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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Sending simple wires in the US takes hours

What? No. It happens instantly at a protocol level. Practically, about thirty minutes. Most people don’t send and receive wires and so don’t choose bank accounts that prioritise them.

Practically speaking, Venmo and Apple Pay and Zelle are frictionless and instantaneous and more widely adopted than Bitcoin. For heavy users of international transfers, there are usually better solutions.

There are absolutely edge cases, and so a legitimate use case for a cryptocurrency there, but that’s not enough use to sustain Bitcoin’s value. To say nothing of the transactional motivation having been long since abandoned when inconvenient for the current store of value one.

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Yes sure, it takes 30 mins to send wires in a best case scenario it is executed immediately when you send it but that's not what happens in practice for most people. I do that regularly and it takes me a couple of hours.

Venmo and co aren't "real" transfers of asset, it's an update to a "permissioned" database. You can make immediate transfers on coinbase too but they could be reversed, or your account could get locked just as with venmo. It is just as easy to have banks hold everyone's bitcoin and instantaneously update a database so that feature is not an advantage of fiat over bitcoin.

> it takes 30 mins to send wires in a best case scenario it is executed immediately when you send it but that's not what happens in practice for most people. I do that regularly and it takes me a couple of hours.

Your bank is not set up for wires. Try Fidelity or First Republic or Silicon Valley Bank. Between 10 and 30 minutes from my hitting transfer to appearing in the recipient’s account. Exceptions are large wires which may require a phone call for verification, though I can usually turn that off if I wanted to.

Ok, interesting... I think your general point is valid, which is that, transacting in USD with a bank is, under certain circumstances, simpler and faster than transacting in bitcoin on-chain.

But you always have to rely on a third party, transactions can be reversed, your funds can be locked etc... It's completely different from say, transferring actual bank notes, or actual gold bars or any kind of transaction where a third party is not needed, you can't be censored and it can't be reversed.

And again, everything you do with USD, you could do eventually do with bitcoin. If banks decide to hold bitcoin, they'll let you send bitcoin wires with all the issues associated with fiat wire. Bitcoin wires don't exist but they could. Permissionless, uncensorable, irreversible, under 1-hour USD transactions don't exist and they never will.

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