Hacker News Reader

This has always been more of the dream of BTC than the reality. Transferring BTC around can cost 0.1 - 0.4% which becomes quite expensive. The cost of a wire transfer from Canada to the various countries I make them is a flat $36 - though receiving fees can be as high as $15 (CAD). That means that BTC only makes sense if you're transferring less than $5100.

But moreover, BTC back to fiat is significantly more expensive than "expensive" currency exchange with usually levels as high as 3%

The costs for transactions are not fixed to a percentage of the total amount sent but on the size of the transaction and the network congestion.

Moving one billion USD worth of BTC can cost as little as 0.065 BTC or ~440 USD.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb...

> Moving one billion USD worth of BTC can cost as little as 0.065 BTC or ~440 USD

Which is ridiculous, given anyone (legally) moving a billion dollars pays zero for an instantaneous Fedwire.

Not familiar with Fedwire. Surely it won't be free to move fiat via any payment network.

Do you happen to have a source? PS: seems not to be available to retail customers?

The "Fedwire Funds Service" is the Federal Reserve's wire transfer payment system used to move USD. I'm actually writing an integration to it right this moment (the old fixed-width format, not the new XML one, yay). Naturally this interface is not available directly to retail customers, but if you actually send a wire transfer from your bank, this is the system you will use.

Your bank will generally make this available to you through some online interface. If not, you can visit the teller. They will likely charge you $20-$40 to send a wire if you are a small account, but, even with something like Chase's mid-level "Signature" checking (~$10-$20k minimum to avoid monthly fees iirc) they will waive this fee. And, of course, if you're really moving a billion, not only would you have a banking relationship where your wire fees are waived, that fee would be peanuts anyway.

Im in the EU and we don't have Fedwire here. I can tell you that ABN AMRO charges me ~10 euros for transferring ~200 eur to the UK (with conversion to GBP).

Generally speaking I'm quite familiar with payment infra in Europe, I've worked on it for ~20 years after all.

I am not sure how to engage with this reply. It is of course unsurprising that European banks do not have integrations with the Federal Reserve for moving USD. European banks often have access to international systems like SWIFT and SEPA, and various national payments systems, instead.

I have precious little information to offer you on the workings of European funds transfer services, however; I posted here to discuss Fedwire specifically, since you brought it up.

Well, first of all thank you for your earlier comment.

My anxiety is peaking lately... I have no idea exactly why I answered like that but what I meant was that while I'm not familiar with the US payment system, I do know the European one quite well and that's why earlier I'd expressed incredulity that any traditional banking system could offer zero cost transfers. I think I didn't notice you were not JumpCrisscross

If you want to convert between money, it's slight more expensive but marginally so (15k USD for converting 1B with IB, 8k if you change more than 5B per month)

I'd like to note that they overpaid ridiculously on that fee, they probably just didn't care about the fee since it was a rounding error.

Even $15 would have been too much, looking at other transactions in the block.

See, I did the calculations and it was cheaper to use BTC then to use Transferwise. BTC also worked faster for me then transferwise.

Of course, you already need to own Bitcoin. If not, the fees are slightly more expensive, but still cheaper then using "normal Banks".

Another factor with BTC is. If you receive the money in BTC and the exchange course happens to be relatively stable. Depending on your country, you will have a hard time converting this into your currency.

At a certain amount exchanges will ask a lot of questions (at least in Europe they do). And they want to see proof for the whole chain back, so you better hope your client can provide these infos as well.

And even if everything is 100% legit, you will wait a while for your money.

Not if you use something like Bisq to exchange BTC for fiat.

Personally I use Bitcoin to transfer money to my home country monthly. It's not much, around 1000-1500 euro (hopefully for just one more month), and it's to pay my credit card debt back home. It's very convenient, fast, and I get the best market price for my euros. Using Transferwise is out of the question since my homeland uses an artificial price for the dollar, and thus if I were to use them I'd lose on about 25% of my country's currency.

If $1 = 100 Homeland units through Bitcoin but only 75 Homeland units through currency conversion. Why don't you move 1000 dollars over and bring back $1333.33 and repeat?

It's probably done by government fiat and transferring homeland units to usd probably has a similar penalty to prevent such arbitrage.

Correct! Very surprised you got it!

To elaborate, there is a tax on buying dollars, so although the 'official' price is X, the true price is X + 30% if you want to buy.

I think there might be a possibility for arbitrage eventually, since sometimes the true price is lower than the price you might get for bitcoin but the difference is so minuscule that it would take years to make an interesting profit out of it. Also, it would be a pain in the ass to wire the transfer out of the country, since for example Transferwise doesn't allow you to send money in my homeland's currency, only receive.

The cool thing to me about Bitcoin is the setup for someone new who is unbanked is really quick. You can have someone in Zimbabwe with nothing but a cellphone download an open source Bitcoin wallet and send them money in 10 minutes. They can take this and withdraw cash from and ATM or use Bitcoin and you don't have to go through all the friction of international payments and banking.

Since it works with pub/priv key cryptography its a push model and so you can securely send money to anyone, anywhere, anytime. No bank needed.

I'm genuinely looking forward to a day that we can do this. Digitally transfer money between each other.

Right now, you are probably losing more money that Ttansferwise because it costs a considerable amount of money to convert them to Fiat currency.

Agree. Also, you loose money when you buy it. P2P transfer is extremely cheap, but on-ramp and off-ramp are horrible. That's why there are so many exchanges making money in Bitcoin business.

If you immediately sell 90% of it you may be better off getting USDC (or Euro equivalent) and buying bitcoin with the 10% so you dont have to sell such a large amount since fees in crypto are usually percentage based.

I believe fiat withdrawal fees / trading are a lot higher than transferwise fee, at least in my case. Which exchange do you use if I may ask?

I personally use Kraken. Deposit money is sometimes within the same day, and selling was never a problem: https://www.kraken.com/features/fee-schedule

I am not tight to them, but for me it's the less concerning option.

> Getting BTC transferred to a wallet at an exchange I trust

This has never been a good idea, unless you’ve been immediately selling upon receipt.

> This has never been a good idea, unless you’ve been immediately selling upon receipt.

It evens out over time.

Do most people not expect to spend the money eventually? What else are you going to do with it?

Unless you are getting international transfers for the purpose of buying drugs or speculating/trading I completely disagree with this.

Have taken payment for consulting in BTC a few times and would always get it into a local exchange then sell/transfer out within an hour, it's pretty painless when you are all setup with the exchange, fee's on my end come to 0.8% total amount, not capped.

So $80 for a $10k payment in BTC, that's not including the senders fees, exchange movements and time spent. Looking at transferwise now they will do the same $10K from USD to AUD for $80.60

My point with Transferwise is also: They are not really transferring money. Whereas with BTC, you have a transaction. With Transferwise, they sum up all their transactions and do larger bulk transactions at the end of each month or quarter or whatever.

So with using BTC, you actually have the BTC when it is transferred. The banking system has to cheat itself to keep low fees and fast transaction times. With BTC, you may wait 10-15 minutes. With Fiat, you would usually wait a day or two. But, you can "cheat" your way through the system.

One way I don't get why people won't support BTC: It is a system where everyone can contribute, see every transaction and improve it. The banking system however is old, slow and deeply flawed. And there is no way of improving it. So yeah, even if BTC would be more expensive and slow, I would still use it more often then not, since it's software, and you can fix and improve software.

> It is cheaper ... I sell around 90% immediately

Sorry, i am unconviced. Could you show the numbers including all costs and exposure times to fx risks from your client's BTC account to your landlords bank account and compare those to using e.g. Transferwise?