Why not? Thanks to SEPA ICT I can send up to 15'000€ in less than 10 seconds — actually faster than Bitcoin or anything else — to anyone else in the EU.

Why would I need to use Libra or anything else, what does it provide me that normal money doesn't?

Why should a broken commercial currency with surveillance integration be used globally just because the US payment situation is broken?

You cannot compare the speed of the different services without bringing up settlement time, how long it takes for money to become irreversible.

Yes you can send money very quickly with SEPA, but that's not the settlement time. The money can still be reversed (although with more difficulty than credit card payments). With Bitcoin you also get a notification in seconds, but the payment becomes extremely more difficult to reverse in around 10 minutes.

So they're either equally fast or Bitcoin is faster.

> Yes you can send money very quickly with SEPA, but that's not the settlement time. The money can still be reversed

From a banking perspective, the money is settled in 10 seconds, at least with TIPS (the ECB’s platform; the ACH clear it, but the end-user behavior is the same).

Reversal (known as a recall in the standards) requires consent of the beneficiary.

Recalls don't require consent of the beneficiary.

> It will depend on the consent of the Beneficiary whether to turn back the Funds to the Originator.

SCT Inst Scheme Rulebook § 4.3.2.3 [0].

Of course, if you are talking about fraud, yes: banks may answer positively to a recall, without contacting the beneficiary, when the beneficiary is a fraudster. Indeed, local laws often require that of banks, and therefore the standards define a dedicated protocol for that.

When you break the law, many legal protections no longer apply.

[0]: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/sites/default/files/k...

There are many cases where asking the beneficiary is not necessary, fraud is only one of them.

And to clarify, it's not really "fraud", it's "claim by the originator that a fraud occurred". Which is a very different thing, and which matters immensely in practice.

There are three cases. Fraud is one, the two others are banking mistakes. First, when the bank sends the funds twice by accident. Second, when the bank was not meant to send the funds.

In both of those cases, the beneficiary bank is not even required to send the funds back. It can require consent from the beneficiary (which is its client, after all) if it wants.

Yet in both cases, the beneficiary is not even meant to receive the funds.

Fraud works the same way: unless local law requires it, the beneficiary bank is not required to send the funds back, and can rely on beneficiary consent.

Thanks, it seems you're right.

most people most of the time care more about the time it takes to get the initial confirmation, not the actual settlement. most consumer transactions are not large enough for reversibility to matter that much.

Exactly. Which will take a few seconds with Bitcoin.

> Why should a broken commercial currency with surveillance integration be used globally just because the US payment situation is broken?

I suspect it won't be. Possibly could also catch on in developed countries, although places like Kenya and India already have home-grown non-bank phone-based payment systems. One market I can see would be remittances for international migrant workers - think the Indian workers in the UAE, or Filipinos (well, mostly Filipinas) across the Middle East.

There are newer services like Revolut proving that it can be done.

All you need is somebody's phone number and the transfer is instant and with no taxes. You can also exchange currency at the interbank exchange rate during the week. And transferring that money to your local bank account is also free of taxes.

Not sure if Revolut will last, but I've been very happy with it.

And then there’s PayID in Australia: “pay anyone using their phone number”. Only the people setting up the processing system decided that all the security required for Visa/MasterCard processing was an obstacle and they didn’t think to implement rate limiting on their facility that provides account details in response to a phone number query.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/aussie-banks-warn-customers-a...

In this story they refer to a “spike” in queries to the database. What actually happened is that someone tried querying every mobile phone number in Australia.

Why should I send 2 or 3 euros to someone over a chat?

In Europe I can authorize a seller to directly take money from my account, if it's money for someone I trust (family, close friends) I can give them my prepaid credit card number and charge it with just the amount they need

Do you really think that Libra would make this simpler?

that's just the broken, backwards US banking system.

My revolut transaction for eur->cad didn't arrive. Now I have to pull all strings at bth banks to figure out what happened.