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Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

In Europe, wire transfers work exceptionally well since the introduction of SEPA Instant Credit Transfer.

You have the choice between a free, transparent, technically stable, instant payment system (< 10 seconds until 100'000 EUR), using a stable currency.

an unregulated system where unknown people create and control the currency, that is generally slow, often with high payment or exchange fees and where you need to trust a lot of unknown parties (software, tools, network, coins, etc), where you can lose your key, that is falsely transparent (you see transactions, but you don't know who control the network).

Mhhh...

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You forgot to mention UX. SEPA payments have horrible user experience. The "modern" way of receiving money in automated manner in Europe and using SEPA is through payment providers. On checkout, customers get redirected to payment providers with strange startup names they've never heard about to initiate a transaction, and then redirected to their bank to log in and approve the initiated transaction. This is basically training people to accept phishing and MITM attacks.

Checkout via Paypal or debit/credit cards is much more straightforward and user-friendly, which is why they are still widely used (along with local services like Swish). A crypto wallet app that just requires scanning a QR code is even better, and miles ahead of anything SEPA/PSD2 offers in terms of user experience.

How do I scan a QR code on my phone? Do I need a mirror?

If it’s so great, why is nobody using it?

If people are so easily fooled into MITM attacks, why do they not happen?

Have you used Apple Pay? Works quite well.

> How do I scan a QR code on my phone? Do I need a mirror?

> If it’s so great, why is nobody using it?

Where I live people pay by scanning QR codes all the time.

> If people are so easily fooled into MITM attacks, why do they not happen?

They do! People are getting scammed on these systems all the time; usually the provider agrees to repay the funds to keep them quiet.

If QR codes are such a big UX plus then i hate to break it to you but all bank apps in my country read and create QR and people use it all the time. SEPA included.

Its quite lovely on invoices i must say.

Whats probably not there is that not every EU country uses this but that is matter of time. The banks are international, popular features spread. It will probably become standard very soon.

Absolutely true and I use it daily however some people want to dodge taxes or pay for child prostitutes. In which case the official banking channels are unusable.

True, but how is it relevant to the comment you replied to?

It's to say that "West" has a quite established and efficient transaction platform.

Because of that, as part of the "West", I hardly see any benefit of crypto, unless you are in some other camp (aka: "anti-West").

This is what I meant.

I think I read the parent comment differently: when crypto is claimed to be a weapon against the west, it is not because it is in any way an alternative, it is a weapon as a system supporting illicit activities against the west (money laundering, sanction evasion, state sanctioned ransomware). The fact that it slow, unscalable and expensive does not matter for those type of activities. So I thought it does not really matter that our banks are efficient.

> It's to say that "West" has a quite established and efficient transaction platform.

That part of "West" you are referring to also had ultra low or even negative interest rates, thus eroding the buying power of Euros and other peripheral currencies. No wonder European countries also account for some of the highest numbers of bitcoin nodes (per capita).

if only they did the same for gold

> You have the choice between a free, transparent

Transparent you say? Could you point me to the SEPA explorer where I can inspect every single transaction and account balance please? Here is the one for ethereum https://etherscan.io/ and for bitcoin https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions

SEPA is transparent for authorities though.

Ethereum and Bitcoin are transparent on transactions but intransparent on beneficial owner. Who is Satoshi?

So SEPA allows the government to spy on us while being a black box to the rest of us while Ethereum and Bitcoin are fully transparent while protecting our privacy. Not sure how this is a good point in favor of SEPA but ok.

> while Ethereum and Bitcoin are fully transparent while protecting our privacy

Transparency plays both ways, and be sure that every address can be deanonimized

Every year millions of people start running in circles around a black box building in the middle of the desert. I'm not sure if that's a useful analogy. Might explain why they get so violent if you question their god or their beliefs.

When you put it that way, the landscape makes a lot more sense. Just as there would be no convincing people on a Ramadan pilgrimage to Mecca of a better option, there may not be any convincing people who worship the black box of legacy banking. In fact, they might ridicule / murder you if you do — a tale of caution?

Seems people everywhere are largely the same.

SEPA only works within the EU whereas what you are comparing is a global payments system. In Europe it is also necessary to report any transactions over 10,000 EUR which causes more friction than you imply.

It is not transparent as to how much currency debasement is taking place, nor does anybody outside a small group at the ECB have any control over it.

It is quite clear who owns decentralized networks - the participants. Are they perfectly equal? No but they are more egalitarian than what they seek to replace.

Decentralized networks are more resilient to outages than the electrical supply of some countries. It may not make sense for you to use but millions around the world have found a use for it.

From a legal perspective do Crypto transfers over 10k have to be reported too?

According to newly announced regulations crypto transfers over 1000 Euros are to be scrutinized. How exactly this will be enforced is not clear to me.

Also noteworthy, cash payments are limited to 10,000 Euros (1000 Euro in Spain)

Awesome, thanks for the reply!

What a whole lot of nonsense. Blockchains operate on the basis of one dollar one vote. There's nothing egalitarian (not to mention democratic) about this. A central bank, on the other hand, is a public institution with a public mandate.

By the way, currency debasement is not an economic term. The only people who use it are conspiracy theorists and crackpots, as far as I know.

> public institution with a public mandate

Fed’s Powell begging people to quit their jobs atm. So, it this the public mandate you are talking about?

