https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/best-ways-to-wire-mo...
There are tons of banking solutions in every country for transferring money. But they typically have low limits and require appropriate documentation.
I usually use PayPal or Visa / MasterCard.
And in general, they are doing something that’s very difficult.
You wrote:
> If you have a business that delivers some digital product, it is very difficult to serve an international client base without running afoul of anti money laundering compliance issues at banks and such.
And yet I use a whole bunch of services not based in my country of residence that deliver a digital product to my home. Mostly paid through either PayPal or Via / Mastercard.
How can something be very difficult yet extremely common?
Unless you mean receiving payments of large sums of money, in which case you're going to want to engage a transaction processor and legal team anyway. And for even larger sums of money, on an ongoing basis, it's not uncommon for an organisation to setup a local headquarters.
And anyway, the point of anti-money laundering legislation isn't to run afoul of such legislation, it's to decrease the likelihood a business is used by people who have a need to launder money, and to more easily identify and track laundered money, etc.
Or did you mean to imply that setting up a business like PayPal, Stripe, Visa, or Mastercard isn't easy. That's probably most certainly true. You've got to be really dedicated.
Is there something I've missed?
Most companies will just incorporate in the US and use a US payment processor and operate as a US company. If, for example, you have a business in Brazil and you want to sell digital goods it’s not so easy to accept payments at all, let alone international payments. And incorporating in the US can be a hurdle if you don’t live here or have somone who can help you navigate getting set up with things like a US bank account.
PayPal claims¹ to be available in more than 200 countries/regions and support 25 currencies. Does PayPal in Brazil not accept payments from PayPal users in The USA?
I'm not saying some people aren't underserved by money services, though.
Hell, my bank even has direct integration with Transferwise so I can send money back home to Australia instantly for next to free right within my iPhone app
I know decentralization is not a huge selling point for most people who just want to do things instantly from within their phones, I myself have little usage for it, but there has been a time where Transferwise halted BRL transfer due to currency being unstable, if I relied solely on TW for my transfers this could be a huge problem for me, one that(in theory) happens because it's a decision of a centralized entity.
The current "safelow" gas price on Ethereum is 2.6 gWei, or $0.016.
Stripe/Paypal both charge more than $0.30, or 15-30 times more.
Handily enough, we know exactly how much electricity Visa used in 2017, and it's about 0.19TWh[0]. Now obviously Visa alone isn't the end of the financial system, bank branches, payment processors, and other actors are involved. Personally, I highly doubt that they add up to another 55-72TWh, but if you can prove that, be my guest.
Of course, at this point we're also missing a very important factor: transaction volume. Comparing financial systems in terms of total energy usage is very misleading, a far better way is to measure energy per transaction. And this is the point where it really falls apart for Bitcoin. As of today, bitcoin is averaging about 180,000 transactions a day. That's about 100 seconds of Visa's average volume[1].
Comparing fees is a terrible way to measure transaction cost in terms of kWh. First of all, Stripe and Paypal employ a lot of people, and people are quite expensive. Second, bitcoin miners are being compensated by the expected rewards of finding a block (or participating in a pool that finds one). This means that the transaction fee and the amount of electricity used simply may not be related at all, since the fee might drop below the electricity cost so long as the expected reward is bigger still.
0. https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... 1. 150,000,000 transactions per day[2] / 86400 2. https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/.... Theoretical (and heavily advertised) capacity is 24k, but a more prosaic 1.8k/s is more in line with a typical daily load.