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I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi. But I like to think in terms of use cases. Currently t

I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi. But I like to think in terms of use cases. Currently there is no way to send "money" to someone in another country on the other side of the world, in a decentralized way, and without transaction fees. Can this problem be solved without crypto? Probably, but currently crypto is looking like the best way to be able to do this.

cmeacham98 4y ago
I don't need to send money to the other side of the world in a decentralized way. There's a good chance I never will and similarly 99% of people do not and never will have this problem.
- MisterSandman 4y ago
  I hate crypto as much as the average HNer, but "I don't need it so therefore nobody does" is a stupid and short-sighted reply. There are at least a dozen countries that I can think of that have massive restrictions on how many flows in and out of the country, preventing people from being able to keep their money safe from raging dictators or changing rulers. It's a lot more than 1%.
  - joebob42 4y ago
    It's not nobody, but I think it's a lot less than 1% of people that are going to need to send a meaningful amount of money to places like that. Obviously providing some service to even .01% of people or whatever is valuable. But at this point Bitcoin is valued like Google which is used by tens of percents of all people.
OtomotO 4y ago
"Decentralized" is the keyword. It's not solved by real world implementations of any major blockchain.
ceeplusplus 4y ago
Ethereum based stablecoins are hardly the best way to do this. From a user standpoint you have to 1) buy your stablecoin on some exchange 2) transfer it to your own wallet 3) pay a hefty fee to transfer it to the recipient (>$20 when the network is busy) 4) Recipient pays another hefty fee to transfer it to an exchange so they can offramp. If I'm sending a remittance or similar paying $$$$ in fees is absolutely not desirable. And with current gas prices the cost of sending anything less than 50k is pretty comparable with just doing a wire transfer.
- web4 4y ago
  the fees on exchanges are very small compared to paypal and similar products. Coinbase Pro fees are less than 0.6% and go down to nearly 0%. for payments over 10K the fees may be less than Wise or a wire, and faster. for average users the end game is L2 and direct on- and off- ramps from CEX and services like Ramp, and more payment processors accepting crypto so off-ramps will not be always needed. fees in L2 are in cents.
- dharma1 4y ago
  A lot of exchanges (and fiat onramps) now directly with L2s like Avalanche or Polygon where gas fees are a lot lower
  - password4321 4y ago
    On/offramp is still there if you have to get back through ETH. I remember feeling the frog water warming up when I first heard how "wrapped ETH" was another required fee in-between... craziness.
    - Jommi 4y ago
      You don't need to use ETH mainnet at all. The top On/Offramps work fully on low-fees chains rn.
- Jommi 4y ago
  You don't need step 1), there are multiple ramps that sell and buy straight from wallets now.
timmg 4y ago
> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi. To me, it’s strange that you can agree that most cryptos are scams but don’t understand why there is so much hate for them.
- tornato7 4y ago
  90% of emails and websites are spam or scams… doesn’t stop most people from loving the internet. You just have to look past the junk.
GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
Centralised mechanisms solve the problem for less cost
- Jamie9912 4y ago
  Okay, tell me how I can send money to my friend in Macedonia from Australia without transaction fees.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    you can't do that with crypto either (and crypto likely will have higher transaction fees)
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      > crypto likely will have higher transaction fees If you are sending a fair bit of money, I very much doubt that.
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        most transactions are small. crypto might put pressure in banks to lower transaction fees for large transactions, but that is a very niche benefit
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        My impression was remittances were typically in the hundreds of dollars.
  - cesaref 4y ago
    Okay, tell me why you should be able to send money to your friend in Macedonia from Australia without transaction fees?
    - eudoxus 4y ago
jerglingu 4y ago
I'm guessing the scorn is a reaction to the religious fervor that permeates the crypto space and that bleeds into the "mainstream" like the front page of HN and parts of Twitter. Based off the explosion of "told ya so" articles that have followed the Terra/UST scandal and sentiment among friends, anyway.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  The fervor of the crypto space definitely does not bleed over to the front page of HN.
vladgur 4y ago
