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Comment by hello_1234 | Hacker News Reader

I really wish they succeed. It takes 3 to 5 business days to transfer money using ACH in the US if you don't want to shell out 25$ for wire transfer. Transferring money is just about transferring a few bytes of data. Why does it take 3 business days? Why are customers still forced to shell out 25$ for instant transfers?

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The US is the US, but in places like the EU and Australia, consumer level inter-bank transfers are now taking a few hours, minutes or seconds, at a price between free and less than $1.

It's sort of a constructive proof that you don't need crypto currency, if that's the justification for its existence.

it's really mind boggling to me they take $1 at all. Why? Banks have a myriad ways to make money instead of taxing consumers (and overwhelmingly the small fish). It's 2019 and cash has 0 cost to transfer.

In the UK, the Faster Payments Service enables near-instant transfers (usually a few minutes) that are typically free to the consumer. This network has been operating for more than a decade.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

yet it costs me $10 to send $500 to the UK and $39 to send to the US. And even more to receive.

Try http://transferwise.com/, that's what I usually use.

not available for the kind of businesss payments i want

"I can get from A to B on foot. I can even ride a horse and be there 10x faster. It's sort of a constructive proof that you don't need cars."

You appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of ACH vs wire. They aren't the same thing, with one of them having a fee just for the speed of it.

3-5 days is actually a feature of ACH. This delay includes the ability to reverse a transaction, a built-in risk management. For example, here is a quote from an article on the front page of HN right now (#5, SIM swap horror story):

> After a couple of days, our bank reversed the $25,000 charge and told us that the fraud department caught the ACH withdrawal before it was fully processed so that neither my family nor the bank lost this money forever.

Google will give you lots of good information on the difference between wire and ACH.

Here's a great podcast on NPR's planet money if you want to learn more - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/epis... You cannot just give me two anecdotes to defend one of the most inefficient systems in the US.

How is ACH "inefficient"? It's certainly slow, but speed and efficiency are not the same thing. It's far more efficient than bitcoin.

It's a mainframe batch-processing system built in the 1970s, and it's mostly worked just fine for 40 years. That's pretty efficient!

The mainframe batch-processing computers might be efficient. I have no idea. I am taking about the "ACH system". It's supposedly automated but it shuts down during the weekends. There is no way to tell how long it will take for transaction will take to complete. If you listen to the NPR podcast, it took one of their transactions 8 days to complete. And why is "speed" not a measure of efficiency when it comes to transferring something?

We transfer most freight by slow container ships instead of fast airplanes because it's much more efficient: It's less expensive, requires less energy-per-kilo, and amortizes the cost of the vehicle over a larger volume of cargo.

Exactly this. Extra hoops to transfer your wealth are like most things in life. Do you want security or convenience? Maybe you don't care about security for a $5.00 coffee. What about a $5K contribution to your IRA? What about a $50K downpayment on a house? All risks have models and it is silly to pretend they are all the same.

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