Edit: in order for it to get "so slow its stopped" more than half of the miners would need to go offline and not rejoin for hours.
Also, how does borrowing and interest work with something like Bitcoin or other distributed ledgers?
You sign some legally binding agreement, they send you the bitcoin, you pay it back in the agreed intervals + interest over time. If you don't, the legal system gets involved.
I'm wondering if there is a smarter way to issue loans through something like smart contracts as another comment mentioned. Where we perhaps remove the need for large single institutions to hold large amounts of capital for the purpose of loans. Otherwise we would then be entering in a very similar structure of what we have today and the inherent drawbacks.
We could imagine mediating that transaction through blockchain something something, but degree of risk pooling - centralization - is the essential feature of the transaction
Bitcoin costs 50-100x that: $10-15-20 for "small number hours" settlement.
A Bitcoin transaction with a fee of $0.20, might settle after several days, but would more likely expire from the mempool before confirmation. And the really fun part is the unpredictability!
ACH isn't perfect. But Bitcoin is completely inappropriate for the common ACH use case.
Except when you realize the mempool has a complete record of every pending tx, unlike the central bank whose system is completely down and cannot and will not have a record of any of these transactions and it's services cannot be reached.
A part of me wants to be elated, but another part realizes that the end of US empire may allow the CCP to continue unabated, and that has incredibly horrible consequences given all the sabre rattling and their focus on Taiwan after illegally annexing Hong Kong and enslaving Xianjing.
The West will continue, and the lack of the US hegemony may allow it to prosper in other ways, but this will be an incredibly rough patch as it loses its status on sole Super Power, I don't think the CCP's China qualifies as a super power as it cannot unilaterally impose the world to operate on its own standard in anything but trade reliance, something it can and should lose. As creditor it cannot really do much except in a close sphere of emerging African countries, of which Bitcoin is actually flourishing, or the Russia/Iran block, and Iran is a hotbed of Bitcoin influence with state sponsored miners.
I hope the US takes the lead once more without the need for overt militaristic, police-state tactics as the petro-dollar loses its gravitas, I just don't want to be here when it happens.