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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever paid for anything substantial with real money? It's a huge pain in the ass. I have to go into a bank, even during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have to pay outrageous fees to transfer money & participate in something called a "wire". Where my money will simply be magically transferred to another party somehow. There are a zillion steps, none of which are disclosed to me. It should work fine, but it is also takes an indeterminate amount of time. No one can explain where the money is in the interim period. Also the money could go to the wrong person. Also, the other party has no way of knowing the money arrived. I have to call them and remind them that I sent it & they need to check to see if their bank received it.

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There's three arguments there:

1 - Banks can make mistakes.

2 - Banks can be slow.

3 - Banks making it really hard to do transfer large sums of money.

I can't solve 1, but I can tell you that crypto definitely doesn't solve it. Because making a mistake with crypto is irreversible. The money is just gone. Mom forgot her password because she's getting old? Well, too bad, now Mom is broke and her money is gone forever.

Two is a solvable problem and it's getting better over time. It used to be even slower.

But 3, I'm in favour of. I want it to be hard for me to transfer away my life savings. I want there to be many steps in which my ID is checked and people look me in the eye and verify that yes, this is the thing I want to do. Because I am an idiot, and if you give me a gun I will shoot myself in the foot. I don't want it to be easy to accidentally go broke.

You don't realize that the reason they are slow is because they are insecure. Why don't wires go on weekends? Because there is a possibility of an error, that a human clerk would need to sort out in his working time. Bitcoin can go on weekend because its mathematically secure.

So because you are a self described idiot, I have to deal with ancient pain in the ass banking systems?

Good point, I've had one hell of a time making down payments on cars or first/last month's rent with cashier's checks when my bank doesn't have physical branches in my area.

If I could have paid with, say, a dollar-backed stablecoin from a reputable institution, I could have made the payment digitally and closed the sale/rental without waiting days for a bank to mail me a check. In the apartment rental case, I might not have gotten passed up because someone else arrived check-in-hand ready to close the deal.

> There are a zillion steps, none of which are disclosed to me. It should work fine, but it is also takes an indeterminate amount of time.

Curiously, this also describes the process of mining the next block in a PoW blockchain...

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