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I routinely buy things with fiat that complete in seconds. There's on order of trillions of completed fiat transactions per day. They don't generally take days.

I routinely buy things with fiat that complete in seconds. There's on order of trillions of completed fiat transactions per day. They don't generally take days. Only a tiny, tiny amount of them of a very limited class take days. It's disingenuous to imply all fiat transactions take that long.

Geee 6y ago
Your transaction isn't settled instantly. The actual money that flows between institutions behind the scenes is way slower than bitcoin. You can use credit/debit card on Bitcoin too, and your payments seem to go through instantly with whatever tps the network supports.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  Your transaction isn't settled instantly. The actual money that flows between institutions behind the scenes is way slower than bitcoin. ... and yet the world turns; and credit cards amount to $3tn of payments in the U.S annually. As it turns out, businesses do not actually care about instant settlement of payment transactions that much, what's important is instant authorization.
  - Geee 6y ago
    You just repeated my point. Are you trying to disagree with me or what?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dogman144 6y ago
    Yeah and btc is instantly authd by the user. You sort of proved the other person’s point haha.
  - argvargc 6y ago
    Bitcoin alone has done more than that per year since since 2018. And there are literally thousands of other projects. Credit cards are small by comparison. https://mobile.twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1346139278636670976 https://mobile.twitter.com/yassineARK/status/134613927863667...
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      That's absolutely an apples to hand grenades comparison. First of all, global credit card volumes are much larger than Bitcoin volumes. Asia Pacific has been a bigger credit card market than the U.S. for some time - for example. Secondly, credit cards payments are overwhelmingly payments for services or goods; effectively none of Bitcoin's total volume is in that category. In fact, virtually all of Bitcoin volume is gross settlement and relates to speculative trading activity.
      - argvargc 6y ago
        Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day. I'm not referring to those. On-chain transactions are for a variety of things, but they are all payments, which was the criteria in question you brought up. Regardless of how you might opine on those payments "merit" (I could equally deride the usefulness of plastic trinkets ordered from China on Amazon - for what good it would do), they are not insignificant on Bitcoin compared to legacy systems. They are all payments settled either from one party to another, or between one party's multiple accounts, and just because they are almost entirely "only" settlements does not imply they are somehow not useful or otherwise to be derided.
        NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
        >Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day. I'm not referring to those. Where does that number even come from? I've been trying to source anything that's even vaguely in the same ballpark and coming up empty. Most of the sources I can find suggest ~$100bn a day. But no, in any case, that's not what I'm talking about either. Nor am I trying to apply any moral value to the purposes to which payments are put. The point is: you can't say "credit cards are small relative to BTC" without consider the segmentation of the payment market in the fiat world. I encourage you to provide evidence of the size of the "credit card" usage (i.e. goods and services payments) of BTC. Good data is hard to find but it's self-evidently not in the "trillions of USD per year" order-of-magnitude. If you want to talk about the gross settlements segment, again, BTC is a minnow. Sure counting every transaction on the BTC blockchain, it's a few $tn a year currently. Fedwire does that much every day, and that's only for inter-institutional transfer.
argvargc 6y ago
On a per-value basis, what I have claimed is entirely true. The bulk of fiat does not move around on peoples payment cards or in cash in their hands, it moves in bank-to-bank transfers that indeed do take days or even weeks, and further have an up to 10% failure rate. It may well be that through the use of caveats you don't see or think about, you are able to execute small transactions quickly with fiat, but it is the counterparty to your transactions who is bearing the burden of fiats shortcomings in these cases. For example, if we're comparing digitally, in most cases, you are able to arbitrarily reverse the transaction up to or even over a month later, claiming it as fraudulent, or rejecting it for some other reason justifiable to you, but for which the vendor has little recourse. This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken. With cash a similar problem exists with counterfeit money, a vendor may collect up a weeks earnings, only to take them to the bank and have a percentage of them rejected. All of these problems are solved by crypto, it improves on money in many key ways (these are just a couple), that's its point, and why people are excited about it enough to drive its collective value up to the region of Apple's stock value, around 4x faster than Apple took to do so.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken. Worked quite well for me when my credit card details were stolen and I could revert $8k of purchases immediately. If my wallet keys are stolen or cracked, I will lose everything with "transaction finality" - that would be a problem which is enabled not solved by crypto.
  - argvargc 6y ago
    As we've seen with the development of centralised exchanges, institutional and retail custodial solutions, many of which are backed by various forms of insurance, the fact that the base layer provides for transactional finality (along with many other things), in no way prevents the development of custodial and insurance-backed solutions on top of it. That crypto can do new things, and yet may also facilitate all of the (useful) old things, simply makes it a superior tool. There can be no fundamental argument against this.
dogman144 6y ago
Unless you’re paying cash, average final settlement time is ~90 days, in reality. That’s just been abstracted away from the credit card user. Bitcoin settles in 6 blocks (60 mins) Now, on the UX topic, btc has a lot to improve. But I’m always surprised how rapidly people assume their transactions in fiat are settling as a comparative criticism for Bitcoin.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  > Unless you’re paying cash, average final settlement time is ~90 days, in reality. Do you have a source for that? I tried looking and everything I saw is it would take between 24 hours and 3 days on average, for credit cards. You very well could be right, I'd just like to see something that confirms it, and wasn't able to find anything. Example source: https://lifehacker.com/this-is-why-your-credit-card-transactions-take-so-long-1786567382 https://lifehacker.com/this-is-why-your-credit-card-transact...
  - dogman144 6y ago
    One way to look at it is w/ credit cards, bill isn’t due until the end of the month (for a reason, and then all settlement starts occurring once you pay it). Would like a better source, I have that timeframe from an Anthony Pompliamo (VC in the space) interview by Lex Fridman, but I’m looking for a primary source as well.

