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Comment by pooper | Hacker News Reader

Before I begin I know nothing about pos or crypto so, to quote margin call, please, speak as you might to a young child, or a golden retriever

When I need to send my sister who has a bank account with the same bank that I have an account with, I can zelle her within minutes. I've done this once every month for the last year. In the beginning, it told me that it takes "a few days" to send amounts over USD 500 (my amount is USD 2,000). However, recently I have noticed that it says "a few minutes" for my request. There is no cost associated with it.

Assuming there is zero fraud protection, zero liability, zero anything for the transaction, is it possible to send and receive payments for free, at no cost, using any block chain technology? If yes, how can we get there? If not, why not?

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Just going on a tangent from crypto bullshit.

There's a thin, but opaque difference between "transfers" - what you're doing - and "payments" which Stripe or Paypal are doing.

Wait until you’ve experienced the bliss of UK FPS. It’s completely free for consumers, and so fast that if I transfer money between two banks with push notifications for tx, I often get the receive notification before the sent one.

Ofc its more efficient, but its not censorship resistant..

Which you don't really need unless you are operating something like ransomware.

is censorship applied justly at all times?

censorship is applied rarely in cases of porn and geopolitics. The majority are happy to stay in their lane; circumventing sanctions is a niche market.

Your argument reduces to the well-debunked "if you've got nothing to hide" argument.

Actually, I very much might have something to hide. As do you.

I am just saying that the market for censorship resistant currency is small. No one wants to pay a premium for something he doesn't use.

You're conflating censorship and privacy here, in a somewhat hilarious way, because you get less privacy with cryptocurrency than you do with traditional banking.

You're also ignoring the censorship that happens through the exchanges when they blacklist wallets. Sure, you can send cryptocurrency from wallet to wallet, but if the exchanges blacklist the wallets, you can never get the money out to fiat currency.

I'm positive you're going to next say use monero or zcash, but then you're limited to using shady exchanges, and if you want to have your fiat bank accounts flagged, there's a great way to do it.

> is it possible to send and receive payments for free, at no cost, using any block chain technology?

I could be wrong, I don't believe there's any current blockchain scheme in which this is possible: they all rely on some positive financial incentive structure for verifiers, which translates to some transaction cost.

It's conceivable that, in the near future, more blockchain financial providers offer to cover transaction fees (the way my debit card covers FX and ATM fees). But that's not a meaningful improvement from the status quo, and it's still worse, fee-wise, for the average consumer than direct ACH or PCN transfer.

Check out Nano or Stellar. But simple projects that actually solve problems don’t win the hype game in this space.

Nano?

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