Hacker News Reader

Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

My US bank account has zero transaction fees and if I had this kind of money I do not see why I could not transfer for zero fees (don't see a limit anywhere). And if making smaller transactions, apps like Venmo can transfer money both instantly and free (unlike Bitcoin).

View on HN

Banks typically have limits on how much you can withdraw or transfer with any given method in a day.

Well if I were to show up at the bank wanting to transfer $1bn I am sure I would get all kind of stares, but can not see a technical reason why they would not be able to do it. Difference with Bitcoin is you can do it completely anonymously, for all the good and bad things that go with that.

> completely anonymously

Except we're all out here talking about this and no one knows what other $1bn transactions have occurred in the banking system today so we're not talking about those.

He means anonymous from bank actors and state actors obviously. When you transfer money with a bank or wire service they know who you are and who you are transferring money to. Nobody afaik, knows who either of these wallets are held by.

Banks typically treat billionaire customers differently too, it's absolutely ludicrous to think they'd have to use hundreds of thousands of transactions (let alone pay for them!).

Maybe. Having worked in the wire room before, that is not inaccurate. That said, transferring one billion would require advance knowledge, multiple signoffs, and adjusting permissions for people. Depending on the institution the payments may have to be split, but odds are the bank would eat the cost to maintain that relationship.

> That said, transferring one billion would require advance knowledge, multiple signoffs, and adjusting permissions for people.

This is largely a feature, not a bug, as various Bitcoin exchanges have discovered.

I run a VC fund. We move store money around in large amounts (6-7 figure transfers, 7-8 figure balances). Our bank loves us and doesn't charge us any fees for anything ($0 wires etc). Having millions parked with them allows to lend the money which is how they make their revenue. They don't care about fees.

In the case of China, hundreds of thousands of transactions is too many, but it is apparently routine for transfers of money outside China to be done in a large number of small transactions due to the legal per-person limit on transferring money outside. (And yes, since it's a per-person limit, not only do you need to do a large number of transactions, you need a new cooperator to put their name on each one.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com