What are those. I have claimed here and will repeatedly do so -- there are none. I mean, sure, there are a few companies which integrate the sell-your-bitcoins-buy-our-product in one go but the volume of that is near irrelevant. And no, international transfers do not count as a usage because not only the sender needs to buy bitcoins the seller needs to sell them too...
The current cost to move $10m of bitcoin across international borders is about $1. Attempt the same via conventional means and you'll quickly realise it's benefits go beyond monetary efficiency.
As for current working use cases Factom[0] stores an auditable timestamped data trail in a merkle tree structure, which is then anchored into the bitcoin blockchain.
This is a tech minded site, I would hope people here understand the value of immutability. Real immutability, data that can't be altered or undone in anyway.
Many seem upset at bitcoins meteoric rise and the rampant speculation for good reason, but make no mistake blockchains will be around long after we are gone.
[0] www.factom.org
- resilience against political "changes" (esp. China, Russia); money that is under foreign, unaffiliated regulatory regime cannot be seized by authorities at home
- taxes: you want to secure your cash/assets from sudden taxes on property/equity
- resilience against a bank going literally bankrupt. this happened in the financial crisis, even in the EU, and one bank's customers IIRC lost everything above 100.000 € on their accounts.
Also, if you run an international business with regional offices or such, you don't want to spend huge amounts of both time and money when transferring company funds or buying machinery from vendors in other jurisdictions.
I'm fairly sure the cost is close to 0 for eur using SEPA. I've also transferred chf and usd across borders with no fees.
FX fees are different (around 0.01% with a decent broker?) but I suppose BTC spread+commission is higher than that anyway.
Also, are BTC transaction fees really that low ($1 for a 10m transaction)? I've been hearing complaints for a while now about how long it takes to process minimum fee transactions. I don't have any experience with it, as I haven't messed around with BTC in a few years, but, it's definitely part of the argument for the changes happening tomorrow.
In the past several weeks I've done transactions for less than a dollar that cleared in the next block. (the cost is more to do with size than the amount of money-- $1m in a single address costs a lot less than $1m in 1M addresses)
Unfortunately due to the lingering effects of the spam attack, some fee estimation software is way off.
So, what other reputable exchange is there that works for BTC->USD and vice-versa and doesn't have ridiculous fees (I agree that Coinbase fees are outrageously high).
But at the moment moving $10m through bitcoin is not one of them.
For one, I don't need to be an op-sec expert to ensure that my money doesn't just vanish because I made a mistake or something was hacked somewhere.
The same is probably true of EUR but I have no experience with it.
You have mixed transferring a currency with converting one currency into another. You meant transferring $10m of USD to EUR isn't free. Which is true. But neither is converting $10m of Bitcoin to Ethereum.
Come on...
Computers can be used to watch child pornography. What point am I making with this phrase? None.
Purse.io lets you buy anything Amazon sells, just about, for bitcoin at a %5 discount (that %5 is not coincidence, it's the effective cost of credit cards.)