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German online bank uses Bitcoins to transfer loans
- sleavey 9y agoInteresting. This is the sort of transaction that altcoins like Ripple and Stellar try to facilitate, though in a more centralised way. I wonder if Bitcoin's popularity will overcome its speed limitations in this instance.
- RedNifre 9y agoBitcoin's lightning network is currently maturing (it allows instant free transfer of Bitcoins off-chain). That should work perfectly for banks, given that unlike regular customers, banks don't transfer money only in one direction, so the lightning channels should stay balanced for much longer.
- viraptor 9y ago> instant free transfer Who offers free transfers permanently?
- wellboy 9y agoIota, Skycoin, Nano. The first 2 also offer linear/near infinite scalability, that is, the more nodes in the network, the more TPS can be handled by the network. That's why one of the first 2 will probably replace Bitcoin until the end of 2018.
- viraptor 9y agoI asked in context of the original post about free Bitcoin transfers on LN. The options you mentioned may be free, but are not Bitcoin LN.
- psergeant 9y ago> That's why one of the first 2 will probably replace Bitcoin until the end of 2018. It may be time to evaluate if you, yourself, are the mark.
- simias 9y agoIota isn't much more than a whitepaper and a centralised PoC. Supposedly they're supposed to roll out the real thing eventually but given their track record and how they've responded to criticism in the past I'm pretty skeptical. I'm also very skeptical of Skycoin and their "web-of-trust" which is even more experimental than "proof of stake" which is itself rather unproven at this point. Reading through the whitepaper I also feel like Skycoin has an issue that's shared with many newer cryptocurrencies trying to break through (including IOTA) which is to attempt to do way too much stuff at once. It's just just "web-of-trust", it's also "skywire meshnet", "fiber application ecosystem", "Skyminers custom-built hardware VPN" etc... In an effort to differentiate themselves they just pile the features on top of each other instead of focusing on doing one thing right. At least they don't use ternary I suppose. It seems like a very wild bet to me (even by cryptocurrency standards) than either of them are going to manage to replace Bitcoin by the end of the year. After all, what drives adoption at this point is mainly speculation, not the features otherwise Bitcoin would've been replaced long ago.
- wellboy 9y agoWell all new coins are proof of concept before they gain adoption, so this isn't really an argument why a technology is bad. Skycoin's consensus algorithm is among the few that are peer-reviewed next to Cardano, so i think that's as much credibility as you can get as a new coin. Iota's coordinator is expected to be decentralised and then removed next year already. In order to gain control of the network, you would need to gain 34% of the hash power, omnipresence in the network and omnipotence. I'm not sure what the cost of this is, but there is currently no more secure decentralized network design that I know of. Keep in mind that 45% of Bitcoin's hash power is currently controlled by one company, Bitmain, and they are investors in the 3rd biggest mining pool, totalling 75% hashing power of the entire Bitcoin blockchain.
- madeofpalk 9y agoI mean, even bitcoin is still just a proof of concept. A wider-adopted proof of concept.
- RedNifre 9y agoI meant that when banks open direct lightning channels between each other they can transfer bitcoins without any fees (because there are no intermediate nodes to pay).
- psergeant 9y ago> That should work perfectly for banks Is the price of interbank transfers / clearing really a big deal for banks?
- spookthesunset 9y agoLN, aside from being complete vaporware, is most certainly not free. Or, it’s as free as bitcoin was promised to be “free”, in that it isn’t free at all. Not to mention that, should it ever prove to work at any reasonable scale, LN is basically adding a layer on top of Bitcoin that gives up almost all of the things that were supposed to be core values.
- def_true_false 9y agoNevermind LN, regular tx fees are virtually zero at the moment. https://transactionfee.info/charts/feerate/median https://transactionfee.info/charts/feerate/median
- Catfishfinger 9y agoLN is already working on the mainnet network, I've used it several times and so far it's working well. From here, it just has to reach scale, maturity and adaption.
