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You do understand that Wiring money is not slow because of the technology right? And it has everything to do with government regulations around anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering, anti-fraud, etc.?

I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with different laws.

If I want to send someone money within the US, for example, it’s near instantaneous, whether through a credit card/debit card purchase, Zelle/Venmo, PayPal, direct bank transfer, etc.

To the extent some forms of transfer require waiting a day it’s because, once again, banks do settlements once a day to reduce costs and to meet federal government regulations that prevent fraud and/or help keep the economy more stable.

Blockchain tech is significantly slower than decades old banking technology. You can go hours before someone mines something to close out a bunch of transactions. What slows down banking transactions is the very stuff the absence of which meant that $30bn of wealth evaporated overnight in FTX.

> I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with different laws

Condescending straw man here.

Being able to use BTC to do this, routing around the various jurisdictional settlement layers, is a huge practical improvement.

Those 7 days don't make society better, they're a drag on the economy and the wallets of anyone who doesn't have access to quicker mechanisms.

You think preventing fraud, money laundering or terrorism funding (the specific examples cited above) doesn't make society better?

An unalterable public ledger does a lot more to prevent or expose those things than banking regulations. Weren’t there even a few banks that were making huge profits off of criminal activity recently?

The question you're posing assumes an argument the comment you're responding to doesn't make. It's not whether "preventing fraud, money laundering or terrorism funding" makes things better, it's whether the processes put in place are effective towards combating those things. It would be upsetting to know a $2b pipeline for catching these things were only able to detect $2m worth of illicit funds for example.

Your comment is also assuming funds would only be seized for a shared definition of "fraud, money laundering or terrorism" when that is not always the case. Preventing "terrorism" by placing embargoes on all individuals of disagreeable governments would seem like an overreach for many individuals with family overseas.

This is from your years of law enforcement knowledge on Terrorism, Tax Avoidance, Theft?

Many of us don't want everything we do monitored and tracked. I understand this leads to more financial fraud, laundering, and terrorism, but if I were to list my problems in life, those are nowhere near the top. Privacy is much higher.

That's not a universal statement -- that calculus could change -- but this is the case for me in the developed world in 2022.

Blockchains are literally a public ledger.

It's the least private system you could conceive.

> I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel

I don’t see anything in the post you are replying to that indicates they believe this. They noted the distance, which makes clear many practical issues (it was not only another country but not in a trading or common regulation block like the EU).

It’s clear the amount of time involved is the obstacle the person had issue with. This seems like a use case for crypto (even if I personally would tend to just do the wire whenever practical).

> I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with different laws.

They meant exactly that. The claim that blockchain is faster because of technology is obviously a complete strawman.

> A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes.

Ignoring the week-long wire detail (which deserves an explanation because that doesn't resonate with my experience), depending on when you sent that transaction, your wire could've lost a decent amount of value due to the price instability of bitcoin. Losing 5% in a matter of minutes because everyone is panicking is not a good deal.

You shouldn't call it "losing 5%," BTC price is not an exchange rate, it's a measure of exchange volatility with an integral component tracking trust in ECC, network availability. It's silly to try and compare software to what is essentially a government-financial-corporate feedback loop and it's behaviors.

Every country could severely limit mining, and the supply would continue its steady velocity, whereas sometimes executive behavior spurs financial institutions to simply make the federal banks buy everything.

Fractional reserve banking is an inherently unstable system.

True federation is not.

Ethereum crossed a similar threshold at the merge reducing the calculus, but it's not clear to me if there are any more "difficulty bombs" built in where executive control can be expressed, say in the consensus layer where unilateral control can be expressed over supply.

> You shouldn't call it "losing 5%," BTC price is not an exchange rate, it's a measure of exchange volatility with an integral component tracking trust in ECC, network availability.

No, I'm talking about the exchange rate. I don't care what bitcoin means internally or how it functions, I care about what it's worth on the market today and tomorrow, because there's no to way live in the purely crypto world.

That's the whole point of a currency, that you and I agree that some instrument of value will stay consistent enough to transact with. Crypto is just not there because the ecosystem is full of scams. You could design a perfectly federated system that's worthless because bad actors abuse the platform. If you build a system that assumes everyone is a criminal, then that's what you wind up building, a system in which everyone is a criminal.

We have stable coins that can get you both.

Both the loss of capital and the inconvenience of an exchange rate?

> ”A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes.”

And how long does it take to convert the Bitcoin to money in the destination country?

SWIFT wires normally clear the same day. If it took seven days, your transaction was being held for legal reasons. It’s foolish to think that Bitcoin somehow solves this problem — it just moves the responsibility for inspecting transactions to the “off-ramp” exchange you’d be using in the destination country.

Why did it take 7 days? wire from Netherlands to US (ING to BofA) took 2 minutes

If it took 7 days it was probably due to AML/KYC issues. Bitcoin would have been faster, of course, because it doesn't do AML/KYC, but that just means it's unsuitable for conducting business (other than businesses that are outside the law).

There's no good reason for KYC to take days.

It's perfectly reasonable for the party receiving the funds to ask for a proof that the money didn't come from human trafficking. But that should be a fully automated process in most cases, and no one but the receiving party should have anything to say.

