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Comment by quadcore | Hacker News Reader

Tangential. Many think bitcoin is useless and i understand the debate, it clearly has it's legitimacy but "hey, wait a minute" was i thinking the other day, Ive personally used bitcoin to pay for things and I love it a lot more than my banking system. The user experience is just better Ive found. For example, it takes days to wire money or get money for me. Also in France they pushed KYC to a degree its ridiculous. Here you got to fill a full A4 form to move 3000+€ which is ridiculous because the rich and powerful certainly dont do that. I understand KYC protect me and but its not well implemented imo. So in short it's kind of simple: some of us use bitcoin for its UX really.

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Where are you based? UK to UK (at least) money transfers are usually done in seconds/minutes. We use Wise for international stuff and it's pretty much instant as well.

Surely if bitcoin/crypto became the way/ubiquitous, it would end up having the same KYC issues?

Not knocking crypto, btw!

You absolutely are knocking on crypto, as you should. The only morally legitimate use case I’ve seen for crypto was when it was one way you could still donate to the scihub lady.

Local transfers in many jurisdictions are instant or near instant [1]. UK based FPS is just one of many.

International transfers are certainly not instant - Wise originally innovated a cheaper and faster solution to this problem, but that crown is fast vanishing as rivals heat up their offerings (Atlantic Money, Revolut, amongst others).

BTC is a valid alternative to these options. My real gripe is the on/off-ramp between FIAT and crypto. That's where the fees are in my experience.

[1] https://www.gbm.hsbc.com/-/media/gbm/insights/images/scheme-...

Oh yeah banking in the UK is awesome compared to what i have now in France, ive used my (UK) account for years, even when I was in Asia or in Africa.

I don't think most people think it's useless. It's more that it's value is heavily overinflated for its market, by hype and cryptobros.

Most people think it's useless.

Crypto being valuable is mostly useless. If I’m buying a coffee, I don’t really care about the market cap, as long as there is enough value to enable active transactions, it works.

Crypto might be the future, but I can’t see any reason why it would be Bitcoin or anything else that exists currently. It’s more likely something will come along with more features later making it more useful for real transactions. Obsoleting the current coins.

"Also in France they pushed KYC to a degree its ridiculous. Here you got to fill a full A4 form to move 3000+€" While it is true some French banks have some ridiculous red tapes I can assure you that not all French banks are like that. Plus for the majority of banking operations you can use foreign services like Revolut or Wise with much less frictions and even an API.

>I can assure you that not all French banks are like that. Plus for the majority of banking operations you can use foreign services like Revolut or Wise

The difference with Bitcoin being, wherever you are, on planet or in space with an internet connection, the same transmission rules apply.

You arent forced to jurisdiction shop or be a member of the minority of humans with the luxury of citizen friendly governance, just to transact freely. If there is one major usecase and value to BTC, its that.

You can also now play with it in Nostr.

Many of us send like 1000 sats (20 cents) instead of pressing the like button, which is a much better signal for posts than on social media, and lots of fun.

Jack Dorsey explained many times in the interviews that social media companies are captured by advertisers because of their dependence upon them, and talked about how they had to take a different direction of the product that he wanted because of advertisers.

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