We could make a million of such transactions per minute using $1000/month hosted server. We have the technology.
The problem is legacy infrastructure and the fact that banks benefit from high fees on international transfers.
There is at least one successful business (transferwise) that makes international transfers much cheaper and faster using terribly inefficient work-arounds.
If banks were at all motivated to fix the issue, they would, using Java and a database. They don't need blockchain (which, btw, is slower to settle a transaction than updating a record in a database).
Whatever problems you may have with international bank transfers, they work: every business in the world relies on them. For all the supposed benefits of blockchains, no blockchain solution can make that claim, or any claim close to it.
It is not like the problem hasn't been attacked many times from different angles.
What a ridiculous argument. With blockchain really just becoming interesting over the last 2 years, you think banks, many of which use systems 20-30 years old (bonds are still primarily traded over phone) are going to switch over to it immediately. Give me a break.
> Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo?
International bank transfers can take days, have large transaction fees, and have a non-trivial amount of book keeping error. Whenever those same transactions could take 30 minutes with no human oversight I'd say the speedup is much higher than 10x. With that, it seems like you're more interested in making claims without being properly educated on what you're talking about.