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Comment by ucha | Hacker News Reader

Buying US stocks takes 2 days to settle.

Sending simple wires in the US takes hours.

Last time I tried to send significant funds from France to the UK, it took me a whole week of back and forth with the bank to complete all the AML/KYC paperwork.

Let's not even talk about how long it would take to move gold from one part of the world to another cf. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-30/iran-is-h...

You can buy or send bitcoin in seconds if you're not trying to do it on-chain, the same way you can do it with stocks and other assets. But definitive settlement of a bitcoin transaction is faster than pretty much any other asset.

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> Sending simple wires in the US takes hours

What? No. It happens instantly at a protocol level. Practically, about thirty minutes. Most people don’t send and receive wires and so don’t choose bank accounts that prioritise them.

Practically speaking, Venmo and Apple Pay and Zelle are frictionless and instantaneous and more widely adopted than Bitcoin. For heavy users of international transfers, there are usually better solutions.

There are absolutely edge cases, and so a legitimate use case for a cryptocurrency there, but that’s not enough use to sustain Bitcoin’s value. To say nothing of the transactional motivation having been long since abandoned when inconvenient for the current store of value one.

Yes sure, it takes 30 mins to send wires in a best case scenario it is executed immediately when you send it but that's not what happens in practice for most people. I do that regularly and it takes me a couple of hours.

Venmo and co aren't "real" transfers of asset, it's an update to a "permissioned" database. You can make immediate transfers on coinbase too but they could be reversed, or your account could get locked just as with venmo. It is just as easy to have banks hold everyone's bitcoin and instantaneously update a database so that feature is not an advantage of fiat over bitcoin.

> it takes 30 mins to send wires in a best case scenario it is executed immediately when you send it but that's not what happens in practice for most people. I do that regularly and it takes me a couple of hours.

Your bank is not set up for wires. Try Fidelity or First Republic or Silicon Valley Bank. Between 10 and 30 minutes from my hitting transfer to appearing in the recipient’s account. Exceptions are large wires which may require a phone call for verification, though I can usually turn that off if I wanted to.

Ok, interesting... I think your general point is valid, which is that, transacting in USD with a bank is, under certain circumstances, simpler and faster than transacting in bitcoin on-chain.

But you always have to rely on a third party, transactions can be reversed, your funds can be locked etc... It's completely different from say, transferring actual bank notes, or actual gold bars or any kind of transaction where a third party is not needed, you can't be censored and it can't be reversed.

And again, everything you do with USD, you could do eventually do with bitcoin. If banks decide to hold bitcoin, they'll let you send bitcoin wires with all the issues associated with fiat wire. Bitcoin wires don't exist but they could. Permissionless, uncensorable, irreversible, under 1-hour USD transactions don't exist and they never will.

> Last time I tried to send significant funds from France to the UK, it took me a whole week of back and forth with the bank to complete all the AML/KYC paperwork.

You would need to do the same paperwork with bitcoin.

I have UK and French bank accounts, transfers between them take seconds. Transfers from the French account to any other Eurozone account take seconds.

This comment made me laugh! Filing paperwork to send bitcoin? You are in outer space!

Legal requirements can be surprising.

> Sending simple wires in the US takes hours.

Joke is on you, though. Even Brazil now has instant wires (zero fees).

> Last time I tried to send significant funds from France to the UK, it took me a whole week of back and forth with the bank to complete all the AML/KYC paperwork.

How much time would it take to convert, transfer to a bank account AND withdraw that same amount of money from Bitcoin to plain FIAT?

I feel like Iran and Venezuela are bad examples as they are typically denied access to much of the global financial system. It’s normally pretty easy to move gold around and this process is handled by banks. Of course you might not get the same gold bars if you move gold between countries (for one thing they tend to come in different sizes in different places) and it likely won’t even be physically the same gold, but the banks tend to handle the arbitrage of taking physical gold to refineries across to move it from one market to another (though there were some worries this might break down between the US futures markets and London physical markets due to coronavirus restrictions)

A bitcoin transaction never settles. If a longer chain is created without that transaction it will become the current state and that transaction will be effectively rolled back.

A bank transaction never settles. Though unlikely, it is possible that quantum events may sporadically reverse the transaction.

Both are probabilistic and highly unlikely.

>Both are probabilistic and highly unlikely.

A simple case of this happening with bitcoin is if the network fragmented. For example if a country had a firewall which temporarily blocked bitcoin. The country would continue slowly adding blocks which would likely revert when they reconnected back with the rest of the network.

People would only mine on the shorter blockchain if they think it's valid and good luck adding a country firewall in an undetected fashion. It will be directly visible in one of the two forked blockchain that a lot of the hashpower has vanished.

If a country is behind a firewall, most likely, almost no new blocks will be mined because the hashrate difficulty will stay constant while the computational power behind the firewall will become too low. Blocks will be mined much more slowly for a period of time inversely proportional to the hashpower behind the firewall. Most likely, that chain will enter into a "mining death spiral".

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