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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

One of your points is of dubious validity: fees may not be higher.

Fees went very high when the network became congested; but when it’s not congested, they’re much lower than credit card systems are for normal businesses.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ suggests that right now, what equates to about nine US cents is sufficient for a basic transaction. And if you’re happy to wait an hour, then two cents ought to do you fine.

I’m not sure whether this is a typical rate; I haven’t been keeping an eye on it, and https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d is hard to read casually. But by the looks of it, a very substantial fraction of transactions have been going through at what will be under ten cents if they’re simple transactions.

Your standard sorts of base rates for accepting credit card transactions are 30¢ + 1.75–2.9%, depending on certain conditions like country and card type.

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I agree. It's almost hilariously counterintuitive. I recently needed to send a moderate sum of money (4 figures) to someone who lives across the country. There's no obvious reason why this should cost me anything or not happen in the same day. However,

* Checks / ACH takes days to close, plus in many situations you might have to actually mail the person a check

* EFT seems reliable, but takes days and requires having been previously set up and authenticated (which borders on impossible if you don't own both accounts).

* Wiring seems like the obvious solution, but depending on your combination of banks fees are going to be >1% for transactions of my size. I also failed to get a wire to happen in <24 hours online for reasons I still don't understand.

* Using a money sending service like Google Pay sounds reasonable enough, but even assuming you're under the transaction limit and have already set up everything necessary to satisfy their fraud prevention systems, any large amount will still take multiple days to fully clear.

On the other hand, while Bitcoin's slow transaction times are a pain for in-person merchant payments, being able to send even large sums of money reliably in less than an hour for (comparatively) a small fee seems almost miraculous. It's true that if you need to go USD -> BTC -> USD it takes much longer, but that's more a problem with currency exchange than an inherent limitation of the currency itself.

Last week I needed to make a highly time-sensitive transfer of ~20k that had to clear the same day. Chase charged me a flat fee of $25 for the wire (and Ally Bank would have been happy to do it for $20). Chase temporarily froze my account since the payment was so large it was immediately flagged, but I spoke to someone on the phone within a few minutes, verified it was all legitimate, and the transfer was then processed without issue.

I fail to see how Bitcoin could have helped any of this.

I had to do similar a month ago, around $20k as well. It was from my account at BofA to an account at a different bank. I did it all online, and it cost $10 and cleared the next day, so within 24 hours. I did this all online without talking to any person, though I did have to 2FA into my account.

I get that some banks might not be as competent yet, but signs look like they'll all get there in the end.

is this sarcasm?

> I fail to see how Bitcoin could have helped any of this.

how about:

- not having to pay $25 (btc fee of $0.03 is confirming within an hour, $0.10 is almost guaranted to confirm in 10m)

- "frozen account" is not even a thing

- not having to speak to anyone on the phone

you must be joking.

With the price fluctuations, maybe that 20k arrives as 19k. Don’t leave it in bitcoin for too long either. Might turn into 15k.

You're fortunate that it was processed without issue. Banks and governments have vested interest in large money transfers and it could just have easily gone the other way; they could have suspected the money and witheld the transfer and the money until you provided paper documentation of its legitimacy.

Average person pays fees twice. One buying the currency, and a second time at sale. On top of that exchanges have even more fees so, consumers are paying more than just one block chain fee.

That's not a big of a deal as you're making it out to be. I can say this because I use bitcoin regularly in commerce. I pay 3 cents equivalent (typical fast fee over the last handful of months) plus maybe 20 cents if I'm silly and use something like coinbase to purchase bitcoin initially.

And then my transaction clears in 10-20 minutes instead of a day or two like the banks' ACH network.

For 0 cents, my bank does overnight transactions.

For 10 cents they do it in under 10 seconds.

SEPA Inst is a thing now.

One of the other benefits of bitcoin is that you can use it or send it anywhere. Not just Europe or $otherrestrictedproprietaryregionssystem.

Most people don't really send their money out of Europe. Or if they do it's a very rare and exceptional event.

One benefit of crypto might be that it lights a fire under the ass of banks to improve their services. There is no technical reason why banks can’t match or exceed the convenience of crypto for making money transfers. They just haven’t had enough competition to make it happen yet.

Yes. Here in Sweden we now have a system called Swish[1] that, after some initial setup, lets people make more or less instantaneous transfers to each other and to businesses. It works quite well, is very popular and, for now, is free to use for private individuals. I think one reason we have this system is the fear of bitcoin. (The other is the banks' wish for everyone to stop using cash.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)

SEPA Inst is planned to offer <10 second transactions for most SEPA banks by end of the year. The transaction costs about 10 cents at my bank (normal SEPA is free).

Yes. But don't forget credit cards offer others services, such as charge refund and fraud protection

I am only quibbling on the statement about fees, not the rest.

The point is that credit cards offer very valuable services in exchange for fees. Bitcoin offers nothing for a higher fee.

really? nothing? do you even know what bitcoin is? the ignorance in this thread is baffling sometimes.

Are you talking about credit cards or debit cards? There is a big difference when making a comparison to bitcoin.

The reason why bitcoin doesn't have these features is that there isn't a bank sitting between the two parties doing business. To exchange a bitcoin with somebody, you are essentially trading "in cash". When you do business with somebody directly in cash, the same kind of shortcomings are involved, especially when it's not a transaction with a vendor that has a policy that allows you to return and refund the products you bought using cash when you can provide the receipt.

In fact once you lose the receipt, in most places, if they allows you to return the items you bought, they won't give you back your cash. Rather they will give you the ability to exchange what you returned for something of equal value within the store. They still get to keep the cash you gave them in that scenario.

When it comes to being able to dispute charges on a debit/credit transaction, like I said before, that is only because there is a middle man bank that is holding the funds in escrow. While I am not up to date on the way things are currently regulated with regards to bitcoin, there is nothing technologically getting in the way of somebody being able to build a banking/brokerage type system around bitcoin exchange if they wanted such guarantees.

Both credit and debit?

  The reason why bitcoin doesn't have these features is that there isn't a bank sitting between the two parties doing business

Yes I know, that's why we should make fairer comparisons..

Point of formatting: please don’t use indentation for quotes, as it renders them much less usable everywhere. Just use the old email convention, a leading “> ”.

> when it’s not congested, they’re much lower than credit card systems are for normal businesses

So, it sounds like it only works if nobody uses it.

Sure, you can say we now have <insert name here> which is like Bitcoin, but solves this problem. This, however, is similar to pointing out there are credit cards with lower fees than what you mentioned (e.g. national ones), it's just the major ones that are expensive.

> but when it’s not congested, they’re much lower than credit card systems are for normal businesses.

It's extremely americanocentric to assume All Of The World either uses credit cards or x-gen Kriegerands.

I’m Australian. There are sometimes other options (PayPal and BPAY being the most common two), but Visa/Mastercard are typically the only advertised option for online commerce.

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