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How often is there a direct transfer of this size? Fedwire moves about 2.7T/day and I believe it would have cost $0.26 to transfer this amount, assuming that it
by oijaf888 13y ago
How often is there a direct transfer of this size? Fedwire moves about 2.7T/day and I believe it would have cost $0.26 to transfer this amount, assuming that its at the upper end of their sliding scale ($0.08 - $0.26/transfer).
- latj 13y agoBesides cost there is also risk- a transfer of this size in the light of day would raise a lot of questions- Where did this money come from? Was tax paid? And depending on the reason for the transaction regulators may interfere or freeze the funds.
- glesica 13y agoYes, because making sure someone isn't buying a nuke on the black market and is paying the taxes they owe is just terrible. Don't get me wrong, the regulatory framework for money transfers seems to suck, but I don't want to go from "shitty regulation" to "zero regulation", I want to go from "shitty regulation" to "smart regulation".
- Sambdala 13y ago>I want to go from "shitty regulation" to "smart regulation". I'm tempted to conclude this is something that happens so rarely you may as well count the times it happens as a rounding error. It's a bit like saying government will just work if we only vote for the right candidate.
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- chipotle_coyote 13y agoI'm tempted to conclude this is something that happens so rarely you may as well count the times it happens as a rounding error. Everyone's tempted to conclude things like that, but there's a subtle fallacy happening when we do. Generally speaking, we notice government programs of all stripes when they get in our way. When they don't get in our way, we don't. It's very easy for someone paying attention to the news to be able to rattle off incidents where the FDA and FEMA and the SEC screwed up, because the screw-ups are in the news. But when they do their job correctly we never hear about it. Basically, the dataset we carry around in our heads about How Well Government Works is substantially biased toward instances of failure. The only way to really measure how useful a regulation is or isn't is to determine what it is the regulation is supposed to address and examine a substantial set of "before and after" data points; trotting out vivid but essentially anecdotal examples of WHEN REGULATORS GO BAD makes for great editorializing, but it doesn't actually tell us very much.
- thenmar 13y agowhoa whoa whoa, that would never happen in bitcoin libertarian paradise
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shitgoose 13y ago"Where did this money come from?" I guess, not from you. Is that the reason to question it? "Was tax paid?" What makes you think that this money supposed to be taxed?
- fragsworth 13y agoNot everyone can participate in Fedwire. I believe it also requires that you put your assets one of their accounts if you're going to use it, so you're relying on the credit of the U.S. government (which is pretty good, but still adds risk, and subject to U.S. laws) until you withdraw your funds. And there's probably a lengthy process to deposit and withdraw funds.
- gorrillamcd 13y agoKeep in mind though, this transaction was nearly instantaneous. Bank Wire transfers take 3-4 days to complete (at least, as far as I know with normal-person quantities of money). Instant international money transfer is amazing!
- gergles 13y agoNo, that's ACH. SWIFT (or even FedWire) transfers happen within a few minutes.
- csomar 13y agoMy experience tell me otherwise with both of them. It can take from a few days to a couple weeks.
- booyaa00 13y agoWhat country are you in? In the UK bank transfers happen within a couple of minutes. You can login to your bank, transfer money to someone elses bank, they'll login, and see the money.
- dprice1 13y agoMy guess is the previous commenter is in US. There's an excellent episode of the podcast "planet money" which addresses exactly this question, and which also explains why the system in the UK is much faster. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-...
- csomar 13y agoNope. Third-world here. I don't think it'll take a couple weeks in the US.
- guan 13y agoFedwire and other real time gross settlement services (RTGS) are almost instantaneous. SWIFT transfers usually are not: SWIFT is a way to communicate messages about transfers between banks, but they would still need a way to do the actual settlement. This could be very fast in the case of two large banks in different countries: if you are a customer in bank A, which has a correspondent account with B, and the recipient is also a customer with bank B. Then bank A can use SWIFT to say “please transfer $1 trillion from our account to the recipient’s account”, and that could happen instantly. (It usually doesn’t.) But if the final recipient is actually a customer at bank C, then the money needs to get from B to C somehow. That could happen in the recipient country’s RTGS—Fedwire if it’s the United States—but it might also be slower, through ACH or an equivalent. One problem with fast transfers is that many banks don’t have straight through processing for RTGS. This means that the money can get instantly from bank A to bank B, but may not get posted to the recipient’s account with bank B until a clerk gets around to verifying and booking the transaction.
- JackFr 13y agoI believe FedWire has a $50M pert transaction max, thus $1T would cost around $5K.