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> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve mon

> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next day. I made seven figure international payments that went through in 24 hours. This is not a technical problem that Cryptocurrencies are somehow uniquely placed to solve. Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. National payments in Europe at least are actually pretty much instant since they are now fully automated. International payments can take up to a day due to an actual human checking the correctness (and perhaps doing due diligence for money laundering).

cal5k 8y ago
So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same (cough the metric system cough), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks. In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of remittances (China, India, the Philippines, etc.). Historically they've been massively overcharged for the privilege of doing so because they're held captive to our oligopolistic banking system - sometimes upwards of 20% because they regularly send smaller amounts to minimize risk.
- short_sells_poo 8y ago
  How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all! Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework. It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.
  - cal5k 8y ago
    It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world. That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end. Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be. You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer. The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      I understood bitcoin transfers could take days. If so, that's not really very liquid?
      - CedarMadness 8y ago
        It depends really. Transactions are usually processed based on the fee associated with them. If the network is exceptionally busy and you send a transaction with a low fee, yeah it'll take a while, but when creating the transaction you can adjust the fee (and most wallets will give you a few options) to make your transaction more valuable to miners, so it will be picked up more quickly.
        tim333 8y ago
        Bitcoin from wallet A to wallet B usually only takes about 20 minutes but fiat -> bitcoin and bitcoin -> fiat can take a while, typically a day or so each and more if backlogged.
- isostatic 8y ago
  There appears to be plenty of competition in the "send money abroad" market https://www.money.co.uk/money-transfers.htm https://www.money.co.uk/money-transfers.htm
- notamerican 8y ago
  Nobody mentioned the Euro Zone before you did; they're talking about Europe "as a continent", for the most part. Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions. And having lived in both Switzerland (where they use CHF), and Germany (Euros), I can say it's much the same across Europe. International payments within Europe are fast too; a couple of days if you're changing currencies, and faster if both sides are in the Euro Zone. Banks don't have to be slow. The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal! Exchange fees show up in a number of different places. I have a Capital One card that I got specifically for the advertised "no foreign exchange fees". In reality, it consistently charges me about 1% more than the official exchange rate at any given point. 1% doesn't seem like a terrible fee. I wish it would itemize it, though. Many merchants will not bill the card in their local currency -- instead, because it's a US card, they refuse to bill it in anything other than USD. That means they end up making me pay extra to cover their exchange costs, which are always exorbitant, maybe 10 times as much. They appear to have something worked out with their local bank, where the bank accepts payment in USD and gives them payment in CNY or HKD. Here, the bank is teaming up with the merchant to screw the customer without even benefiting the merchant. I recently ordered something from Amazon's Canada site, and they generously offered to let me have them bill me in USD -- they would cover currency exchange themselves. Left unstated was that they would charge, again, an order of magnitude more for the service than my card would. At least they gave me the option to say "no, bill me in CAD". The best option I generally have for transacting in China is to pull cash from an ATM (paying Capital One's 1%ish fee), and pay cash even for very large purchases. It's quite possible that banks aren't where you're getting hit by exorbitant fees -- transact directly with a bank, and you should be able to get low fees.
  - bostik 8y ago
    > Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions. Well, anything within the same bank is instant. There is a commonly used mechanism in business accounts called "Faster Payments" which tend to settle even across banks in the UK within 2h. Very recently - as in, in the last 4-6 weeks - a system called "SMS" was rolled out. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with text messaging. It's a new cross-bank settlement mechanism which promises to settle the transfer in 20 minutes within UK. The reality is that SMS transfers don't work reliably across all the banks. Our payments and customer service teams had a bad week after we enabled SMS payments. When a supposedly faster transfer takes 5-6 days and you have to chase the bank(s) about payment states, there's clearly a fault somewhere.
- rchaud 8y ago
