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Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all!

Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework.

It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.

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It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world.

That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end.

Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be.

You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer.

The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer

I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).

I understood bitcoin transfers could take days. If so, that's not really very liquid?

It depends really. Transactions are usually processed based on the fee associated with them. If the network is exceptionally busy and you send a transaction with a low fee, yeah it'll take a while, but when creating the transaction you can adjust the fee (and most wallets will give you a few options) to make your transaction more valuable to miners, so it will be picked up more quickly.

Bitcoin from wallet A to wallet B usually only takes about 20 minutes but fiat -> bitcoin and bitcoin -> fiat can take a while, typically a day or so each and more if backlogged.

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