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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

try to use Pix outside of Brazil

Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.

Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant

And somehow less relevant than cash.

I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my local branch in minutes, and almost any other currency in the world can be delivered to me by FedEx the next morning for a flat $10 fee.

I can take cash to any other country in the world and get it converted into the local currency, whether that's paper or digital in almost any city.

Crypto is great if you do a very few, very specific things in a vanishingly small number of places. But if I'd tied my finances to crypto instead of cash, I'd have been stuck many times in foreign lands.

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> I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account.

If you are at a institution bank, probably but that's a non-existent use case - I never had Argentinian Pesos, Turkish Lira or Bulgarian Lev I suddenly needed to deposit into my bank account !..

> Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.

I'm not sure whether you travel much, but I always travel as a digital nomad. I pay small transactions with local cash or mostly bank cards as everybody does. But big amounts? That's where crypto comes into play. I've paid in crypto transactions worth a few thousands dollars because that's the only way to do it without incurring huge transaction fees and / or long processing time.

The huge transaction fees come from the occasional, but surprisingly regular, crashes in value.

You don't have a no international transaction fee card? They're trivial to get

> that's the only way to do it without incurring huge transaction fees and / or long processing time.

You're joking right? I just did a $25,000 wire internationally with a currency exchange in the middle and it cost $75. It went through in one business day. You'll get more hassle trying to withdraw from your exchange than that.

When I bought my house and did the wire it cost $15. Where are you getting huge transaction fees?

Unless of course you try to transmit it to someplace your bank or the government doesn't like, or the bank has dumb AML controls. In which case the transaction will likely get held up if it can be sent at all. If you try to transfer from somewhere boring like from the USA to Canada of course you can send $25k no problem (most of the time anyway, my bank has interrogated me and locked up my account before for attempting to send $1500 to my wife until I gave up and just used cash).

Meanwhile you could transfer $25k in crypto to Dubai and walk away with it in cash at an OTC desk in an hour via a wallet to wallet.

“ Meanwhile you could transfer $25k in crypto to Dubai”

Thats a use case 99.99999999999999999% of humanity does not care at all about.

Dubai / UAE is about the largest per capita inflow of high net worth individuals, and even on an absolute basis has one of the highest immigration inflow of high net worth individuals.

Yes if you are poor as dirt and can just take your life savings of <$10k (probably 99% of humanity) on an airplane if you need to use it in another country, you can do so no problem and you do not care, the idea of a crypto OTC desk likely does not even occur to you. It is still solving the same problem, but by being small enough that no one cares.

The data pretty well speaks for itself. Humanity with money cares a lot about escaping capital controls. This is inviolable, the more the banking system handicaps itself the more capital flows into less regulated products.

The flat fee is a small part of what that transfer costs. The real transaction fee is embedded in the exchange rate. 2% markup is not an unheard of amount, which I guess would make your total cost $515 and not $15.

There's a reason Wise is a huge business and people in Canada resort to "Norbert's gambit" to exchange currency with minimal transaction costs.

I think it was about 1% off the "theoretical best" exchange rate I could have gotten. But I don't exactly have access to those kinds of rates as an individual. Do crypto trades not have the same dynamic once you involve exchanges? Once you include the take from the USD ~> Crypto ~> $Other do you still come out ahead?

No idea, never owned or used crypto. I guess for large amounts the reference point should be total transaction cost using Wise and/or some version of Norbert's gambit if your currency pair is a popular one and dual-listed securities/ETFs are readily available.

You do know that 3 out of the 4 most populous countries have currencies with restrictions on foreign exchange? Send a lot of money out internationally and they will ask for reasons and documents as evidence.

Do you imagine that large changes in your local currency holdings with no explicable financial transactions would be unnoticed?

> I just did a $25,000 wire internationally with a currency exchange in the middle and it cost $75. It went through in one business day.

This is exactly what I'm talking about and I'm not certain whether you're sarcastic .. Paying $75 on a 25k amount with a transaction time of 24 hours to complete is absolutely insane. You'd have used USDT or USDC or any other stable coin, you would have paid <$1 of fee and got the transaction done in seconds.

How about the exchange rate padding when you go from crypto to useful currency and back?

it's a 1:1 when you convert a stable to USD - some exchanges might take a small fee like 0.01% or so ... On Coinbase it's a 1:1 https://www.coinbase.com/en-de/converter/usdc/usd

Can you be more explicit about what large, legal purchases you've made with crypto?

I'm not sure whether you travel much, but I always travel as a digital nomad.

I was a "digital nomad" before that was even a term.

I've done "work from home" in Japan, China, Macau, South Korea, Belgium, and at least ten American cities. Even way back when we did it with payphones, Telex and fax machines.

Get off my lawn.

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