I was able to send funds from US directly to a bank account of my friend in Ukraine near instantly for low single digit percent and I could do the same using western union(to my surprise). All without a fear that my currency will drop 10-20% in a day. Now about decentralization, I believe that most people hold their transactional crypto funds in a handful of exchanges and thus the dream of decentralized crypto transactions is rarely realized. But most importantly why does the end user care if the transaction was decentralized or went through a series of transactions through one or more centralized intermediaries. All people care is have funds that left place A showed up in place B
- 88840-8855 4y ago
  Wow, what a use-case.. sending money from the main NATO member to a country that the NATO supports and wants to win the war. Now do the same thing with sending money to Russia. I just checked WISE. "We temporarily stopped sending money to Russia". Yeah.. thanks..
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    Okay, so how much has the Ukraine situation actually resulted in crypto transactions? Enough to justify multi trillion valuations?
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      Note that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon all have $1T+ market caps, and before the recent market meltdown had multi-trillion valuations. Most Americans - particularly those who grew up before globalization - underestimate the scale of global markets. The U.S. is about 4% of the world's population and about 15% of global GDP. Anything that's Internet-based and has truly global appeal will be significantly larger than anything we would've been familiar with pre-globalization. Hell, the product I work on has about 3B users, 10x the population of the United States.
      - faeriechangling 4y ago
faeriechangling 4y ago
I’ve been hearing that use case for crypto for a decade now. I don’t see people using crypto that way, they overwhelmingly use existing services which are cheaper and work fine the overwhelming majority of the time. People ignore this and speculate trillions into crypto. My issue is that people don’t even need to see crypto actually succeeding at the use cases people talk about to be considered a good investment. People will invest in crypto regardless. I believe crypto does have value but the valuation in no way matches the actual present day value of the crypto or even a plausible projection of its future value. People just say “crypto to 100 trillion! Smart contracts!” and nobody has to see any real results that justify those numbers. Why should I be impressed that something has potential? Many things have potential.
abofh 4y ago
> Currently there is no way to send "money" to someone in another country on the other side of the world, in a decentralized way, and without transaction fees. Why is this necessary? I have banks in three countries and generally pay nothing to move money between them or to pay others. This really doesn't feel like a problem that needs to be solved except by those trying to avoid taxation.
- Jamie9912 4y ago
  You never wanted to send your friend money for them to buy something in the moment?
  - abofh 4y ago
    And there are dozens and dozens of ways to do that: Venmo, PayPal, iPay, bill pay, ach, wire transfer, iBAN, payconiq, biscuit, cash, check, beer. And that's just in my neck of the woods, I'm sure I'm forgetting more.
    - Jamie9912 4y ago
      Venmo is USA only. Paypal takes egregious transactio fees. Everything you listed has transaction fees except for biscuits, cash, check and beer. Which will take much longer than 60 seconds to arrive
      - abofh 4y ago
        Ach and bank wires cost me nothing, iBAN costs me nothing, payconiq p2p costs me nothing, all are roughly instantaneous, except ach which is still same day.
        Jamie9912 4y ago
        iBAN takes days. And they also need a bank account...
    - web4 4y ago
jacobr 4y ago
It’s a very niche use case. For most use cases, you can send money perfectly fine using a credit card or Apple Pay etc. To receive money you can open a Shopify store or whatever comes next. To send money to relatives in countries with little infrastructure, there’s already Hawala, Western Union, etc. Not perfect but will be incrementally improved.
_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
> without transaction fees You also have to pay transaction fees transferring crypto, it's build into the protocol.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Yes but it doesn't scale with the amount you are transferring.
sgammon 4y ago
> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi wish i could frame this quote
fragmede 4y ago
> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site. > Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi. That second sentence explains the first, really. Anyway, so the remittance industry is estimated to be USD 15.27 Billion as of 2021 so if you could tap into that market, you'd do pretty well. Or rather, you would, if you charged some sort of fee to use your services, so you need to charge some sort of a fee, which negates that advantage of using crypto. Coinbase makes it easy to get into crypto, but they do charge a fee for that.

cmeacham98 4y ago

I don't need to send money to the other side of the world in a decentralized way. There's a good chance I never will and similarly 99% of people do not and never will have this problem.