Geee 6y ago

Your transaction isn't settled instantly. The actual money that flows between institutions behind the scenes is way slower than bitcoin. You can use credit/debit card on Bitcoin too, and your payments seem to go through instantly with whatever tps the network supports.

NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
Your transaction isn't settled instantly. The actual money that flows between institutions behind the scenes is way slower than bitcoin. ... and yet the world turns; and credit cards amount to $3tn of payments in the U.S annually. As it turns out, businesses do not actually care about instant settlement of payment transactions that much, what's important is instant authorization.
- Geee 6y ago
  You just repeated my point. Are you trying to disagree with me or what?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dogman144 6y ago
  Yeah and btc is instantly authd by the user. You sort of proved the other person’s point haha.
- argvargc 6y ago
  Bitcoin alone has done more than that per year since since 2018. And there are literally thousands of other projects. Credit cards are small by comparison. https://mobile.twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1346139278636670976 https://mobile.twitter.com/yassineARK/status/134613927863667...
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    That's absolutely an apples to hand grenades comparison. First of all, global credit card volumes are much larger than Bitcoin volumes. Asia Pacific has been a bigger credit card market than the U.S. for some time - for example. Secondly, credit cards payments are overwhelmingly payments for services or goods; effectively none of Bitcoin's total volume is in that category. In fact, virtually all of Bitcoin volume is gross settlement and relates to speculative trading activity.
    - argvargc 6y ago
      Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day. I'm not referring to those. On-chain transactions are for a variety of things, but they are all payments, which was the criteria in question you brought up. Regardless of how you might opine on those payments "merit" (I could equally deride the usefulness of plastic trinkets ordered from China on Amazon - for what good it would do), they are not insignificant on Bitcoin compared to legacy systems. They are all payments settled either from one party to another, or between one party's multiple accounts, and just because they are almost entirely "only" settlements does not imply they are somehow not useful or otherwise to be derided.
      - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
        >Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day. I'm not referring to those. Where does that number even come from? I've been trying to source anything that's even vaguely in the same ballpark and coming up empty. Most of the sources I can find suggest ~$100bn a day. But no, in any case, that's not what I'm talking about either. Nor am I trying to apply any moral value to the purposes to which payments are put. The point is: you can't say "credit cards are small relative to BTC" without consider the segmentation of the payment market in the fiat world. I encourage you to provide evidence of the size of the "credit card" usage (i.e. goods and services payments) of BTC. Good data is hard to find but it's self-evidently not in the "trillions of USD per year" order-of-magnitude. If you want to talk about the gross settlements segment, again, BTC is a minnow. Sure counting every transaction on the BTC blockchain, it's a few $tn a year currently. Fedwire does that much every day, and that's only for inter-institutional transfer.

argvargc 6y ago

On a per-value basis, what I have claimed is entirely true. The bulk of fiat does not move around on peoples payment cards or in cash in their hands, it moves in bank-to-bank transfers that indeed do take days or even weeks, and further have an up to 10% failure rate. It may well be that through the use of caveats you don't see or think about, you are able to execute small transactions quickly with fiat, but it is the counterparty to your transactions who is bearing the burden of fiats shortcomings in these cases. For example, if we're comparing digitally, in most cases, you are able to arbitrarily reverse the transaction up to or even over a month later, claiming it as fraudulent, or rejecting it for some other reason justifiable to you, but for which the vendor has little recourse. This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken. With cash a similar problem exists with counterfeit money, a vendor may collect up a weeks earnings, only to take them to the bank and have a percentage of them rejected. All of these problems are solved by crypto, it improves on money in many key ways (these are just a couple), that's its point, and why people are excited about it enough to drive its collective value up to the region of Apple's stock value, around 4x faster than Apple took to do so.

viraptor 6y ago
> This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken. Worked quite well for me when my credit card details were stolen and I could revert $8k of purchases immediately. If my wallet keys are stolen or cracked, I will lose everything with "transaction finality" - that would be a problem which is enabled not solved by crypto.
- argvargc 6y ago
  As we've seen with the development of centralised exchanges, institutional and retail custodial solutions, many of which are backed by various forms of insurance, the fact that the base layer provides for transactional finality (along with many other things), in no way prevents the development of custodial and insurance-backed solutions on top of it. That crypto can do new things, and yet may also facilitate all of the (useful) old things, simply makes it a superior tool. There can be no fundamental argument against this.

dogman144 6y ago

Unless you’re paying cash, average final settlement time is ~90 days, in reality. That’s just been abstracted away from the credit card user. Bitcoin settles in 6 blocks (60 mins) Now, on the UX topic, btc has a lot to improve. But I’m always surprised how rapidly people assume their transactions in fiat are settling as a comparative criticism for Bitcoin.

cableshaft 6y ago
> Unless you’re paying cash, average final settlement time is ~90 days, in reality. Do you have a source for that? I tried looking and everything I saw is it would take between 24 hours and 3 days on average, for credit cards. You very well could be right, I'd just like to see something that confirms it, and wasn't able to find anything. Example source: https://lifehacker.com/this-is-why-your-credit-card-transactions-take-so-long-1786567382 https://lifehacker.com/this-is-why-your-credit-card-transact...
- dogman144 6y ago
  One way to look at it is w/ credit cards, bill isn’t due until the end of the month (for a reason, and then all settlement starts occurring once you pay it). Would like a better source, I have that timeframe from an Anthony Pompliamo (VC in the space) interview by Lex Fridman, but I’m looking for a primary source as well.