- psergeant 9y ago> “Traditional money transfers are relatively costly due to currency exchange fees, and can take up to a few days” I would like to see some worked examples here that take into account local Bitcoin pricing and the time taken to withdraw from exchanges, vs Western Union and other commercial “Send Money” organisations. The space is intensely competitive, so I suspect the margin consumers pay if they do a minimum of research is tiny, so I’m skeptical that Magic Bitcoin Magic is somehow making this better.
- kown223 9y agoIn my country the spreed to exchange eur or usd to local current is huge, you lose at least 10%
- psergeant 9y agoThanks for the data point! What’s the spread between BTC and your local currency vs BTC/USD? Is Bitcoin legal in your country? Are there reliable exchanges? What’s the cash-out wait? Thanks in advance!
- throwaway13337 9y agoI use transferwise all the time for usd to eur. The loss is closer to 1%. E.g. 1k usd costs $10 to transfer at the googled exchange rate. Better solutions are out there. Bitcoin is, as always, a solution looking for a problem.
- anonoholic 9y agoI have used TransferWise, and yes, <1%; however https://revolut.com/ https://revolut.com/ have recently added virtual bank accounts, and currently add no fee for market rate transfers.
- jgh 9y agoi recently used transferwise to convert a bunch of money and it seemed like all in the fees were closer to 0.1% than 1%. I think if you do larger sums of money the fees get cheaper though because the cost to transfer into transferwise is around $20 or something for ACH pull, but the fees for the currency exchange is a slightly worse exchange rate (though still much better than you would get at a bank)
- Jdam 9y agoI went to a meetup once where Radoslav presented Bitbond. Referring to it as a bank is quite a stretch.
- viraptor 9y agoIf it's registered as a bank, it's a bank. As long as you get all the usual regulation and protection, why wouldn't you think it's a bank?
- psergeant 9y ago> why wouldn't you think it's a bank? The Bitbond site says “See no bank. Hear no bank. Speak no bank.”
- Jdam 9y agoIn fact, it’s not registered as a bank. It’s registered as a financial services company: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2016/10/91093-brief-german-bitcoin-startup-bitbond-recieves-bafin-licence/ https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2016/10/91093-brief-german-... In addition, it’d be quite weird if a random startup can get a banking license just like this. Consider N26, the Berlin-based fintech “bank” and unicorn took years and just got theirs some months ago.
- viraptor 9y agoThe article says: "In 2016, Bitbond was officially licensed as a bank and has gained many investors since." Maybe the article is wrong then.
- madeofpalk 9y agoIt is.
- chmars 9y agoIt’s not a bank: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057934
- foepys 9y ago> “Traditional money transfers are relatively costly due to currency exchange fees, and can take up to a few days,” Albrecht told Reuters TV in his office in Berlin’s fashionable neighborhood Prenzlauer Berg. “With Bitbond, payments work independently of where customers are. Via internet it is very, very quick and the fees are low.” I don't see this argument as valid. When was the last time the currency of a solvent country fell more than 10% within a day? With Bitcoin this happened just yesterday. This means you lost 10% of your money during fiat -> Bitcoin -> fiat if you kept the Bitcoin for longer than 12 hours. Edit: bitbond.com has a link to a "eBay SEO" optimizer in their website footer. I don't know how much this says about their credibility.
- wellboy 9y agoThis argument isn't really valid, because Bitcoin also goes up by 10% within a day. That's why this bank can calculate this factor in and have a small off-set budget for daily fluctuations. Of course, there are also weekly 30% drops, but there are also weekly 30% hikes. Across a span of a year, all of this volatility cancels each other out.
- japhyr 9y agoAren't they better off overall as long as the loss due to volatility during a transfer, plus the transaction fee, is less than the traditional transfer fee?
