It isn't.

Settlement is complicated business.

Complicated enough that it took the invention of Bitcoin to take it out of the bankers hands and move it to the digital realm.

And even then, it was not instantaneous (10mn) until layer two solutions appeared.

Thinking that "money can be transferred instantaneously because digital" is not a reasonable assumption.

Just like with Tesla's AutoPilot, naming does matter.

If you tell people your car has AutoPilot, what would a reasonable person assume? It can drive itself! And they did, and people have died.

When RH tells Average Joe that the funds are "Instantly" available... that does indeed mean instant to most people.

Poor analogy.

"Autopilot" comes from airplanes, where all it has done historically is "keep the plane going in a straight line".

In contrast, Tesla's AutoPilot can do much more.

Notably as well with autopilot in airplanes is that the pilot should always be in the cockpit, ready to take over... just like in a Tesla.

Notably absent here is the fact that planes can land themselves. In fact the plane can do everything on its own besides taxi on the runway and takeoff...most of the time. Yes, pilots are there to take over if needed, but that doesn't change the reality of autopilot which is not just "keep it in a straight line"

You sound like someone educated about aviation - Average Joe is not.

To Average Joe, "Autopilot" means it flies/drives itself.

Average Joe knows that planes have autopilot... that's where Average Joe heard the term first.

Do you really think Average Joe also thinks that planes entirely fly themselves and that pilots are just window-dressing?

Hang out in the Aviation StackExchange long enough and you'll see exactly that question come up. "Why do we even still have pilots?", or "What does a pilot actually do?".

Yes, in general, people are ignorant of what pilots do and what AutoPilot can and cannot do.

This is made even more confusing by recent progress in autopilot with some large jets getting auto-landing features.

And yes... a pilot can program the FMS with waypoints, altitudes, etc, get into the air, push a button... and the plane will indeed fly itself. Modern jets even have automatic throttle/power control too.

A better name for Tesla's system is what it actually is... Driver Asist. But that's not sexy... and we're far off into the weeds.

"Instant" means instant. There is no way to paint it differently.

It's disingenuous to call an ACH transfer "instant" instead of "It'll take several days during which time we'll lend you money", like RH did here.

"15 minutes" to settle cash for next trade is enough "instant" for most traders I think. The part that irritates people is the "2 business days" problem in the regular account.

I have heard it is complicated, but can someone elaborate the "computing cost" of a regular (non-coin) digital transfer?

Btw, transfers within 15 minutes are being done all over the world without the fancy blockchain and coin. I do understand the need for some transfers to be delayed , say liquidating all of one's investment to take a few days just for security reasons.

>can someone elaborate

Well there's - for starters - :

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/counterpartyrisk.asp

All of that risk is associated with holding the goods and currency for this delayed period! It all makes sense, but, if ACH was 10 minutes instead of two days, the entire issue would barely matter.

> Complicated enough that it took the invention of Bitcoin to take it out of the bankers hands and move it to the digital realm.

That's not at all what bitcoin does or helps with.

Settlement is not complicated. ACH is complicated, but ACH isn't just settlement. Bank to bank wire transfers are just settlement, and are regularly same-day (even same-hour) with immediate fund availability.

Hell, FedWire has been doing real-time near-instant moving of money between accounts since 1920 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedwire

Imagine if making a bank transfer was as east as sending a spam email.

FedWire works because those banks work very hard to trust each other.

Europeans and Australians [0] don't have to imagine. I can literally do a bank transfer to an email address.

[0] non-exhaustive list

That’s not the same as what parent comment was suggesting. You can’t send money to literally anyone using only an email address. You and the recipient still have to have regular bank accounts within the settlement system. The email address only serves as a more friendly identifier than the account number.

I should've been clearer: as long as the recipient has linked their email and/or mobile to their account (via PayID) settlement is instant and their email/mobile number can be used to address transfers

In the UK bank transfers are instant.

They very likely aren't. They just appear to be to the retail crowd.

It seems to be in fact instant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

There is precious little explanation in the article you cite on how this is actually implemented on the back-end.

Banking plumbing is notoriously harder than most folks realize, and I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't very hard (and very small) limits to how big of an amount / how many TPS you can actually execute with this system.

I might be wrong, but I'd be surprised if you could move 10M pounds instantaneously with this.

Stop moving the goalposts.

Got curious, for SEPA there's next day settlement and 1B EUR limit.

The instant SEPA transfers have a 100k limit.

My understanding is that this is due to instant SEPA blocking chargebacks to some extend.

In a lot of countries bank transfer is near real time. Chip and pin is the standard for more than a decade. Checks are no longer al primary way to pay anymore.

U.S. banks are very much lagging in technology

Why? What service actually transfers your money instantly? None does.

Cryptocurrency.

which ones?

btc transfers are pretty far from instant, by design.

Nano. Feeless, instant and energy efficient.

On chain, sure, but Lightning is pretty close to instant

Yeah, but with lightning you really need enough value along the network path(s) to execute a transaction, possibly causing a similar thing as this to happen. I still think it would be an improvement though, as enthusiastic buyers could expand the network and get their buys through.

> Yeah, but with lightning you really need enough value along the network path(s) to execute a transaction, possibly causing a similar thing as this to happen.

It's atomic, it either completes 100% or it fails, there's no partial state where the money gets stuck in one of the middle-nodes.