> The fact that it even takes more than an hour is absurd.

The fact that it takes more than a couple of seconds is absurd. What could possibly need an hour?

Our standards are far too low here.

I'd imagine fraud checks, regulation, monitoring, fee collection etc

Almost all of those checks tend to happen after the fact and lead to transactions getting rolled back, rather than being checked in advance.

(Whether that's a desirable approach is a reasonable question, but that's already a thing that happens today. The only thing that needs checking in advance is "is there enough money".)

"Get an approval to buy a home or refinance your mortgage in minutes."

https://rocket.quickenloans.com/

If they can do it for buying a house ...

If Bitcoin can do it in 10 minutes globally, we can do it faster in a centralized system.

Edit: ... Not to mention many other developed nations' banking systems.

Edit: Not sure about the downvotes, but really- please don't pretend sending money instantly within one country is rocket science. The reason we're in this mess is mostly banks wanting to hang onto float, and legacy. Both our neighbors to the north and south have much speedier internal banking systems than we do, as do countless other countries.

Try to get anything out of a Bitcoin exchange in 10 minutes.

To fiat that'll take a while, but moving it around the space cash world is often very quick, on GDAX anyways.

I do it for a living.

How do you query the card balance and transfer the funds? Do you actually get cash out of the card, or do you have to resell it as a store credit to someone else?

Long story, and it very much depends on the brand. Re: cashing out, we do both transfers and resale, depending on the user risk profile.

Can you give an example of a fraud check that needs to take an hour?

Everyone has to make money on that money being transferred. Middle men.

It's incredibly easy to transfer money. I and all my friends use Venmo. Settling the tab, paying rent, utilities, in a few seconds. It works extremely well for me.

Venmo (and paypal and friends) are just little proprietary walled gardens, and if you want to exit the walled garden, you have to go through ACH. More rent-seeking walled gardens -- who only exist because the default payment infrastructure in the US is slow obsolete shit -- is not a solution to this, better infrastructure (like UK's Faster Payments) is the solution.

Venmo isn't any more instant. If you want to actually have money back in your bank account rather than a balance in Venmo, it takes 2-3 business days.

In China with Alipay, I receive transfers instantly and deposits to my bank account "can take up to 2 hours", but typically land within 5 minutes. I get instant WeChat notifications whenever my card is used. Although, to be honest I haven't used a physical card in months. I pay for everything with QR codes. There's a code you can present to the attendant and they scan you (typically faster) and then I authenticate the transfer with a fingerprint or pin. It's honestly astounding to see how advanced the financial system is here, ESPECIALLY when compared to the bullshit that currently exists in the US.

In practice this isn't an issue. Money is immediately withdrawn and I transfer the floating balance back to my bank account every week or so. There are few situations where I want the money in my account immediately.

Also Zelle [0] is supported in-app by a growing number of banks. It’s been painless the times I’ve used it.

[0] https://www.zellepay.com/participating-banks-and-credit-unio...

Gotta fire up the COBOL and batch process it.