MisterSandman 4y ago
I hate crypto as much as the average HNer, but "I don't need it so therefore nobody does" is a stupid and short-sighted reply. There are at least a dozen countries that I can think of that have massive restrictions on how many flows in and out of the country, preventing people from being able to keep their money safe from raging dictators or changing rulers. It's a lot more than 1%.
- joebob42 4y ago
  It's not nobody, but I think it's a lot less than 1% of people that are going to need to send a meaningful amount of money to places like that. Obviously providing some service to even .01% of people or whatever is valuable. But at this point Bitcoin is valued like Google which is used by tens of percents of all people.

OtomotO 4y ago

"Decentralized" is the keyword. It's not solved by real world implementations of any major blockchain.

ceeplusplus 4y ago

Ethereum based stablecoins are hardly the best way to do this. From a user standpoint you have to 1) buy your stablecoin on some exchange 2) transfer it to your own wallet 3) pay a hefty fee to transfer it to the recipient (>$20 when the network is busy) 4) Recipient pays another hefty fee to transfer it to an exchange so they can offramp. If I'm sending a remittance or similar paying $$$$ in fees is absolutely not desirable. And with current gas prices the cost of sending anything less than 50k is pretty comparable with just doing a wire transfer.

web4 4y ago
the fees on exchanges are very small compared to paypal and similar products. Coinbase Pro fees are less than 0.6% and go down to nearly 0%. for payments over 10K the fees may be less than Wise or a wire, and faster. for average users the end game is L2 and direct on- and off- ramps from CEX and services like Ramp, and more payment processors accepting crypto so off-ramps will not be always needed. fees in L2 are in cents.
dharma1 4y ago
A lot of exchanges (and fiat onramps) now directly with L2s like Avalanche or Polygon where gas fees are a lot lower
- password4321 4y ago
  On/offramp is still there if you have to get back through ETH. I remember feeling the frog water warming up when I first heard how "wrapped ETH" was another required fee in-between... craziness.
  - Jommi 4y ago
    You don't need to use ETH mainnet at all. The top On/Offramps work fully on low-fees chains rn.
Jommi 4y ago
You don't need step 1), there are multiple ramps that sell and buy straight from wallets now.

timmg 4y ago

> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi. To me, it’s strange that you can agree that most cryptos are scams but don’t understand why there is so much hate for them.

tornato7 4y ago
90% of emails and websites are spam or scams… doesn’t stop most people from loving the internet. You just have to look past the junk.

GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago

Centralised mechanisms solve the problem for less cost

Jamie9912 4y ago
Okay, tell me how I can send money to my friend in Macedonia from Australia without transaction fees.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  you can't do that with crypto either (and crypto likely will have higher transaction fees)
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    > crypto likely will have higher transaction fees If you are sending a fair bit of money, I very much doubt that.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      most transactions are small. crypto might put pressure in banks to lower transaction fees for large transactions, but that is a very niche benefit
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        My impression was remittances were typically in the hundreds of dollars.
- cesaref 4y ago
  Okay, tell me why you should be able to send money to your friend in Macedonia from Australia without transaction fees?
  - eudoxus 4y ago

jerglingu 4y ago

I'm guessing the scorn is a reaction to the religious fervor that permeates the crypto space and that bleeds into the "mainstream" like the front page of HN and parts of Twitter. Based off the explosion of "told ya so" articles that have followed the Terra/UST scandal and sentiment among friends, anyway.

whimsicalism 4y ago
The fervor of the crypto space definitely does not bleed over to the front page of HN.

