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Re:Bitcoin Halving Just Occured by chrisco255 on Monday May 11, 2020 @04:52PM (#23146919)
VISA scale is roughly 10,000 transactions per second. If you count Lightning network, that's theoretically possible, but I don't think the network is currently doing anywhere near that and has some scaling and liquidity issues from what I understand. Maybe it will get there, but it's not there yet.

As for fees, however, Bitcoin does not care how much BTC you're sending in a single transaction, whereas VISA charges 1-2% as a fee. So, if you want to transact in large amounts (tens of thousands to millions of dollars) across borders, it's hard to beat Bitcoin.

Personally I have more faith in Ethereum community to solve the scalability problem with blockchain vis-a-vis zkRollups, Optimistic Rollups, and Sharding. Ethereum already scales to 2,000 TPS and after ETH2 is launched, will exceed 100K transactions per second.

Re:Bitcoin Halving Just Occured by hocuspocus on Monday May 11, 2020 @05:22PM (#23147245)
> So, if you want to transact in large amounts (tens of thousands to millions of dollars) across borders, it's hard to beat Bitcoin.

No, it's actually very easy. Moving 100k across borders with a SWIFT transfer would cost me $20-30 (and I'm a nobody, someone doing that a lot would switch to a business account and pay maybe half of that). And if you time it well (i.e. during office hours for the emitting, intermediary and receiving banks) it shouldn't take more than a couple hours.

And that's using USD. Switch to Euro as your medium and now it's costing you literally nothing or a few cents.

Re:Bitcoin Halving Just Occured by doyoureallytnot on Monday May 11, 2020 @05:40PM (#23147425)
> it shouldn't take more than a couple hours That's simply not true. It takes days for most banks to "settle their books", before which any money they've transferred hasn't really gone anywhere.

For day-to-day expenses for us common folk that's not really a concern but for big sums of money the recipient will want a little more certainty of the transaction having completed.

This can take weeks with some banks too.

(Source: I work for a major bank)

Re:Bitcoin Halving Just Occured by hocuspocus on Monday May 11, 2020 @07:48PM (#23148824)
Well your employer sucks then. It certainly doesn't take my banks days to receive a Swift transfer.
Re:Bitcoin Halving Just Occured by chrisco255 on Monday May 11, 2020 @06:04PM (#23147658)
This is another good point. Even for day-to-day transactions, VISA is not instant. The only thing that's instant is the authorization that you can spend X amount of money. But the actual transfer of funds from customer account to merchant account takes days. Whereas, again, with Bitcoin or crypto, it's minutes to settle.
Re:Bitcoin Halving Just Occured by chrisco255 on Monday May 11, 2020 @05:59PM (#23147607)
Ok, you try sending $50K or $500K to Argentina or Russia or China and let me know how quick your transaction goes through.
Re:Bitcoin Halving Just Occured by fidelramos on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @04:37AM (#23151781)
> As for fees, however, Bitcoin does not care how much BTC you're sending in a single transaction, whereas VISA charges 1-2% as a fee. So, if you want to transact in large amounts (tens of thousands to millions of dollars) across borders, it's hard to beat Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was designed to have lower fees than traditional payment processors. From the introduction of the Bitcoin whitepaper:

> The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services.

The current narrative of BTC being "digital gold" and "only for big transactions" is not what it was originally designed as. In this sense Bitcoin Cash (BCH) [1] split from BTC to follow the original plan of electronic P2P cash that works for transactions of any size, including cents.

[1] https://www.bitcoincash.org/