  I see this point about remittance fees being made frequently. For payments from Canada to the Philippines, Xoom (bought out by Paypal) charges $2.99 to send $200 (1.5%) and $21.49 to send $1000 (2.2%). That's not anywhere near 20%. I've worked in this industry in the past. Historically yes, poor people have been overcharged. The way they dealt with it was to develop networks of people who they could pay to carry the money with them on trips back home and set up a pickup. It's crude, but it's a system that persists in India and Pakistan, especially for unskilled migrants in the Middle East who don't have access to local banking services. Not really a target market for bitcoin given the steep learning curve. For computer-literate migrants who work in developed countries and are OK with using banks, paypal etc, the fees are pretty reasonable.
  - A2017U1 8y ago
    Their exchange rates are terrible deals and blatantly taking advantage of people who only see the upfront fee and don't think further than that. Get the feeling they'd have no problem making money with zero fees but that would suddenly make customers think twice about it.
    - cal5k 8y ago
      This. Their posted fees mask exchange rates that are horrendous.
    - vbezhenar 8y ago
      Can you open account with US dollars as a currency and transfer money there without any conversions, then withdraw and exchange locally?
      - jki275 8y ago
        Yes, you can, and that’s what most people do.
- Nursie 8y ago
  Cryptocurrencies have failed to make any inroads in this because A) People trust the existing services, and B) They're nowhere near as expensive as you say. At this point it's just yet another talking point for enthusiasts, enthusiasts who have no idea about real-world use-cases.
gst 8y ago
An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time). In fact, ACH supports multiple settlements per day now so if that feature is supported by your bank ACH transfers can even arrive on the same business day. There are a few banks that are slower, but that's not the fault of ACH - don't use slow banks and you're not running into that issue. That's very similar to SEPA transactions, with the exception that some European banks support real-time settlements for SEPA. For banks that don't support this yet funds usually arrive on the next business day. Transfers between the US banking system and the European system are usually slow and expensive as those two systems aren't directly linked to each other. So you your bank needs to send the funds to a correspondent bank which forwards the funds to the final destination. But if you use 3rd party services such as TransferWise those transfers are significantly faster and cheaper. My last transfer from my US bank account to my European account (via TransferWise) arrived on the next business day and cost something like 0.36% on top of the mid-market rate.
- vsipuli 8y ago
  But you cannot deposit money into any arbitrary U.S. bank account using ACH. For every account that you want to make transfers to, you first need to sign a bunch of forms. With the European IBAN system, no permissions or forms are needed to make deposits to a new arbitrary account.
  - gst 8y ago
    Almost all of the US banks allow you to add other ACH accounts that you control. Just confirm the two trial deposits and you can push or pull money from that account. A few banks also allow to send ACH transfers to third-party accounts that you don't control - for example with USAA that's possible. This still doesn't 100% match how transfers work in Europe (you first need to add the account, then wait 1-2 days, then you can send funds to it), but it's definitely better than "signing a bunch of forms".
- Smokinator 8y ago
  A BTC transaction arrives within minutes. For merchants, that's huge. Why wait 36-72 hours for your credit card sales to hit your bank account? Why pay 2% or more for the "privilege" of that clunky old system when you can use Bitcoin for free and offload the fees (.1 percent) to the consumer? Watching you naysayers takes me back to the days when I used to try to get business colleagues to use e-mail, and they would be like, "But I have a fax machine. It works just fine." Really they were just scared of this newfangled computer stuff, but the better tech wins out eventually every time. It's funny to see so many so-called "techies" who are so incredibly ignorant of the most important technological advancement since the Internet itself. In fact, it's probably an even bigger deal than the Internet. lol
easymodex 8y ago
>Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. I'm a devops engineer at a somewhat large company (4mil+ daily users) and in my years of working with servers and databases, even in this professional enviroment, I've seen some crazy things go down. That's why I find the thought of having basically the whole world's money state written in some databases which are so simple to update, insanely scary. And that's also why I really love bitcoin and the whole blockchain idea. I could go on about the reliability and transparency of it but the general opinion around here is somewhat aginst crypto currencies so to each his own. As to the people saying it's difficult to use and has an unfriendly UI. I might be just one of those nerds it's aimed at, but I feel it's the simplest way of transfering money. I mean really, you just put in an address, hit send and the other party gets it. It won't get delayed, no bank will call you about the funds, no conversion fees, etc. Yes there is a transaction fee which makes it a bit odd to buy coffee with, but for small amounts I don't need the whole world to confirm my transaction, I can use whatever other solution. But for big amounts hell yes, I want to use bitcoin. It's my hard earned money and I don't trust anyone with it.

