciary duty. So, especially in the climate of free money, funding a slightly-better-widget-startup takes a backseat to things with lottery odds that may not make any sense at all.

The power consumption is the most goofy part of the whole idea though.

It is the fatal flaw of POW. It is like just pretending that the power cost is not part of the cost of a transaction.

In Canada, the gov'ment told the banks they had to offer cheap, instant transfers. Today, it's free to send money to anyone in the country and it takes minutes.

Yeah, in Australia it's currently overnight between banks (but generally instant from one account to another within a bank), and they're bringing out a new real-time payments platform over the next few months so you will be able to transfer instantly to anybody knowing only their 'pay ID', which can be a mobile number, Australian Business Number (ABN), etc.

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