I'm sure people compared Cuecat to email too. Turned out the problem wasn't "lack of adoption yet".
I mean, you could also send me fee-free payments direct from your bank with rapid settlement if I had a Euro bank account. I don't, but the reason isn't because I can't but because I don't need or want to hold non-domestic currency - exactly the same reason why I and most of my fellow countrymen who do have Euro bank accounts don't hold nano. The hurdle is reluctance to adopt universal international currency, not a technical shortcoming of Target2 settlement.
Not just cross-currency, but also cross-border payments.
I've implemented processing of cross-border payment instructions delivered via SWIFT and there's no way banks will STP a cross-border payment for $150 million. Large payments will always be subject to an authorisation review, at least where I work. That costs money and takes time.
Fundamentally, cash payments will always suffer from counterparty default risk without a central bank. How are you going to build an international central bank or central bank system? The best you'll see are regional efforts like TARGET2.
Digital currencies solve these problems without requiring ridiculous amounts of infrastructure to be created first. If we had to sit around waiting for banks to solve these problems, it would simply never happen.
This is fundamentally why I see digital currencies as the future, and why the hype is indeed warranted (even if perhaps people don't understand why).
I would call lack of adoption a failure. And it seems only issue we currently have with payments is the international one. And even there solutions exists inside certain blocks like Europe.
So in the end it seems there is just lack of political willpower to force global standard for bank transfers.
Wonderful, your single anecdote negates a whole litany of international payments problems that many people right here on HN have complained about repeatedly in numerous comments across numerous threads. International payments outside of major mutually coordinated markets are a known, frequently mentioned difficulty for many businesses and people. This is something that should be as easy as sending an email, but it doesn't even come close to that on a global scale. Crypto needs to be ironed out very thoroughly but it at least offers one possible avenue for avoiding these problems, with the added benefit of giving users access to a certain degree of anonymity and resiliance to arbitrary institutional payment/account freezes.
Strange. One HN thread US users whining about not being able to transfer their own currency to others without either multi-hour delays or costs. Whereas in the EU we're able to transfer funds near-instantaneously using our bank's smartphone apps.
And yet in this article "innovation" seems to mean "creating companies that don't make a profit"
Neither is accepting money for products/services in countries where not everyone has a bank account or a credit card.
Check out M-Pesa or EcoCash. These are largely solved problems from a technical point of view.
International money transfers between entities not on the SWIFT network is still not a solved problem, or more specifically, the solutions that do exists are expensive and slow (and SWIFT transfers can be quite expensive)
Funny. I have been able to send money cross-border relatively cheaply and relatively fast for quite some time. So yes, obviously I see value in that. But actually it has never been any kind of issue that would have even crossed my mind that it would need some fancy new solutions to enable me to do that. Would you be willing to share some more details on which kind of money transactions this is an actual unsolved problem? Where from/to are you trying to transfer the money and what are you buying/selling with that money?
USD does not work in all regions, believe it or not. Moreover it cannot be sent without an intermediary that is heavily licensed and regulated. Contrary to maximalists, we do aim in our Apollo phase for BAT moving on-blockchain with anonymity and low fees. Current blockchains and USD do neither
You can’t generally send EUR anywhere in the world for free in seconds. You can’t pay for things in EUR with 0 fees. There are some crypto’s that can do all of those things.
> Currently there is no way to send "money" to someone in another country on the other side of the world, in a decentralized way, and without transaction fees.
Why is this necessary? I have banks in three countries and generally pay nothing to move money between them or to pay others. This really doesn't feel like a problem that needs to be solved except by those trying to avoid taxation.
They standardized international shipping to everyone's benefit. I wonder what is keeping them from standardizing international transaction of government issued money?
It seems that bitcoin was useful in this particular instance only because of the failure of multiple other systems. Fixing those failure would seem like the easier option indeed.
Yes, there's a big opportunity. But U.S. customer-facing financial companies - especially startups - have been really bad at doing stuff outside the U.S.
Witness the darling Square getting its lunch eaten by iZettle and Paypal (!) even in the UK, to say nothing of rest of Europe, to say nothing of rest of the world.
Everyone and their dog has been trying to solve remittances with technology at least since Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon. Ultimately it's much less a tech problem than a human problem.
US <-> EU is a corridor with huge volume the legacy systems are therefore very very optimized for this. Inside EU Tx are basically inside the same system which is centralized and updating balances is super simple cheap and fast.
Try to send some USD to Mexico or something instead.
Also a Tx taking hours and costing 25 bucks is absolutely not going to allow the Internet of Value to show it's possibilities. It may be acceptable to buy something and let it be ship to you. but what about services? instant services how could they be paid with such a system.
Watch the youtube video linked above if you want to get an idea of the IoV. It's on a completely different scale. Value streaming a fraction of a cent at a time. Instant and basically free.
The payment technology is less of an issue. Consumers been able to send small amounts of money all over the world for a decade or two. It’s more about the regulatory framework around taxes and income that make this difficult
>2. Transferring money internationally as groundbreaking uses for crypto? Seriously?
You are confusing, "groundbreaking" with, "useful and convenient". It is much cheaper, faster and easier to send small international payments via crypto than it is via any legacy financial service - this is beyond dispute.
Why not? Thanks to SEPA ICT I can send up to 15'000€ in less than 10 seconds — actually faster than Bitcoin or anything else — to anyone else in the EU.
Why would I need to use Libra or anything else, what does it provide me that normal money doesn't?
Why should a broken commercial currency with surveillance integration be used globally just because the US payment situation is broken?
The community is working hard to fix these problems. You should realize however that alternative currencies charge far less, and a large reason for Bitcoins relative adoption is first movers advantage. With, say, Ethereum you'd be paying far less tx fees.
Also, how long would it take you to send money between the EU and USA? With Bitcoin it's pretty much instantly with only a flat $5-ish fee. Centralized options such as Paypal or Western Union are far inferior in this use case.
> this is something that can be covered by common standards
Theoretically, but this has been a failure since forever. I've been moving countries a lot in my life and the hassle is real. Transferwise makes things easier but it's recent, slow and still is a middle-man you could get rid of with cryptocurrencies. With cryptocurrencies a simple transaction would suffice.
> Direct participation in payment systems for non-banks is also an option that already exists
I was not aware of this. I doubt it's realistic though, whereas right now I can (and do) send money to people via cryptocurrencies without a need for a bank.
I think the reason I'm getting downvoted on these posts is that people don't realize how banks interaction and money transfers are broken as soon as you travel and move in the world. Here in the UK banking is really easy thanks to Monzo and Revolut, but go abroad and it already becomes a mess. More and more people are going to have these problems as world travel becomes more efficient and cheaper.
I mean, you could also send me fee-free payments direct from your bank with rapid settlement if I had a Euro bank account. I don't, but the reason isn't because I can't but because I don't need or want to hold non-domestic currency - exactly the same reason why I and most of my fellow countrymen who do have Euro bank accounts don't hold nano. The hurdle is reluctance to adopt universal international currency, not a technical shortcoming of Target2 settlement.
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