KYC & AML got a lot more thorough after 9/11, at the behest of the US government. A large part of the cost is extra guarantees against terrorist funding, and it's not obvious that this extra burden is worth the cost. It's kind of like airport security, except for money.

Simply making illegal activity more burdensome with fiat money requires less effort than what's currently being spent on these processes.

> Do you watch porn? How many times have have sites that provide it been in trouble because of some puritan bs from the dark ages? Do you know this is the majority of the internet? Are you aware that a lot of innovations (the internet included) took off and became mainstream because of porn?

The issue here is the American puritan mindset being forced on the world due to the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. Similar issues stem from American social media. Here in Europe I see ads in the subway from museums that would violate e.g. the nudity rules on Instagram.

Funny, I’ve moved hundreds of thousands of dollars between the UK and Australia this year, and it’s never taken more than a few hours. And I got useful money out of the other end, not Bitcoin.

This idea that it’s both useful for large international transfers and a highly volatile investment also seems contradictory.

The ship is sinking so fast I swear I heard the words bubbling by the last paragraph.

Here is a book recommendation for you: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Everyone and their dog hates Thiel nowadays but the ideas in the book ring true more than ever. Here is one of the questions asked in the book: “What important truth do very people agree with you on?”

Some people see the potential for crypto and believe in it. Most people think it's a scam. And it may eventually collapse and go to 0. But the point here is that for radical new things conventional ways of thinking rarely work out.

Given the current stage of history and the macroeconomy perhaps it’s high time someone wrote a sequel “One to Zero.”

Can the book be used as a flotation device?

If I want Crypto to avoid my money being seized, to pay for porn, to send across the globe, then surely I also don't want it to be a high risk investment?

Where's the crypto with high stability and low changes? I guess stablecoins seem to fit that niche the most but they also seem very centralized and owned by specific companies?

So the use cases you're going with are:

* Wire transfers

* Paying for porn

* Avoiding civil asset forfeiture

I think 99% of people watch free/ad-supported porn, and anyone concerned about civil asset forfeiture is likely either a criminal, or a conspiracy theorist and/or paranoid schizo (i.e. a small minority of the population).

Wire transfers are a legitimate use-case maybe. I don't really know much about that as I've never personally had to do it. But if that's the only legitimate use case for cryptocurrency, then it's probably a better idea to try and improve the efficiency of traditional wire transfers than to use fake money that's a magnet for fraud/scams/crimes.

> Blockchain tech is here to stay.

This I agree with. Blockchain as a general technology is useful, but not for financial products/services.

> Wire transfers

Wise or CurrencyFair take your money on a local account anywhere on the globe, and deposit it anywhere else with a local currency from a local account.

Rates are within 0.5% of the currency exchange, and no fixed or percentage fee, no wire fee since it’s all local accounts (it’s an example / please check the terms / this is not financial advice).

I honestly don’t see what’s there to save with crypto. Fees for credit card transactions are often 5 times above (2.5%).

Unless you live in one of the countries they don't want to touch.

> I think 99% of people watch free/ad-supported porn

Huh. You'd be surprised.

> anyone concerned about civil asset forfeiture is likely either a criminal, or a conspiracy theorist and/or paranoid schizo

This right here is the problem. Your argument goes along the lines of: I am doing nothing wrong/illegal therefore I have nothing to worry about. This assumes perfect laws, perfect law enforcement and following proper procedures. Sorry to burst your bubble but this is not how the real world works. You don't need to prove anything and you shouldn't just throw away your rights because you want to prove you're not schizo.

In the case you are a criminal, should the punishment fit the crime and should there be due process or are we just going to throw anyone that breaks a law, any law in jail and sentence them to death?

How many laws do you break during a day? https://www.businessinsider.com/most-commonly-broken-laws-in... Should the government just come in an take all your stuff now because they suspect you've connected to an unsecured wifi? They don't even need to prove anything and poof... your stuff is gone. this is civil asset forfeiture. This is how dumb it is.

> Stick with Bitcoin and ETH and treat it as a high risk investment and you'll be fine.

What you want in a currency is fungiblity (if that’s an actual word) and a stable store of value.

What you get with crypto is a billion competing chains and a “high risk investment”.

To compensate for this you get exchanges who also share your view that customer deposits are a “high risk investment” instead of a warehousing operation which is their legal obligation.

Perhaps I’m not the target of crypto because I can see it for what it is and not the utopian dream people want you to see?

> Do you know this is the majority of the internet? Are you aware that a lot of innovations (the internet included) took off and became mainstream because of porn

You really think that billions were poured into the Internet infrastructure to deliver porn more efficiently?

I'll tell you what: if we didn't need to stream hidef movies, see pictures in the internet it would have not taken of like it did. Porn had a lot to do with the pace at which the progress was made.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-porn-drives-innovation-i...

The only thing the article mentioned about a contribution of internet to porn is “high def streaming” but with no supporting evidence. The first thing that got most people wanting high speed internet was Napster.

I work at a financial institution. Wires are one of our major customer offerings, and they’re way, way up this year.