Comment by bellip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bellip | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, it's digital already. However banks manage the whole system and they can do whatever they want with your money if you are nobody.

I have been waiting for 2 and a half months for an international payment via SWIFT, I worked long hours for that money and I needed it urgently. The money left the sender's account 2 and a half months ago. Neither of us has the money in our accounts while the bank tells us to just wait a little bit longer, or they do not know where the amount is, some nonsense about beneficiary bank holding/releasing my money. Whereas a friend just sent me a hefty figure (mid 5 figures) of crypto by withdrawing it out of Binance Global to my personal wallet, it was confirmed in 15 minutes and I got the money in my account in 10 minutes. I sent the crypto to my local (Binance has different companies/legal bodies in different countries) Binance account, converted it to a currency of my liking and withdrew it to my personal bank account. All under 20-30 minutes and I have the money now.

Not endorsing Binance or any other central exchange (my personal position is: not your keys, not your coins, I would never hold a big amount in any central exchange), but I do not understand HN's (majority of HN's) position against crypto in general. Maybe you are privileged enough to never have this kind of issues, but some of us do. Some of us live in countries with hostile governments, (which government isnt hostile towards the public anyways? /s).

SWIFT does not take 2 months; it takes minutes or hours. Your bank already has your money or it never received it.

More likely, they are holding your money due to some issues with your local KYC laws. (This is especially likely in South America, where foreign senders must verify the source and purpose of payments made to local residents.)

Either way, they haven't received the money.

Yes, but the same issue will likely occur for any other large transfer of value, be it on the blockchain or a briefcase of cash or anything else. The wording of the regulations may not have caught up, but their intent is to regulate all wealth transfers.

Unless you're avoiding the regulation and just not reporting it, of course, which is likely illegal depending on the jurisdictions involved.

Sometimes wire transfers mysteriously fail for no reason, in particular between US and EU banks.

I've had this issue with being paid before, nobody could tell me why the transaction would mysteriously fail.

Agreed, but in this case the OP says that the bank acknowledges receiving the money, and simply won't release it to his account.

That means KYC or source-of-income laws are applying (I don't know what country OP is in so I can't say which).

Sorry for not being specific enough, let me give more details about the incident. My bank tell me they can see the transaction but it is not approved so they cant do anything about it and recommend me to contact with the sender's bank. Sender's bank tells the sender that the amount is held by the beneficiary bank and they can not do anything about it either. At some point, sender's bank told the sender that the beneficiary bank released the payment (around 25-30 days ago), but the transaction is still not completed anyhow. Weird thing about this is, the amount is very small (around 1k EUR), and I have received 20-30 payments from the same sender, same bank in the past 4 years. The most troubling part is, I or the sender, can not take any action to fix the issue and the neither bank tells us what the issue is or recommends us an action to fix the issue.

I am not saying this happens all the time, or all SWIFT transactions are flawed by nature, but this occurring even once is enough for me to be in a very stressful situation without any remedy.

It seems FTX was perfectly able to do whatwver they wanted, through Alameda, with customer deposits as well. Banks on the other are much better regulated, and for very valid reasons as current events show.

Which bank provided the gateway for Alameda to send/receive from the legacy banking system? There may be some regulator questions for that bank's compliance team.

https://www.ledgerinsights.com/senators-quiz-silvergate-bank...

Couldn't the transfer from Binance to your bank account take two months as well in principle?

Of course, I guess that can happen if the bank decides so as well, but the transaction from local Binance bank account to my local bank account is not international and not via SWIFT (correct me if I am mistaken), so far those transactions have been always completed instantaneously (under 5-10 minutes) since they are domestic transactions (?).

To be fair, almost all of my international SWIFT transactions, except this one, have been completed in 6-10 business days (it's not so bad and I can live with it, as long as it doesn't take 3 damn months).

> Maybe you are privileged enough to never have this kind of issues, but some of us do.

Correct.

The eternal hate for crypto is by a screaming minority who are too privileged to even bother realising the majority of people are worse off in countries like Argentina, Nigeria, and Turkey which their currencies have lost over 80% of their value and is quite frankly worthless.

Using USDC as a cheap, fast, global way of sending money is a good alternative for those that don't have a choice in those countries. For those that keep shouting the existing solutions: Wise is neither same day or cheap to send money globally, . Same is true with SWIFT. FedNoW only works in the US and is not global and UPI is also not global.

Crypto and stablecoins tick all the boxes as a 24/7 cheap and very fast way of sending money globally.

The vast majority of people in those countries either go for USD, Euros or are too poor to bother with crypto. Portraing crypto as anything but privileged people's latest hot investment vehicle to become rich, fast, is just plain wrong.

> The eternal hate for crypto is by a screaming minority who are too privileged to even bother realising the majority of people are worse off in countries like Argentina, Nigeria, and Turkey which their currencies have lost over 80% of their value and is quite frankly worthless.

So like 5% of the world population in your examples...

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