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Comment by abxyz | Hacker News Reader

I’m as cynical about crypto as any sane person but I think you’re hand-waving away the challenges of international business. How can you transact in dollars if you’re a business in Argentina? As you say, if you’re operating in Europe, this is a solved problem, but lots of businesses are operating across borders that don’t have the same payment options. Banks could solve this problem but they haven’t and this is what non-banks have come up with. I’m sure if SEPA was global this wouldn’t be necessary, but it isn’t.

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I'm trying to point out that most US people are unaware that days for selling a transaction should be outrageous, yet it's the norm.

And a wire, which is as close to sepa as I think you can get, costs 10s of $ each time.

Basically, the international business problem is real. The Argentina case is mostly lack of a domestic stable currency though. These are legit use cases, fast and cheap transactions aren't.

Fast and cheap transactions are legit use cases.

If you actually offered those US businesses with instant, verifiable transfers that cost nearly nothing, do you actually think they wouldn't move to that?

SEPA also works easily because it's single currency for a single unified economic zone. If currency change was involved then you'd likely be back to routing through central banks or currency change banks and such.

> As of 2025, there were 41 members in SEPA,[2][3] consisting of the 27 member states of the European Union, the four member states of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), the United Kingdom, as well as five EU candidate countries.[4][5][3] Some microstates participate in the technical schemes: Andorra,[6] Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City.[4] As of 2025, Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia are the five countries negotiating to join the EU that are included in SEPA.[2]

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

I don't know if I'd call that a "unified economic zone" without some qualifications.

Few of SEPA members have autonomous regions which are them selves not members of SEPA, I do wonder if making transactions between the autonomous region and the rest of the country, as well as to a different SEPA member is any harder. For example I can’t imagine it would be difficult to make a transaction between Thorshavn in the Faroe Islands and Hirtshals in Denmark proper, or to Oslo or Reykjavík for that matter. But a transaction between North Nicosia to Nicosia in Northern Cyprus and Cyprus respectively may be a different matter.

Here's a fun timeline to walk through how it developed and why it's been, while not trivial, implemented with a kind of structural uniformity to keep the problem space contained.

https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/about-sepa/sepa-timel...

It wouldn't surprise me if SEPA was running a BFT consensus protocol under the hood to ensure security

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