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Comment by payne92 | Hacker News Reader

> "The only good use cases that come to mind is if there is some particular reason for you to evade the conventional and easier systems of communication and storage."

* Nailed it *

I've long said the killer app for blockchain already exists: international money laundering and untraceable transfers.

This also happens to be the precise use case where folks want to "evade conventional and easier systems".

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Until you need international remittances or business payments.

Then, Crypto at its worst is far better than international Wire Transfers, etc.

This claim is often made and it just makes no sense to me.

Let’s say I’m invoicing someone abroad for $100k USD.

Today they send me a wire transfer. It costs about 25 USD (fixed fee, but in this case 0.025% of the transaction, i.e. negligible) and normally completes the same day.

The payment is made in the currency of my invoice, so I’m guaranteed to receive the right amount. (Any currency exchange is the sender’s responsibility. But a lot of companies maintain accounts in various currencies, so they probably have USD at hand.)

How does crypto payment improve anything here? Exchanges just add extra steps. The extreme volatility of Bitcoin means that, by the time an exchange is processing my $100k withdrawal, it might be worth $90k. It’s not a useful currency if it goes up and down 10% in a day.

Why not just use a stablecoin for the transfer?

What’s the benefit? A stablecoin is like an account at a weird unregulated bank from where you have to move the money to a real bank to use it.

How does using one of these products let me access the money faster than a wire between the sender’s USD account and mine?

Wire transfers take multiple business days, at least in the US, at least for me every single time I do one. Individual banks may also put restrictions on your domestic wire transfers. Maybe it's different for you since you're a business, but as an individual, there's a lot of friction in sending money to my friends.

> unregulated

Depending on your perspective, this is either a feature or a bug. In my opinion, a big feature.

> you have to move the money to a real bank to use it

Well yes, that's one of the main hurdles right now caused mainly by lack of adoption. It's not a fundamental problem with the tech; in fact, it's the very kind of problem that would be solved by it going mainstream.

> How does using one of these products let me access the money faster than a wire between the sender’s USD account and mine?

This one is easy: 6 Bitcoin confirmations takes about an hour, and only a few minutes for Ethereum. Much, much faster than wire transfers.

To be clear, this is primarily a US problem.

I live in New York now, but previously I lived in Europe and UK. Bank transfers there are instant. If you want to send 20k EUR from Finland to Spain, it can be done immediately, 24/7, with minimal fees. Same in UK for GBP transactions.

So it’s perfectly possible to do this without a cryptocurrency. It takes some political will though. But then again, it also takes political will to prevent cryptocurrency exchanges from being shut down if they truly threatened central banks.

US wire transfers seem to depend entirely on goodwill of banks. I regularly send wires between Wells Fargo and Schwab, and they always complete in a few hours. Yes, it sucks that banks get away with bad service. But routing money through unregulated cryptobanks isn’t a long-term fix because the regulators will come for them.

If it wasn't an issue then this wouldn't be happening:

https://news.bitcoin.com/central-bank-of-nigeria-orders-bank...

An African central bank is suspicious of cryptocurrency. How is that somehow evidence that wire transfers are difficult?

I guess if the use case is “I want to send $1M from Iran to an American who will distribute the money to Nigerian accounts”... Then yes, that is presumably easier to execute in crypto. But there are also pretty good reasons why countries want to keep an eye on that kind of flows.

I see you've never lived in an African country. Remittances of any kind, even between neighbouring countries, is slow, painful and depending on which country on the continent you're in may not arrive at all. I haven't lived in Asia, South America or even certain parts of Europe but I imagine you may find similar conditions there as well.

As someone who has had to make international payments in the US$20-50k range semi-frequently, Bitcoin is by far the easiest way to do it.

Your story about it being easy and cheap to do via remittances or whatever is pure fiction. Any traditional mechanism is at least two of slow, expensive, and onerous.

I'm genuinely curious where you're sending money that a wire transfer using IBAN+SWIFT doesn't work but Bitcoin does.

What country has the banking infrastructure to support easy $50k-equivalent withdrawals from a local Bitcoin exchange, but not for receiving wires?

If you don't want to get screwed on FX, you need to use a brokerage intermediary with entities in both currency domains. Direct international wire usually causes problems. So if I'm sending FX, it looks like

US Bank -> Wire -> IBKR -> Wire -> SG Bank (or whatever)

Usually this takes at least 5-9 business days end-to-end. (Wire delay, withdrawal hold, wire delay on the other end.)

A bitcoin transaction takes a few minutes, and if your counterparty doesn't want Bitcoin, there's probably an exchange with an entity in the destination country, so you only need to wait for the second wire delay.

It doesn’t make sense that you don’t want to pay FX rates but would happily accept the payment in Bitcoin whose rates fluctuate much worse.

Some banks charge up to 2% for currency conversion, but surely that’s better than the 10-15% lottery involved in Bitcoin? Unless you want to have a gambling aspect to your invoices.

I am not teetering on the edge of poverty so I would rather increase my volatility a tiny bit and stay EV neutral (or, more realistically, positive, since we’re talking about BTC) than incur a guaranteed substantial EV loss.

My suspicion is that your mental model for comparing volatility and loss is incomplete, given that you didn’t mention anything about the size of the transfer compared to your wealth, or anything else about local risk-aversion/utility convexity.

So you do want the gambling aspect because you’re not poor and you believe Bitcoin mostly goes up.

That’s fine, but I don’t think it aligns with what most people want from their money transfers.

I don’t want it, but I’ll tolerate it given the benefits.

It is not pure fiction. I also send transactions semi-frequently in those ranges and have never had an issue. Sure, I have not sent them to Africa and that might be where the differences in experiences lie.

I don't work in Africa, but in SE Asia. I have had countless problems getting medium-sized (tens of kUSD) FX transfers to HK,SG,TH,etc. on a reasonable deadline.

There was once I transferred money from Bitcoin to a Bitcoin cash address accidentally. The money was lost forever. It was a weird reason due to being syncing , but yeah you could lose money just like that while most people wouldn’t be able to explain it or understand it.

That has been solved with more user friendly wallets. If you're using a Qt wallet you'd think you knew what you were doing. The Qt wallet actually even tells you not to do anything until it's done syncing so you must have closed that overlay and ignored that warning. User error, that's your fault.

Actually i got no such warning. But your explanation re-enforces how easy things can go wrong.

This is a great example of why Bitcoin has failed: you do not build faith in a financial system by reportedly telling people that any mistake will have no way to correct it but they will be mocked for not being perfect.

I do international business payments all the time and most of them cost 0.15 EUR and are easy to both accept and send. More expensive ones (those outside the EU) can cost 3 EUR and have a exchange fee of 0.5%. And as far as I can tell prices are going down. I had to pay 0.3 EUR in 2019. Most transactions take like 2 bank days, but that is no big deal since most invoices are for 14 or 30 days.

To me it is unclear what issue there is to solve unless your country has messed up banks.

Better than, say, Transferwise or XE.com? Can you explain how?

There isn’t a list of allowed vs banned countries?

Now you are back at the "evading" use case. BTC works better if you want to send six figures to somebody in Iran. That remains a pretty small use case.

The globally shared ledger is not a place for untraceable transfers.

Monero solves that problem.

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