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Comment by thinkmassive | Hacker News Reader

Like yesterday, when Fedwire and ACH were offline for hours?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-res...

That didn’t affect 99.9+% of people, and is a far cry from the USD being “unusable”.

Congratulations on not needing to send a wire transfer or ACH during the outage. For anyone who was expecting to do that, it was literally unusable.

Your take is like claiming a major AWS outage didn’t happen because you personally didn’t get on the Internet that day.

Most ACH transactions take 3+ business days to settle anyway since it's a batch processing system.

The original comment was talking about USD not being usable, not ACH. Having to delay money transfers for a day does not make a currency unusable.

I use only USD and didn’t even know that happened, so it seems like a bad example.

How many people would have noticed, if not for the headlines?

Anyone trying to send money using ACH. Maybe that doesn’t include you, but many regular people use it on an everyday basis.

In my lifetime, if I were to compare 3 numbers - no. of hours there was no electricity (X), no. of hours there was no mobile data coverage so that I could continue doing transactions without electricity (Y) and no. of hours Fedwie/ACH was down (Z) which prevented me from bank transfers, I'd say X and Y and at least 2 orders of magnitude bigger than Z.

If Fed/ACH going down for a few hours bothers you a lot but electricity/mobile network reliability doesn't faze you, you must be living in a truly unique place.

My computers and network are powered by uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) which I highly recommend for every important system. I have a generator in case of extended outage, which I also highly recommend to everyone who is able to have one at home, regardless of whether you own a computer.

I personally have fiber, cable, and LTE feeding my home gateway. This might seem like overkill to non-tech folks, but I recommend it to anyone whose productivity/career is highly reliant on being online.

I realize this isn’t necessarily a typical home setup, but I also think most people are horribly unprepared for many potential situations.

This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier.

> This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier.

Even if I had a setup like yours, I'd give up on bitcoin before "fiat banking." You can't buy gas for your generator with bitcoin.

Yet.

I don’t mean this flippantly.

One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.

As Andreas likes to say: “email used to be a multi-step series of memorized commands from a green terminal in a University.

Now my Mom can do it with a touch of her finger.”

I believe we’ll get that in the near-ish future.

> One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.

I don't know why you're so confident about this? It's entirely feasible that none of them are ever usable for day-to-day transactions.

Personally, I haven't seen any evidence that Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is ever going to enter the mainstream. Even if it did, I don't see any benefit to using it over USD for the vast majority of people.

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