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Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

Except wire transfers take one or more days and are a huge pain in the ass to initiate online. In the US at least.

If you go to a third world country, it's even less convenient to pay for stuff. For example, you can't get a hotel room last-minute with a credit card in Vietnam, where I checked, because they need to verify your ownership/control of your credit card with a pair of small debits, probably because of the fraud/chargeback situation.

Another example, you want to donate to Wikileaks from the US. Not so easy.

Sometimes you really want digital cash you can take and spend anywhere for any reason, and US credit cards or debit cards or other mainstream bank accounts can't do that.

(There still is the problem of needing to use much more secure computers/devices to manage your digital cash than consumers are accustomed to having and using today.)

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As far as I can tell, most UK wire transfers are essentially immediate (at most a couple of minutes), even between different banks.

The UK is one of the wealthiest, stablest, most developed countries in the world. Pointing out that its banking system is relatively effective as if that reduces the value of Bitcoin is like saying toilets and public sanitation is great in the UK so why are these entrepreneurs bothering building cheap toilets and menstruation technologies for India and Africa again? In other words, unbelievably naive and borderline arrogant.

What happens when bitcoin is the adopted world currency and the power goes out in your area for a few days?

Entrepreneurs smell an opportunity[1] to roll out one of the many, many new energy technologies that have developed in the meantime in your area (which somehow was overlooked until this point.)

[1] An opportunity made possible by the ability (created by Bitcoin) to profitably and efficiently collect micropayments in poor regions of the world

So your solution to the problem of bitcoin being unusable without power(and internet access) in a region is that in the future bitcoin will enable people to develop new technologies that don't currently exist? And they will be able to invent these new technologies because the only thing holding them back is in the inability to collect micropayments(which they can currently actually do using cash)?

No, Bitcoin will help make it profitable to roll out new technologies. Roll out != invent. It will also stimulate the development of said technologies. Because it lowers the cost of taking payment.

As far as cash, try collecting cash payments for your grid of micro-generators recharging cellphones in the Amazon, see how well that works out for you. Let me guess, you're gunna fly some drones in to pick up the payments...

What are these new technologies that are just waiting for roll out?

>As far as cash, try collecting cash payments for your grid of micro-generators recharging cellphones in the Amazon, see how well that works out for you. Let me guess, you're gunna fly some drones in to pick up the payments...

Try removing your micro generator from the community after you've installed it when they stop paying your rent. See how that works out for you.

I'd collect the payments when I delivered the fuel btw.

Ah, the libertarian dream.

Maybe the "entrepreneurs" will in fact "smell the opportunity" and move in and save the day, but for what? What's the gain? Why design critical infrastructure so that its survival is based on a hypothetical market scenario, when it can be done right in the first place?

That won't be wire transfers, that'll be some kind of local interbank transfer. A wire transfer is still complicated (paper forms), slow and expensive to send to other countries.

You also have to give your name and address to the recipient bank to somehow prove you're not laundering money or funding terrorism.

It's called a "wire" transfer for a reason. In the EU, they take a day and are free.

The UK has some of the worst banking in the developed world - not the best.

The quick-transfer system is only available for certain transactions. Most payments still take a while, and anything that involves a paper cheque still takes at least a week.

As for money laundering and terrorism - it's been proven over and over that it's easier to get a bank account for both than it is to get a bank account as an average Joe.

Not a few banks are knowingly involved in illegal transactions of one kind or another. So giving Bitcoin a hard time for the same thing is hypocritical.

Banks are certainly going to be killed by a global digital currency sooner or later, but it's going to need some kind of independent OpenMoney initiative.

BC is not that initiative, because the creators seemed to believe that starting a digital goldrush was more important than creating a rock-solid and secure peer to peer infrastructure for all transactions.

I doubt banks will still be around fifty years from now. In an all-digital economy they're not just parasitic, they're irrelevant.

If you're a business with the right initial approvals, you can initiate wire transfers online. There are all sorts of monitoring and checks that the run in the background, but an innocuous wire can go end-to-end without little or no human intervention. It's just folks like you and me who rarely send wires and have to go through all the paperwork.

> For example, you can't get a hotel room last-minute with a credit card in Vietnam, where I checked, because they need to verify your ownership/control of your credit card with a pair of small debits, probably because of the fraud/chargeback situation.

This problem is soluble (as sibling points out, it's been solved in the UK). Conversely Bitcoin always takes about half an hour to settle transfers, for fundamental design reasons. Bitcoin qua Bitcoin is never going to be an effective way to pay for your shopping, and if you're using "Bitcoin" via a Visa-like entity, the benefits over just using Visa are questionable.

> Another example, you want to donate to Wikileaks from the US. Not so easy.

I suspect for most people (that is, non-anarchists) that's actually an advantage. Bitcoin is the equivalent of paying in used notes; it inherently carries a whiff of, at minimum, tax avoidance or socially-disapproved earning sources, because the big places where Bitcoin is more useful than conventional currency are tax evasion and socially unpopular activity. Whereas someone paying with amex likely has a proper job.

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