vladgur 4y ago

I was able to send funds from US directly to a bank account of my friend in Ukraine near instantly for low single digit percent and I could do the same using western union(to my surprise). All without a fear that my currency will drop 10-20% in a day. Now about decentralization, I believe that most people hold their transactional crypto funds in a handful of exchanges and thus the dream of decentralized crypto transactions is rarely realized. But most importantly why does the end user care if the transaction was decentralized or went through a series of transactions through one or more centralized intermediaries. All people care is have funds that left place A showed up in place B

88840-8855 4y ago
Wow, what a use-case.. sending money from the main NATO member to a country that the NATO supports and wants to win the war. Now do the same thing with sending money to Russia. I just checked WISE. "We temporarily stopped sending money to Russia". Yeah.. thanks..
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Okay, so how much has the Ukraine situation actually resulted in crypto transactions? Enough to justify multi trillion valuations?
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    Note that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon all have $1T+ market caps, and before the recent market meltdown had multi-trillion valuations. Most Americans - particularly those who grew up before globalization - underestimate the scale of global markets. The U.S. is about 4% of the world's population and about 15% of global GDP. Anything that's Internet-based and has truly global appeal will be significantly larger than anything we would've been familiar with pre-globalization. Hell, the product I work on has about 3B users, 10x the population of the United States.
    - faeriechangling 4y ago

faeriechangling 4y ago

I’ve been hearing that use case for crypto for a decade now. I don’t see people using crypto that way, they overwhelmingly use existing services which are cheaper and work fine the overwhelming majority of the time. People ignore this and speculate trillions into crypto. My issue is that people don’t even need to see crypto actually succeeding at the use cases people talk about to be considered a good investment. People will invest in crypto regardless. I believe crypto does have value but the valuation in no way matches the actual present day value of the crypto or even a plausible projection of its future value. People just say “crypto to 100 trillion! Smart contracts!” and nobody has to see any real results that justify those numbers. Why should I be impressed that something has potential? Many things have potential.

abofh 4y ago

> Currently there is no way to send "money" to someone in another country on the other side of the world, in a decentralized way, and without transaction fees. Why is this necessary? I have banks in three countries and generally pay nothing to move money between them or to pay others. This really doesn't feel like a problem that needs to be solved except by those trying to avoid taxation.

Jamie9912 4y ago
You never wanted to send your friend money for them to buy something in the moment?
- abofh 4y ago
  And there are dozens and dozens of ways to do that: Venmo, PayPal, iPay, bill pay, ach, wire transfer, iBAN, payconiq, biscuit, cash, check, beer. And that's just in my neck of the woods, I'm sure I'm forgetting more.
  - Jamie9912 4y ago
    Venmo is USA only. Paypal takes egregious transactio fees. Everything you listed has transaction fees except for biscuits, cash, check and beer. Which will take much longer than 60 seconds to arrive
    - abofh 4y ago
      Ach and bank wires cost me nothing, iBAN costs me nothing, payconiq p2p costs me nothing, all are roughly instantaneous, except ach which is still same day.
      - Jamie9912 4y ago
        iBAN takes days. And they also need a bank account...
  - web4 4y ago

jacobr 4y ago

It’s a very niche use case. For most use cases, you can send money perfectly fine using a credit card or Apple Pay etc. To receive money you can open a Shopify store or whatever comes next. To send money to relatives in countries with little infrastructure, there’s already Hawala, Western Union, etc. Not perfect but will be incrementally improved.

_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago

> without transaction fees You also have to pay transaction fees transferring crypto, it's build into the protocol.

whimsicalism 4y ago
Yes but it doesn't scale with the amount you are transferring.

sgammon 4y ago

> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi wish i could frame this quote

fragmede 4y ago

> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site. > Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi. That second sentence explains the first, really. Anyway, so the remittance industry is estimated to be USD 15.27 Billion as of 2021 so if you could tap into that market, you'd do pretty well. Or rather, you would, if you charged some sort of fee to use your services, so you need to charge some sort of a fee, which negates that advantage of using crypto. Coinbase makes it easy to get into crypto, but they do charge a fee for that.