> Powell begging people to quit their jobs

Out of curiosity, where did you read this?

Probably meant to say begging for people to get laid off (the economy to cool down).

You're so close to an ad hominem that I can hardly be persuaded to reply but your confusion has taken the better of me.

Proof of stake blockchains operate on the basis of more dollars = more votes, for this to be true for proof of work blockchains one would first need to spend that capital for mining equipment.

It is very egalitarian since everyone can participate on an equal footing, everyone can run a node and get a complete copy of all transactions and verify correctness. It is challenging and expensive to get the same kind of insight into the stock market.

The European Central Bank has arguably failed its mandate of keeping price stability within the eurozone when some countries have more than 20% inflation.

Currency debasement is more commonly known related to coins but I'll leave the term as is

> It is very egalitarian since everyone can participate on an equal footing, everyone can run a node and get a complete copy of all transactions and verify correctness

I have friends that can pay rent but don’t have much left over. There are people in my city that live hand to mouth. I know plenty of people who are well off enough, but aren’t ever going to (or have the technical inclination, or sore cash to) run a node.

> get a complete copy of all transactions and verify correctness

I’m sure this is a real benefit for all the single parents struggling to feed and cloth their kid.

The reality is, most people don’t have the resources (time, technical or monetary) to participate in “egalitarian” crypto currencies. Moreover, even if they all did, it still wouldn’t be egalitarian, because they’d still be out-purchased by those with capital. So we’re back to where we started, except with more e-waste, energy bills and more exaggerated hyper-capitalism.

Well exactly, had these single parents bought Bitcoin or Ethereum years ago they wouldn't be struggling now.

One doesn't need to run a node to use the system but it is accessible to everyone, just as the code is there to be scrutinized publicly.

The entire point was to reform currency where economic policy is more predictable and the currency less susceptible to kleptocracy.

Interestingly enough the inflation rate of both Bitcoin and Ethereum is now lower than that of major world currencies. So while volatility still needs to trend lower for day to day usage, the case for a store of value has already been established in the past decade and anyone can see the price history and number of wallets increasing exponentially.

> had [they] bought Bitcoin or Ethereum years ago they wouldn't be struggling now.

I'm curious how you think people "make money" on crypto. Wouldn't those people getting rich be doing it at the expense of people losing money investing in crypto?

No, the market isn't a zero-sum game. "A rising tide lifts all boats"

Of course everyone cashing out at the same time would be akin to a bank-run. In practice this doesn't happen since people bought in at different times and have a different cost basis.

Ok, but where does the actual money come from?

If I bought 10k of ethereum at one point in time and sold if for 100k, I put 10k into a pot which I took 100k out of.

Basic math tells me there won't be a "rising tide" for the boats that are left when anyone else pulls out.

A rising tide also makes some vessels capsize, though.

I do not see how crypto is not a zero sum game, actually its a negative sum game if we deduct the mining costs, lost coins and the exchanges fees. Wasnt this supposed to work without whaleish, centralised exchanges?

> Proof of stake blockchains operate on the basis of more dollars = more votes, for this to be true for proof of work blockchains one would first need to spend that capital for mining equipment.

Just to clarify - this really depends on which chains you are talking about. Some proof of stake chains implement direct on chain governance, in which stake does directly translate into explicit voting power to implement policy changes. Polkadot in particular does this. But Ethereum, does not have anything resembling on-chain governance. Ethereum validators have no more say in what makes for valid ethereum blocks then what proof of work miners had to say. The folks that really matter is everyone running non-validating nodes and the people who choose to interact with those nodes for their transactions or inspecting the chain history.

> The European Central Bank has arguably failed its mandate of keeping price stability within the eurozone when some countries have more than 20% inflation.

It's not that simple. They could rise interest rates more but Italy and Greece would probably default on its debt, which would make euro a lot more unstable than keeping 20% inflation rate in three very small eastern european countries which corresponds to 3.6% of the whole EU population. Current inflation in euro zone is ~10%.

> It is very egalitarian since everyone can participate on an equal footing

Errr, no. One dollar one vote is not equal footing. If you have more dollars you can buy more votes. That's the opposite of egalitarian.

> The European Central Bank has arguably failed its mandate of keeping price stability within the eurozone when some countries have more than 20% inflation.

Yeah, Bitcoin has really held up great in value in comparison to euros or dollar… it’s only down 70 % on top of those currencies‘ inflation.

While AMZN is down 50% this year and much of the tech sector with it

It is still one of the best performing assets in history

Stop parroting this nonsense. Crypto isn't one of the best performing assets by any stretch of the imagination. You can't measure the return over an arbitrary period and call that the asset's performance. That's not how it works. An asset's performance needs to be considered in terms of expected return, i.e. the average return over a time period (typically, a day or week) and some measure of risk (such as the standard deviation of returns).

Unless someone’s willing to give me and a lot of other folks a server farm full of GPU’s then no- it’s not participation on equal footing when the whole ecosystem has been partially bootstrapped by money stollen or gained through criminal enterprise.

Even putting that aside, it’s not equal footing because the wealthy people who are wealthy based on the traditional economy make crypto a defacto plutocracy because they can afford to buy their way into it one way or another.

You'll be reported to the ECB and you'll have your accounts blocked for defaming the system.

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