Yes, I can send money to my buddy in the US for a few cents and I don't care about Western Union opening hours or ELIXIR bank session times or whatever really. It's just me, my buddy, and the money. Takes only a few minutes, I can do it whenever I like. Even sundays. And nobody even knows. It's beautiful.

Out of curiosity, what app/coin do you use to go fiat-->crypto-->fiat? I know there are various options, but intereste to know one which can be used easily for this kind of transfer.

I have a local fiat gateway here in my country which I use to convert between fiat / cash, like 4coins.pl or inpay.pl. I suppose most countries have some fiat gateways like this. In my case the exchange usually takes only a few minutes.

Ideally you would not need to convert to fiat as more businesses accepted cryptocurrency as payment, but we are not there yet unfortunately.

And your buddy has to pay income tax on that transaction. And IRS will know later, when his chosen exchange will decide to share their records with them (and they do this).

The buddy would owe taxes on receiving the money like receiving any kind of money (is it a gift etc?). Beyond that they owe capital gains or can take a cap gains loss due to changes in btc price if they hold onto the btc. If they receive it and immediately cash it out the additional potential capital gains taxes would be extremely minimal. I don't really see what the issue is here?

People send and receive money and owe taxes on it, whether it is using bitcoin or dollars or whatever... The difference here are the reasons the parent post said they enjoyed sending the money via btc.

They only owe tax on what they earn through price speculation (e.g. if I send my buddy $1k in Eth, and he sells Eth for $1.2k, he pays tax on $200 only. If he sells for $0.8k, it's a loss, and he can do the tax writeoff on the $200)

LOL just like everybody pays all their taxes on gifts right? Do you know how Monero works? Monero is completely private and there's too many exchanges for the government to audit them all, and besides that the laws are bound to change in the near future as crypto-currency becomes more viable. Stop being so cynical, it's a poor long-term life strategy.

So besides money laundering, the other use case for the blockchain is tax fraud?

what I'm saying is that anybody who gives somebody five dollars is technically supposed to pay taxes on that, but when's the last time you did that? "Tax fraud" is rampant if you're going strictly by the book, it's not just limited to crypto-currencies. (But the fact that you attempted to make that point isn't surprising considering Hacker News in general seems to be very cynical towards crypto-currency)

What does your buddy do with it?

Did you read his question?

- Power consumption - Media headlines - Gambling and guess the security aspect is kinda neat, but feels like this needs to evolve quite a bit more first. Future still looks interesting.

CryptoKitties.

in related news, CryptoKitties just raised $12M:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/cryptokitties-raises-12m-f...

What about for building financial systems that work in communities with dysfunctional governments?

ssshhh Hacker News hates crypto-currency, most likely due to its ageing community. This a "get off my lawn" post, just move along.

Most likely due to relatively low percent of "business" people and relatively high percent of "tech" people here. Blockchain is really not the bestest amazing thing as some people describe it.

The blockchain is the least interesting aspect of what makes up the public cyptocurrency networks. They are a nice combination of distributed consensus + PK signed transactions that produces a very good UX.

“Very good UX” doesn’t really describe interacting with public cryptocurency networks for me between the security concerns, transaction times, and obscure address names. Is there a particular use case that you have in mind where that’s an improvement on the status quo from a UX perspective?

Are you including signing up for a credit card or bank, making sure you don't have inactivity fees in your checking account, paying your bills on a monthly basis and incurring late fees and credit score dings if you don't?

Yup, all-in the sign-up is roughly the same, the bills are pretty easy to keep paid, and fees are far less inconvenient than the possibility of losing control over a financially-significant private key.

IBAN is not much more meaningful than a random string. International transactions usually take a day or more.

I don't think that aspect of centralized banking infrastructure has "very good UX" either. I could imagine something like PGP where the key management around hardware wallets and an interface like https://etherscan.io/ was serious UX improvement, but wasn't broadly disseminated knowledge yet.

Equity crowdfunding, and all other things fintech.

Yes. A very large amount of use cases.