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Comment by aey | Hacker News Reader

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aey·

At the cost of 2 trillion a year. Or 1 trillion if if you only count service fees and not liquidity.

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/financi...

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Care to actually quote where the banks are spending $2 trillion a year to stop double spends?

The world is. There is no engineering reason why it’s so expensive to move numbers around in a bank.

In comparison the search engine market is 170 billion. If a google sized company or decentralized network could reduce the 2 trillion global spend on payments to 170b, that would be fantastic regardless of how much it spends on preventing double spends.

Dude. That $2 trillion is all of finance. Finance is a hell of a lot more than preventing double spends (which don’t exist outside of bitcoin). On a per transaction and even global domestic product basis, the cost of our financial system is tiny. By comparison the cost of bitcoins financial system by any metric is astronomical.

Read the report, it's 2 trillion of revenue for payments only, not all of finance. That report doesn't cover trading, derivatives, mortgages, etc... 1 trillion of payments revenue comes from credit lines, about 1 trillion is fees moving money around.

Bitcoin is just one settlement layer. There is no reason for my day to day transactions to settle there. My day to day payments can be settlement on a chain with much higher throughput and faster finality and different security assumptions.

There is also no reason why I can't lend my funds to 100m user credit cards directly without a middleman through software either.

So whats the cost comparison of moving $100,000 out of China into the the US via bitcoin vs the traditional banking system?

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