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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Any technology can be used to facilitate illegal activities. Vehicles, weapons, phones, computers... Nothing new here. Cryptocurrency is no different.

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Crypto-currency’s _only_ use case today, other than speculation, is illegal payments. For almost everything else the traditional banking system is faster, cheaper, and safer.

It’s Saturday now in many places in the world. Can you move a few thousand USD between your two primary accounts at different traditional banks before Monday?

... yes? Faster Payments for my GBP balances and Prompt Pay for my THB ones tend to take a few seconds and be free?

Added bonus: both will confirm the recipient name, and if I truly, actually fuck up the payment, I can get the money back again rather than it disappearing into the ether.

Finally: the money I have transferred is now available to actually spend on things straight away, without needing to then reconvert it to real people money with a sizeable cost.

Don’t know, I’ve never had any need to do that. But I can pay a merchant $50 by credit card without spending $30 in transaction fees or waiting 30-60 minutes for confirmations.

Bitcoin Cash is the original and confirms in the next block for pennies.

«[Problem x] with cryptocurrency will be fixed by [new alt-coin] that’s just around the corner!»

Just because the US has (comparatively) bad banking infrastructure doesn't mean most places do, most of Europe can do this and has been able to for years (though probably in EUR). This includes some cross-border payments.

Instant payments should be coming to the US in 2023. See https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_faq.htm

And when you say "for years", it's really decades that this has been the norm for. In my experience it is the same in the more developed Asian countries, or really any high HDI country that is not the US.

Ok, but you're not denying the fact that it's a use case. Why should I have to suffer because the US financial infrastructure is stuck in the 1930s?

All technology becomes outdated at some point, if cryptocurrency is useful to me right now to perform basic financial operations how is that not a use case?

But you’re not moving spendable USD between your own accounts when you’re transferring Bitcoin, so it’s hard to see how this is related to your use case?

It's trivial to do that in Australia. Is this still a significant challenge in the US?

Our two major bank-to-bank payment rails are the Automated Clearing House (ACH) and Wire Transfer. Both are "closed" on weekends for some reason. One could probably use something with debit cards like Venmo or purchase and hand off a cashier's check.

Yes: Many banks, at least in the US, are now open for limited times on Saturdays & Sundays. I can walk into one bank, get a cashiers check, and bring it to another bank, all with zero transaction costs. And possibly faster than Bitcoin, depending on the transaction fee I was willing to pay.

To help people in the US: Zelle can do this I think? PayPal probably too.

The nice thing is that if your account is closed on the weekend, the thing you need to buy probably is too.

Here in Australia I can transfer up to $10,000 between traditional banks faster than I can with bitcoin, any day of the week.

Yes, and it’s also illegal to spend over $10k in cash in Australia. And there ain’t no government that can stop a person from sending infinity via bitcoin any day of the week. Even the ones that believes that the laws of math don’t apply there.

Update; this was cancelled in Dec 2020. Got very close, a jurisdiction banning cash tx’s. And that is why Cryptocurrency, non state money is important.

Nowhere did I disagree with what you've said, except for your final sentence. The interesting thing about cryptocurrency is not that it facilitates illegal activities, but that it does very little else - and that is in fact quite different from the rest of your list.

> The interesting thing about cryptocurrency is not that it facilitates illegal activities, but that it does very little else - and that is in fact quite different from the rest of your list.

How can the same people who make this argument turn around and in the same breath decry Bitcoin for being nothing more than a speculative store of value? You can’t have it both ways.

No one buys Bitcoin to spend it. This much is abundantly clear. And Bitcoin, as an inflation-proof global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms, never had to do anything other than sit there as an idle speculation to fulfill its primary role as safest safe haven asset. That’s what makes it such a powerful idea.

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