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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

I've sent many Bitcoin transactions into the 6 figures of USD recently, and never paid more than $0.25 for a transaction fee. Think about this: What does your bank charge for a wire transfer? Mine wants to charge $37. And how long does it take to complete? Mine takes days.

Compare this to $0.25 and a 10 minute delivery time. It's honestly not even close.

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As another poster mentioned, this is argument against your bank, not for Bitcoin. Many banks (for example most EU banks) charge zero fees and wire transfers are instant.

It's just incompetence of banking system that this is not supported more widely but there are no technical reasons why it cannot be like this globally for all banks.

So this is not a long term moat for BTC as banks can just become competent one day and this advantage disappears.

The whole point of Bitcoin was to form an alternative to banks so that they don’t become all powerful. If banks become better actors as a result, that’s good for Bitcoin.

I've only had experience with the US banking system. It seems like this is much better in other countries.

The UK faster payments system is instant. Sorry US/Canada your payments systems are just slow and expensive.

> What does your bank charge for a wire transfer?

Free

> And how long does it take to complete?

Seconds

I wish I lived in Europe... /sigh

To be fair, at peak BTC I recall seeing people claiming confirmation times of in the hours.

You're taking almost 10 years of fast Bitcoin confirmation times and focusing on a narrowly small number of weeks or months that things were congested...

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