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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Eliminating Western Union’s vice grip on international remittance seems like a good thing to me.

But to ask the obvious question: why does El Salvador need Bitcoin to do it? It’s not clear to me that the settlement system laid out in TFA necessitates a cryptocurrency scheme, since it all boils down to a locally denominated network of ATMs. Is there some technical reason for this that I’m missing? Without one, it feels like burning tires to accomplish a financial task that any non-failed state (certainly one that can roll out apps and ATMs) should be able to accomplish with ordinary means.

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How do you send money from the US to El Salvador without Bitcoin or WU? That's the whole point of remittance; I'm not sure how a network of ATMs local to El Salvador will help people send money internationally to the country.

You do exactly what Chivo does, except without using Bitcoin for clearing and settlement. You instead use a bank, or, because this is an entire country we’re talking about, use the national bank or carve out a special rule for financial remittance for your app.

So basically your solution is to give everyone in El Salvador a bank account and for the government to subsidize their remittance fees. Because if you're using banks, someone is paying fees. Someone from the US still has pay a fee to wire money from their bank to some endpoint in El Salvador.

The banks are literally the problem that Bitcoin solves, not the solution. Banks = fees and censorship.

If you can just do that then why does WU exist?

Is this the thread where US Bitcoin fans learn that the rest of the world has been doing this for decades?

I'm being sarcastic. Bitcoin in an amazing solution that allows people working in the west to send money home direct and takes this trash company out of the equation.

if it’s as easy as having your bank send money to someone else’s bank, why does western union and transferwise exist?

[Transfer]Wise is typically cheaper than bank to bank, they (the banks) charge relatively heavily (at least for normal retail current accounts) for IBAN/BIC/et al. transfers.

But yes it is possible, and as easy as entering some different/extra numbers compared to intranational sort code/account number transfers.

That relies on banks in the sending country participating too, or El Salvador opening it's own banks in those countries doesn't it? How do they get sending banks to participate in these cheap/free international transfers?

Sorry, that was perhaps unclear, that 'they' referred to the banks, in the case of bank-bank.

Bank-bank requires that the bank at both ends supports sending/receiving to/from (as applicable) IBAN or similar yes. In the UK in practice that means 'mainstream' banks do and 'challenger' banks don't. (Monzo for example prefers to solve the problem by integrating Wise a bit into its own app.)

Wise avoids it by charging you (like paying for any other product/service) or having you transfer to its account in your country, and then sending the payment to the destination bank from its account in the same country as that, so it becomes two local transfers, one in each country.

Because if you're not in the country legally you don't have a bank account.

This is a dumb and pedantic reply

Any remittance company can stand in for Western Union to make his argument, the actual company isn't relevant.

It seems Wise (nee TransferWise) doesn't ('yet') support SVC, but assuming you don't actually specifically care about El Salvador, it does support quite a range of not particularly major currencies, and that'd be my answer.

Wise (and competitors, no affiliation just can't recall other names at the moment) are popular/standard in Europe, but as far as I can tell not so much in North America. I don't know why; as far as I can tell it's supported (certainly the currencies are) and allowed?

Of course if you have cash you want sent it's no good, but I'm not sure how many legitimate use cases there are (where you can't deposit in a bank current account first) for that these days.

> assuming you don't actually specifically care about El Salvador

...what was the point of providing this answer then when the question was specifically about El Salvador...

As I said in your quotation, it was because I assumed your actual question was more general, that El Salvador is just the subject here, but for the purposes of your question it's just standing in for 'some other country with another [perhaps minor] currency', and so Wise not currently supporting SVC specifically would be rather arbitrary.

If you do actually want to send money to an SVC denominated account in ES, then no, it doesn't help you (beyond 'you could sign up to be notified'...), sorry for bothering you with it?

My question is a lot more general than just sending money to El Salvador, you are right. But if your reply does not satisfy the specific problem constraints of sending money to El Salvador, then it can't be a solution to my more general question of how to send money internationally regardless of whether or not your counter-party has access to the correct kind of banking services (or none at all).

> It seems Wise (nee TransferWise) doesn't ('yet') support SVC, but assuming you don't actually specifically care about El Salvador, it does support quite a range of not particularly major currencies, and that'd be my answer.

We don't support SVC in El Salvador either. The USD has been our main currency since 2001.

Oh OK, sorry, I just got that from typing 'el sal' into the currency/country select. I have no idea how (if) it handles secondary country users of a currency if you see what I mean, given that currency conversion is only part of it - perhaps the 'main' feature is the international transfer, making it look like a local transfer/payment (by being one each end).

Don't worry, even Google still believes SVC is our currency.

A search for "Bitcoin price" will show the price in SVC.

doesn't google pay do this?

Other side of the coin is that they want independence from US dollar. They suffer from inflation, but can't print it for themselves.

They also believe that world will eventually move onto Bitcoin standard, and being the first adopter is beneficial for them.

El Salvador's inflation is low compared to other Latin American countries.

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate?con...

They're talking about monetary inflation, not price inflation.

El Salvador uses the USD, so if the federal reserve bank of the US prints money it devalues their currency as well. Not a good position to be in as a sovereign nation.

They could use a variety of ways to solve their problem, but want to:

1) Be independent of a peg on a currency controlled by another state 2) Attract investment from the wealthy crypto crowd 3) Appeal to younger voters through a visionary approach

We shall see if they succeed. I suspect we are in for a train wreck, but am hoping it works in their favor.

Because the technical implementation already exists with the highest security guarantees in the world. If they were to build their own WU, they could mess it up or get hacked, most likely by whomever they paid to make or operate it. Also, in the long run, they are betting on wider adoption and interoperability through lightning.

> Because the technical implementation already exists with the highest security guarantees in the world.

This is a tired observation, but I'll trot it out again: I don't care how "secure" my financial settlement layer is if it allows me to flush my net worth down the drain with a single typo. My threat model includes my ability to feed, clothe, and house myself, all of which are contingent on my ability to claw back transactions that are fraudulent or incorrect. Blockchain solutions offer me no relief.

Bitcoin addresses have a checksum. Note that ETH does not.

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