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Comment by psergeant | Hacker News Reader

> “Traditional money transfers are relatively costly due to currency exchange fees, and can take up to a few days”

I would like to see some worked examples here that take into account local Bitcoin pricing and the time taken to withdraw from exchanges, vs Western Union and other commercial “Send Money” organisations. The space is intensely competitive, so I suspect the margin consumers pay if they do a minimum of research is tiny, so I’m skeptical that Magic Bitcoin Magic is somehow making this better.

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Transferwise is quite cheap. I haven't been able to change bitcoins efficiently to many currencies. Euros and usd are the main ones. I'd say transferwise is probably quicker and cheaper but you never know. The actual btc-fiat exchange can be very cheap if you are a 'maker' in the market.

Dont use transferwise or worldfirst. Both have very bad reputation of closing down accounts adn freezing money. Just google both you come up with frustrated customers from literally hours ago. . I had nightmare scenario when needed to pay 120,000 eur to a contractor in England. They blocked the account for 30 days and made company almost go flop. We were forced to open extra credit line not to go bankrupt. Transferwise is a new trick of old dog PayPal (most hated company in the world) founder Peter Thiel. Same tricks just a different company name. Lookup Transferwise twitter they have people complaining constantly.

For European currencies (I use GBP, EUR, DKK, SEK) I find Transferwise to transfer within 5 minutes.

That's reasonable, as banks in those places usually support very fast local transfers, and that's what Transferwise is doing. A bitcoin exchange could meet this speed, but won't be able to beat it.

Most cryptos are faster than any type of wire transfer except card payments.

I transferred some money on Thursday from one uk bank account to another at another institution. Took less time than to log on to the second bank to confirm it had gone through.

Very US-centric. Elsewhere in the world "wire transfers" - transferring money from one bank to another happens more or less instantly.

When I pay myself from my business account and it happens just about instantly. Max I've ever waited was like 15 minutes.

Using Transferwise, a friend from Australia paid me back in the UK and it went through in like 1 hour.

Isn't Transferwise basically just using their accounts in both banks to achieve that, and rebalancing them later (if necessary)? That's not really representative of the performance of the banking system, is it?

For the international part, yes, but still the Me > transferwise and transferwise > friend transfers are "wire transfers" and both of them happen fast enough for the whole transaction to be completed in just a few hours.

Not necessarily, in Europe.

Many electronic bank transfers are approximately instant.

Sure, if you don’t factor in the conversion to and from money that can be used to buy groceries and petrol.

Providing liquidity (placing a non-marketable limit order and waiting for it to get matched) doesn't necessarily save you the spread. Your order is more likely to execute if the price moves against you, so the adverse election hurts. Market microstructure is tricky...

Time and fees from exchanges. Some routes work out OK, some not so great. Often the problem is liquidity in local markets. Even for small amounts. What look like arbitrage opportunities are really information about money movement inefficiencies.

In my country the spreed to exchange eur or usd to local current is huge, you lose at least 10%

I use transferwise all the time for usd to eur.

The loss is closer to 1%. E.g. 1k usd costs $10 to transfer at the googled exchange rate.

Better solutions are out there. Bitcoin is, as always, a solution looking for a problem.

I have used TransferWise, and yes, <1%; however https://revolut.com/ have recently added virtual bank accounts, and currently add no fee for market rate transfers.

i recently used transferwise to convert a bunch of money and it seemed like all in the fees were closer to 0.1% than 1%. I think if you do larger sums of money the fees get cheaper though because the cost to transfer into transferwise is around $20 or something for ACH pull, but the fees for the currency exchange is a slightly worse exchange rate (though still much better than you would get at a bank)

Transferwise is good but its network goal is to make money out of the transfers. Cryptos network doesnt share this goal

Great that all those exchanges aren't charging any fees and there's no transaction cost for Bitcoin...

I recently did a lot of EUR-USD transfers and have evaluated several options. I came to the same conclusion as other posters here: Services like Transferwise and Currencyfair are all very cheap, and do the job well and without risk.

Going through Bitcoin was not even close to competitive.

Did you at least google Transferwise to see all horror stories of people getting their wires frozen? Really curious of your definition of “without risk”

By that I mean that they are registered and regulated within the EU and other countries they operate in. The people operating the service are known and comply with applicable regulation, so that I can be reasonably confident nothing shady is going on and that I can get legal recourse in case something is wrong.

And no, despite doing some research on Transferwise before using them I didn't run into horror stories of them freezing wires. Transferwise has always been very professional and helpful in interactions with me (more so than my own bank).

Have you ever transferred 120,000 EUR with them, or - you know - any serious amount?

My transfers were in the 1k-10k range, I guess that's not "serious" for you.

But no, if I were putting such a big amount of money in their hands at once I would certainly do more research and look for better safeguarding.

Its not a matter if its serious to me. If i see quarter on the street I pick it up because money is money.

Unfortunately all those money-wire services are registered in UK and UK has the most strict KYC rules I think ever existed in free commerce. If you start sending bigger amounts they will shut you down, no matter how much due diligence you provide they just scared of repercussions, just in case.

> Cryptos network doesnt share this goal

Of course they do. There is an inherent transaction fee built into networks like Bitcoin, plus the fees exchanges charge.

Miners don't get paid anymore?

Thanks for the data point! What’s the spread between BTC and your local currency vs BTC/USD? Is Bitcoin legal in your country? Are there reliable exchanges? What’s the cash-out wait? Thanks in advance!

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