cal5k 8y ago

So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same (cough the metric system cough), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks. In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of remittances (China, India, the Philippines, etc.). Historically they've been massively overcharged for the privilege of doing so because they're held captive to our oligopolistic banking system - sometimes upwards of 20% because they regularly send smaller amounts to minimize risk.

short_sells_poo 8y ago
How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all! Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework. It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.
- cal5k 8y ago
  It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world. That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end. Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be. You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer. The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    I understood bitcoin transfers could take days. If so, that's not really very liquid?
    - CedarMadness 8y ago
      It depends really. Transactions are usually processed based on the fee associated with them. If the network is exceptionally busy and you send a transaction with a low fee, yeah it'll take a while, but when creating the transaction you can adjust the fee (and most wallets will give you a few options) to make your transaction more valuable to miners, so it will be picked up more quickly.
      - tim333 8y ago
        Bitcoin from wallet A to wallet B usually only takes about 20 minutes but fiat -> bitcoin and bitcoin -> fiat can take a while, typically a day or so each and more if backlogged.
isostatic 8y ago
There appears to be plenty of competition in the "send money abroad" market https://www.money.co.uk/money-transfers.htm https://www.money.co.uk/money-transfers.htm
notamerican 8y ago
Nobody mentioned the Euro Zone before you did; they're talking about Europe "as a continent", for the most part. Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions. And having lived in both Switzerland (where they use CHF), and Germany (Euros), I can say it's much the same across Europe. International payments within Europe are fast too; a couple of days if you're changing currencies, and faster if both sides are in the Euro Zone. Banks don't have to be slow. The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal! Exchange fees show up in a number of different places. I have a Capital One card that I got specifically for the advertised "no foreign exchange fees". In reality, it consistently charges me about 1% more than the official exchange rate at any given point. 1% doesn't seem like a terrible fee. I wish it would itemize it, though. Many merchants will not bill the card in their local currency -- instead, because it's a US card, they refuse to bill it in anything other than USD. That means they end up making me pay extra to cover their exchange costs, which are always exorbitant, maybe 10 times as much. They appear to have something worked out with their local bank, where the bank accepts payment in USD and gives them payment in CNY or HKD. Here, the bank is teaming up with the merchant to screw the customer without even benefiting the merchant. I recently ordered something from Amazon's Canada site, and they generously offered to let me have them bill me in USD -- they would cover currency exchange themselves. Left unstated was that they would charge, again, an order of magnitude more for the service than my card would. At least they gave me the option to say "no, bill me in CAD". The best option I generally have for transacting in China is to pull cash from an ATM (paying Capital One's 1%ish fee), and pay cash even for very large purchases. It's quite possible that banks aren't where you're getting hit by exorbitant fees -- transact directly with a bank, and you should be able to get low fees.
- bostik 8y ago
  > Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions. Well, anything within the same bank is instant. There is a commonly used mechanism in business accounts called "Faster Payments" which tend to settle even across banks in the UK within 2h. Very recently - as in, in the last 4-6 weeks - a system called "SMS" was rolled out. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with text messaging. It's a new cross-bank settlement mechanism which promises to settle the transfer in 20 minutes within UK. The reality is that SMS transfers don't work reliably across all the banks. Our payments and customer service teams had a bad week after we enabled SMS payments. When a supposedly faster transfer takes 5-6 days and you have to chase the bank(s) about payment states, there's clearly a fault somewhere.
rchaud 8y ago
I see this point about remittance fees being made frequently. For payments from Canada to the Philippines, Xoom (bought out by Paypal) charges $2.99 to send $200 (1.5%) and $21.49 to send $1000 (2.2%). That's not anywhere near 20%. I've worked in this industry in the past. Historically yes, poor people have been overcharged. The way they dealt with it was to develop networks of people who they could pay to carry the money with them on trips back home and set up a pickup. It's crude, but it's a system that persists in India and Pakistan, especially for unskilled migrants in the Middle East who don't have access to local banking services. Not really a target market for bitcoin given the steep learning curve. For computer-literate migrants who work in developed countries and are OK with using banks, paypal etc, the fees are pretty reasonable.
- A2017U1 8y ago
  Their exchange rates are terrible deals and blatantly taking advantage of people who only see the upfront fee and don't think further than that. Get the feeling they'd have no problem making money with zero fees but that would suddenly make customers think twice about it.
  - cal5k 8y ago
    This. Their posted fees mask exchange rates that are horrendous.
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    Can you open account with US dollars as a currency and transfer money there without any conversions, then withdraw and exchange locally?
    - jki275 8y ago
      Yes, you can, and that’s what most people do.
Nursie 8y ago
Cryptocurrencies have failed to make any inroads in this because A) People trust the existing services, and B) They're nowhere near as expensive as you say. At this point it's just yet another talking point for enthusiasts, enthusiasts who have no idea about real-world use-cases.