- disconnected 9y ago> Across a span of a year, all of this volatility cancels each other out. Bitcoin price was around $19k in December 2017. The price tumbled all the way down to around 7k in February, came back up to 11k, and now it is hovering at around 8k (numbers massively rounded, but you get the picture). If we consider this span alone (~6 months), Bitcoin's value has fluctuated by more than 50%. But if we consider a full year, things are even crazier since bitcoin was worth around 1k then. Source: https://www.coindesk.com/price/ https://www.coindesk.com/price/ The above is great if you are selling bitcoin. It is not so great if you are chained to any sort of contract (loans, phone contracts, car payments, etc). If the contract stipulates "X bitcoin per month", your loan/rent/whatever went up 8x in one year. If you are chained to that contract for several years (phone contracts in my country are typically for 2 years), you are massively fucked.
- germanier 9y agoThe title and article body claim that they hold a bank license but as far as I can see[0] they only have a license as a financial service provider (FDI) for investment brokering (Anlagevermittlung) and proprietary trading (Eigengeschäft). In particular they are not regulated as a bank with capital requirements (CRR-Kreditinstitut) and can't do their own lending business (Kreditgeschäft). On their website[1] they make no claim of being a bank. The text only speaks about being a "regulated financial institution" and the footer states "unbank" and "no bank". Their terms of use[2] clearly state that they are only a credit broker, don't loan themselves, and are not party of the loan contract. This is not banking and I'm not sure why Reuters uses that word so much. They don't even mention once that this company is not the lender and heavily imply they are. [0]: in the database of the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority: https://portal.mvp.bafin.de/database/InstInfo/institutDetails.do?cmd=loadInstitutAction&institutId=146194&locale=en_GB https://portal.mvp.bafin.de/database/InstInfo/institutDetail... [1]: https://www.bitbond.com/about_us https://www.bitbond.com/about_us [2]: https://www.bitbond.com/terms_of_use https://www.bitbond.com/terms_of_use
- sschueller 9y agoSo much for accuracy of Reuters. What else do they get wrong when they can't even tell when something is a bank or not? Sad thing is these kinds of articles get translated and end up in hundreds of papers all over the world all as fact.
- turnermatt 9y agoGoogle “Thomson Reuters Blockchain” to find out why
- Theodores 9y agoWhat is also funny is when you have an obvious spelling mishtake in a Reuters article and for that spelling mistake to be copied and pasted into many, many places. In this way you can tell which newspapers actually have people reading what they publish and which ones can't be bothered.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
- joosters 9y agoWhy would two currency exchanges (say USD->BTC then BTC->EUR) ever be cheaper than one (USD->EUR) ? There’s nothing special about Bitcoin that means it will have lower spreads than other FX exchanges.
- tudorconstantin 9y agoIt's the transfer time and fees between non SEPA countries that's cheaper and much faster. And that includes fiat->BTC->fiat commissions and tx fees.
- netsharc 9y agoCurrency exchangers work by having pools of money in many currencies and countries, so if you want to exchange USD to GBP, they add your money to their USD pool, and take out the same amount out of their GBP pool. How fast can you do it? Probably as fast as sending an data packet to the UK. I don't see why bitcoin has to be used, well maybe if the exchange doesn't have a lot of capital and is buying BTC with the USD and selling it for GBP.
- tudorconstantin 9y agoThe issue is with transmitting money in another country. That's what takes several days (from Germany to USA for example). They buy BTC in Germany for EUR, send them to the guy in USA who then sells those for USD. It probably takes less than 5 minutes the whole operation.
- madeofpalk 9y agoRead the comment again. Exchanges like Transferwise work by not actually transferring your money internationally. Once Transferwise receives my money in their UK account, they just instantly transfer the money from their Aus account to the recipient. It doesn't take several days because my money never actually went overseas
- jpalomaki 9y ago
- mxschumacher 9y agoI've been a client for multiple years and have taken heavy losses on the loans I have handed out
- flatfilefan 9y agoWhat made you staying a client then?
- mxschumacher 9y agoyou can't just exit existing credit contracts. these aren't bonds that could be traded.
- DEFCON28 9y agoIf Bitcoin is such a good solution, why do they have to mislead with news about banks that aren’t banks?
- neilwilson 9y agoThey are using the banks of the bitcoin exchanges. As a swift alternative that's fine, but you can't avoid banks if you're using country denominations.
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