I love that you asked this question! The very reason it doesn't happen often is because of friction inherent to legacy payment systems. Perhaps I'm misundersta

I love that you asked this question! The very reason it doesn't happen often is because of friction inherent to legacy payment systems. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what is meant by "international payment", but surely for a majority of people this is just an irrelevance? I can't imagine my parents have ever needed to make an international payment, for instance. I have an employee in Iran and my goodness was it hard to work out how to pay him (Iranian banks don't have SWIFT and IBAN and helpful things like that), and Bitcoin did actually seem like a legitimate option at one point, until we realised that between business banking and accounting, it was also going to be really hard to do - so I would love for this new wave of currencies to make international payments easier. But I just don't think it's of very much significance to many people in the grand scheme of things. 54% of Americans apparently don't have a passport; are these people really going to be making regular international payments, more than about once a lifetime? (The significant number of "digital nomads" on HN who work from a beach in Thailand are really not representative!) However, if we're taking "international payment" to mean "an easy way to take out/spend money when you're on holiday without getting stung by exchange rates and assorted complexities" then I will certainly grant you that this would be broadly regarded as a mainstream benefit (though, again, I guess those 54% of Americans would probably disagree).