Also, eventually most lower-value transactions in bitcoin will be on layer two technologies, like the lightning network (peer to peer) or liquid bitcoin (federated peer to peer, mostly for exchanges and traders to quickly move funds between exchanges).
If you're also doing FX that'll be minutes for major currencies. Should you be going through a network of correspondence banks from obscure bank to obscure bank it might be longer but even then rarely days. If currency controls some dalay depending on regulatory setup. Even if the banks do netting, cheaper than RTGS, that should be just a couple of hours between reasonably large banks.
What you may have is a problem with your bank or it using ACH.
It takes 5 work days for the wire to fully clear. Since 5 days is a full work week, it almost always bleeds over to the weekend and in reality takes 7 days.
BTC might still be a terrible system for international transactions but it's still 168 times faster than the one that exists now.
It is 168 times faster than what you currently use.
There are services like TransferWise who specialize in fast international money transfers.
I could imagine that part of your delay is because the bank your family use (in Croatia) does not themselves handle international transfers, so they go through an intermediary bank, only adding delays.
I have often done ~12 hours international wires from Wells Fargo (U.S.) to Asia, and here the delay could simply have been due to the time zone.
Within the European Monetary Zone I often see money arrive in 10-30 minutes (crossing borders).
Also yes, within Europe, an IBAN to IBAN transfer is pretty much instantaneous. However US is not in the IBAN system, so that's a different story.
There are probably multiple reasons why the transfer takes a week, but the spirit of my comment was that an hour long (at worst) transaction time for BTC is actually very fast if you look at it through the international money transfer lens.
1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electr...
they are immediate, cheap and can be exchanged for real money for free.
I don't know, haven't explored that option honestly.
Or try to buy anything time/quantity limited, so you don't get it because the transaction took too long to complete.
Meanwhile, in Canada, I just do a money transfer by email without any fees (if sending more than $10), and it's almost instant if the receiver have auto-deposit set up.
And to be honest I do not see the point for them to support a decentralised currency like. just complying with the regulatory rules ( KYC, anti Money laundering,etc...) Would be a real nightmare
That is incorrect. On average it takes 10 minutes to mine a block, but you have to submit the transaction to be included in the block, so > 10 minutes before it appears on the blockchain.
However, there are actually many block chains, as miners creates block in parallel, it’s the longest one that is the “official”, but the minute you see your transaction in a block, you do not know if this block will stay in the longest chain, so in general you want at least 5 new blocks, after your block, before it is considered “safe”.
So now we are talking about one hour to do a transaction, and that assumes that the network is not overloaded, because there is also a cap on number of transactions that can be included in a block.
All in all, it is a terrible system for fast transactions.