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Comment by howmayiannoyyou | Hacker News Reader

As someone who sends wires frequently for work... way to complicated and unnecessarily so as compared to moving cryptocurrency. I would MUCH rather enter an address and memo field (Eg. XLM-Stellar) to move USD -> EUR then go through the IBAN/SWIFT, etc. headache; let alone the fees.

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Isn't a SEPA transfer exactly that? Enter an address, confirm via 2FA, and it arrives at the destination in 2 minutes?

Pretty much, but the time frame is either seconds (if both banks support SEPA Instant) or the next business day.

As someone that listened to people harp about SEPA for a decade. I am not impressed by it.

The actual user experience of SEPA is 2-5 business days just like America's oh so antiquated ACH system.

There are some very specific edge cases where SEPA instant exist, and that edge case may work for a large number of people that live in that walled garden.

That garden seems to be same country to same country transfers, where both banks have SEPA instant.

But to make it seem like the Eurozone or SEPA participant network has this solved has been very disengenious.

Maybe have a word with your bank then?

I frequently sent money to foreign countries and never experienced taking it longer than one day.

Oh, and it's free too.

Make one mistake with that address and your crypto is gone!! at least with IBAN/SWIFT the funds can be returned to the original account.

One mistake like putting in the entirely incorrect address? It's impossible to initiate a transfer with an invalid address, as they have checksums.

One mistake may mean copy-pasting wrong address. Or putting an extra "0" at the end of amount.

This happens. Both are (most of the time) reversible in standard banking.

Heh, unless you accidentally sent to hedge funds, /s.

My understanding was that wire transfers weren't very reversible.

They often are and it depends how quickly you react. This is a good description https://laws101.com/can-you-reverse-a-wire-transfer/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/citibank-just-go... - and that's not some poor Joe McConsumer, but financial sharks.

How about copy/pasting the wrong address then (either somebody else‘s, or one the recipient no longer has key access for)?

Can it? When I sent money to the wrong account, my bank told me "what's gone is gone"

Fortunately the sum was trivial, but nevertheless ...

I’m skeptical of Bitcoin as-is for any purpose (except Venezuelan digital gold) and cryptocurrencies generally as a “store of value”, but I can see the value cryptocurrencies could provide by offering some method of getting around the unnecessarily bad transaction systems we have in place today at least in the US.

The Venezuelan digital gold may come here sooner than many think.

You don‘t need cryptocurrencies for that. Many people in this thread have already mentioned SEPA – bulk retail payments have been a solved problem in Europe for years, and instant settlement is currently being rolled out.

You’re absolutely right. It’s ridiculous we haven’t solved this already.

The value of cryptocurrency is inversely proportional to how functional the regular digital banking system is.

Crypto advantage is no need to rely on or trust a 3rd party.

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