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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

I cannot understand why you would want to use Facebook's "currency". I'd just use what we currently have.

Biggest bank in Russia (Sberbank) introduced a simple feature: if you know a phone number of a person, you can enter it on their website and if the owner of the phone number has any account with Sberbank you can send him money. The convenience of such feature was so big that it caused people move from other banks to Sberbank just to use it. Eventually leading to government regulation making this feature bank-agnostic.

The point here is: people who are used to Internet and the way things work here can't understand the old-fashioned companies.

Why sending money overseas cost such enormous amounts of money? Why bank fees are so difficult to understand? Why there is fee when moving money within the same bank, when we all know that it is simple transaction in the database?

Same thing in Scandinavia, but it's a cooperation between banks. Know someones phone number? Open the app "Swish" and send him money.

Why what is the use case here that bank transfers, cheques and cash don't already solve

Say you're out eating with mates and you want to split the bill, no one really carries cash anymore here so that's not an option (and also annoying to split). Writing a cheque is obviously ridiculous and a bank transfer requires a lot of needless information. A "swish" as we call it takes about 10 seconds, 5 if your friend is already in your phone's contacts.

It's just an ease of access / quality of life thing. Your question is more or less equivalent to: "What's the purpose of QR-codes? Just enter the URL!" - it's easy, fast, and frankly nice. A really really simple and great way to send small amounts of money between people.

Broken bank regulations and lack of competition explains a lot of that as well as existing as the USSR for a large part of the 20th century.

And maybe the Russian government doesn't want ordinary citizens to move money outside the country

Same thing in Canada. It's called Interac Etransfer. Link your email account to a bank account, and you can send someone money for $1.50 per transaction. Made it much easier to pay back friends if you don't have exact change, or a remote landlord as I don't have to mail paper cheques and wait for confirmation.

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