gst 8y ago

An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time). In fact, ACH supports multiple settlements per day now so if that feature is supported by your bank ACH transfers can even arrive on the same business day. There are a few banks that are slower, but that's not the fault of ACH - don't use slow banks and you're not running into that issue. That's very similar to SEPA transactions, with the exception that some European banks support real-time settlements for SEPA. For banks that don't support this yet funds usually arrive on the next business day. Transfers between the US banking system and the European system are usually slow and expensive as those two systems aren't directly linked to each other. So you your bank needs to send the funds to a correspondent bank which forwards the funds to the final destination. But if you use 3rd party services such as TransferWise those transfers are significantly faster and cheaper. My last transfer from my US bank account to my European account (via TransferWise) arrived on the next business day and cost something like 0.36% on top of the mid-market rate.

vsipuli 8y ago
But you cannot deposit money into any arbitrary U.S. bank account using ACH. For every account that you want to make transfers to, you first need to sign a bunch of forms. With the European IBAN system, no permissions or forms are needed to make deposits to a new arbitrary account.
- gst 8y ago
  Almost all of the US banks allow you to add other ACH accounts that you control. Just confirm the two trial deposits and you can push or pull money from that account. A few banks also allow to send ACH transfers to third-party accounts that you don't control - for example with USAA that's possible. This still doesn't 100% match how transfers work in Europe (you first need to add the account, then wait 1-2 days, then you can send funds to it), but it's definitely better than "signing a bunch of forms".
Smokinator 8y ago
A BTC transaction arrives within minutes. For merchants, that's huge. Why wait 36-72 hours for your credit card sales to hit your bank account? Why pay 2% or more for the "privilege" of that clunky old system when you can use Bitcoin for free and offload the fees (.1 percent) to the consumer? Watching you naysayers takes me back to the days when I used to try to get business colleagues to use e-mail, and they would be like, "But I have a fax machine. It works just fine." Really they were just scared of this newfangled computer stuff, but the better tech wins out eventually every time. It's funny to see so many so-called "techies" who are so incredibly ignorant of the most important technological advancement since the Internet itself. In fact, it's probably an even bigger deal than the Internet. lol

easymodex 8y ago

>Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. I'm a devops engineer at a somewhat large company (4mil+ daily users) and in my years of working with servers and databases, even in this professional enviroment, I've seen some crazy things go down. That's why I find the thought of having basically the whole world's money state written in some databases which are so simple to update, insanely scary. And that's also why I really love bitcoin and the whole blockchain idea. I could go on about the reliability and transparency of it but the general opinion around here is somewhat aginst crypto currencies so to each his own. As to the people saying it's difficult to use and has an unfriendly UI. I might be just one of those nerds it's aimed at, but I feel it's the simplest way of transfering money. I mean really, you just put in an address, hit send and the other party gets it. It won't get delayed, no bank will call you about the funds, no conversion fees, etc. Yes there is a transaction fee which makes it a bit odd to buy coffee with, but for small amounts I don't need the whole world to confirm my transaction, I can use whatever other solution. But for big amounts hell yes, I want to use bitcoin. It's my hard earned money and I don't trust anyone with it.