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If you wanted to transfer 100k between two banks in, say, 1900 via $5000 bank notes, how much do you suppose it would have cost you? Based on that cost would y

If you wanted to transfer 100k between two banks in, say, 1900 via $5000 bank notes, how much do you suppose it would have cost you? Based on that cost would you say the dollar was failing as a currency in 1900?

arcticbull 6y ago
What It’s 2020 an ACH transfer costs in bulk about 1/10th of a cent and has no practical cap.
- rlpb 6y ago
  Now try doing that internationally.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Sure there’s tons of options. TransferWise, for one. Wire transfers. InteractiveBrokers. And they’re actually quite affordable. This has been a solved problem for a long time.
    - rglullis 6y ago
      Now try doing that without a middleman.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Try doing that with Bitcoin lol, no merchants accept Bitcoin on either side and nobody gets paid in it so you have to convert dollars on one side to crypto for a 1-2% fee, transfer it for $10 fee to an exchange in the receiving country and then convert back to local units for a 1-2% fee. Also, why. It makes no difference.
        rglullis 6y ago
        Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull. Back in 2014 I was consistently selling BTC to friends in Brazil at a rate that made perfect sense for them and even above the BRL-USD rate. This year I paid for all of my domain renewals using BTC on namecheap. Hundreds of dollars. You can go to a service I provide right now and you can purchase the services with ethereum and ERC20 tokens. I also accept Raiden, which can make the transaction cost virtually zero. I will reiterate what I asked in first comment: instead of just arguing with the amygdala, is there any chance you can establish a set of parameters and values that will make crypto (not necessarily Bitcoin, not necessarily Ethereum) something you consider worthy of a experiment, or are you forever going to believe that the status quo is the best we can do? > Also, why. It makes no difference. You playing the cynical permabear who sees no point in building on blockchain tech is no different from a corporate drone who does not understand why people work on Free software without any immediate financial reward. Even if Bitcoin fails, it has already paved the way for something that won't. You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        > Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull. Well played, I upvoted you in no small part because of your wordplay there :) I see no point in building anything backed by proof of waste, it’s simply not a reasonable value proposition. It’s like trying to build coal fired cars. Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives. That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap. Setting aside for a second that the market cap of a currency is a nonsensical metric, currencies are what you measure market cap in not of. Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from. Permissionless is what has allowed North Korea to fund its nuclear program with billions of dollars of cryptocurrency. It’s what allows ransomware authors to get paid and shut down schools and hospitals. It’s what allows laundering the proceeds of crime. It’s what allows rampant market manipulation. Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics. And that really knocks out the rest. The reality is trust is a huge optimization. Beyond that most solutions are cheaper, faster, simpler and map better onto human fallibility if implemented as a MySQL table in RDS. Then you can secure it with a Merkel tree and call it a day. No, I’m not bullish on crypto because it has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today except separate suckers from their money. It’s great at that. And this is in spite of some of the smartest minds in the world working day and night to do so. If a single crypto product shows even a 1% improvement over a classical implementation along any axis I’ll eat my ... er, hat (yes, that’s a John McAffee reference) and buy your bitcoins at what I’m confident will be a dramatically higher price. > You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference. There’s no such thing, we live in a society. So, I guess, I respectfully disagree but always appreciate hearing the other side.
oh_sigh 6y ago
The point changes if you express the costs as a ratio of costs of equivalent offerings, versus absolute costs. A lot of things that would be super wasteful today look like a cakewalk compared to how things were done in 1900.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

arcticbull 6y ago

What It’s 2020 an ACH transfer costs in bulk about 1/10th of a cent and has no practical cap.

rlpb 6y ago
Now try doing that internationally.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Sure there’s tons of options. TransferWise, for one. Wire transfers. InteractiveBrokers. And they’re actually quite affordable. This has been a solved problem for a long time.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    Now try doing that without a middleman.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Try doing that with Bitcoin lol, no merchants accept Bitcoin on either side and nobody gets paid in it so you have to convert dollars on one side to crypto for a 1-2% fee, transfer it for $10 fee to an exchange in the receiving country and then convert back to local units for a 1-2% fee. Also, why. It makes no difference.
      - rglullis 6y ago
        Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull. Back in 2014 I was consistently selling BTC to friends in Brazil at a rate that made perfect sense for them and even above the BRL-USD rate. This year I paid for all of my domain renewals using BTC on namecheap. Hundreds of dollars. You can go to a service I provide right now and you can purchase the services with ethereum and ERC20 tokens. I also accept Raiden, which can make the transaction cost virtually zero. I will reiterate what I asked in first comment: instead of just arguing with the amygdala, is there any chance you can establish a set of parameters and values that will make crypto (not necessarily Bitcoin, not necessarily Ethereum) something you consider worthy of a experiment, or are you forever going to believe that the status quo is the best we can do? > Also, why. It makes no difference. You playing the cynical permabear who sees no point in building on blockchain tech is no different from a corporate drone who does not understand why people work on Free software without any immediate financial reward. Even if Bitcoin fails, it has already paved the way for something that won't. You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        > Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull. Well played, I upvoted you in no small part because of your wordplay there :) I see no point in building anything backed by proof of waste, it’s simply not a reasonable value proposition. It’s like trying to build coal fired cars. Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives. That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap. Setting aside for a second that the market cap of a currency is a nonsensical metric, currencies are what you measure market cap in not of. Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from. Permissionless is what has allowed North Korea to fund its nuclear program with billions of dollars of cryptocurrency. It’s what allows ransomware authors to get paid and shut down schools and hospitals. It’s what allows laundering the proceeds of crime. It’s what allows rampant market manipulation. Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics. And that really knocks out the rest. The reality is trust is a huge optimization. Beyond that most solutions are cheaper, faster, simpler and map better onto human fallibility if implemented as a MySQL table in RDS. Then you can secure it with a Merkel tree and call it a day. No, I’m not bullish on crypto because it has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today except separate suckers from their money. It’s great at that. And this is in spite of some of the smartest minds in the world working day and night to do so. If a single crypto product shows even a 1% improvement over a classical implementation along any axis I’ll eat my ... er, hat (yes, that’s a John McAffee reference) and buy your bitcoins at what I’m confident will be a dramatically higher price. > You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference. There’s no such thing, we live in a society. So, I guess, I respectfully disagree but always appreciate hearing the other side.

oh_sigh 6y ago

The point changes if you express the costs as a ratio of costs of equivalent offerings, versus absolute costs. A lot of things that would be super wasteful today look like a cakewalk compared to how things were done in 1900.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]