> what bank in the world would charge only $23.46 for transferring $166 M?

I have never paid for a wire. I’ve also overseen multibillion-dollar wires for which there were zero transfer fees.

If you send and receive wires, get a bank account that doesn’t charge for them. (This is almost every account at e.g. Fidelity or First Republic.) Consumer accounts usually optimise for a different basket of needs than large instantaneous transfers. If that is something you care about, there are a myriad of options superior to Bitcoin.

Are you serious?

I have sent multiple international wires over the years and money always goes missing either from the sending/receiving fees, or the intermediary bank in New York takes a small cut.

Maybe if you have an account with billions of $$$ then you get a special deal, but us normies have to pay.

Those wires are usually expensive because in many places you have to move tangible money around as a result. In Chile in the 2010's Banco de Chile and its counterparties (including Banco BICE) had vaults of their own in their counterparty's complex just so they could square up all the money that moved between their customers on account of instant transfers.

Sure, when Alice pays Bob, Bob pays Charlie, and Charlie pays Alice a small amount of money a lot of it cancels out. But not all, and over millions of transactions one bank can end up owing another a lot of money. You have to cash out at some point, as banks hate trusting people with money for no interest. So banks then resort to armored vehicles full of cash and gold bars so they can square up.

When they're moving money they balance the cost of additional security against the risk of loss and that's what gets reflected in the bill for the bank wire.

Please tell me how to send a 10k USD from US bank account to EU bank account for $23.46 or less. Transferwise is one of the cheapest and it costs $50 USD in fees.

> tell me how to send a 10k USD from US bank account to EU bank account for $23.46 or less

Sent a few thousand dollars from my Fidelity account to a Frankfurt-based friend’s UBS account last week. Zero fees. Note that I sent, and they received U.S. dollars. I believe they incurred about a dollar of slippage in the FX conversion to Euros.

I transfered a few milions within EU banks with zero fees. As long as it’s in EUR and you use IBAN...

Buy having an account where that's one of the options. This may not be the default type of account advertised by your bank to the average person.

The anonymous whale sent from one wallet to another just to rotate their address? Or have they actually sent this money to someone else? Was this money acquired legally? Is it being used for illegal activity? A Bank would have to audit it at the very least, so there's value for the people at having banks manage that transfer rather than let them do it anonymously.

Also for someone with $166M cost of a large transfer seem negligible even if it was in the 100s of thousands. Unless they need to move it all the time continuously, in which case I'd ask, why do they need that?

Anti-Money Laundering laws only catch 0.5% of illicit funds, yet cost 100x the money recovered.

https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les...

Also, the $10K threshold for additional AML scrutiny has been the same amount for nearly 50 years. It should be close to $50k in today's dollars due to inflation.

In 1970 when these AML thresholds were set a dollar was tied to gold at $35/oz. So based on the gold price today it's actually:

$10,000 (1970) = $10,000 x 1880/35 = ~$537,000 (2020)

Wire transfer fees are not commissions, so they don’t depend on the amount — unless currency exchange is involved.

Large transfers of hundreds of millions USD happen between institutions all the time.

I don’t think this is interesting or unique, or a convincing example of why Bitcoin is worth the enormous environmental impact.

Assuming you had $166m in one account at your bank, a wire transfer would be $20-35 depending.