Re:MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
by SailingSperm on Thursday February 11, 2021 @05:50PM
(#26108502)
30 mins for FINAL international settlement of arbitrary $ amounts between $0.001 - $100B IS fast - and the uptime for the BTC network is 100% since inception ~2011.
If you're really wanting to compare apples to apples - For traditional banks doing cross border transactions, it takes up to five days at most global banks, not counting weekends or bank holidays to actually settle with a lot more intermediaries involved.
Re:MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
by shawnz on Thursday February 11, 2021 @03:19PM
(#26106582)
> So you would keep your cryptocurrency in a bank and transfer it through the normal channels
You do your daily spending through the normal channels, sure, but why would you need to keep your cryptocurrency savings in a bank in such a situation?
Re:MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies
by xirbeosbwo1234 on Thursday February 11, 2021 @07:48PM
(#26109564)
Bitcoin is fantastically slow. It can handle about 120 million transactions per year. That is absolutely 100% unusable for anything at scale. If 30 million people used Bitcoin, they could each do about one transaction every three months and the fees would be sky-high. That is not good enough, not even for savings.
Other cryptocurrencies are faster by smallish constant factors. None of them, at this time, are scalable. None of them are fast enough to be usable by millions of people.
Hyperinflation is a problem of massive corruption and incompetence in government. It doesn't happen by accident in an otherwise stable society. If you're concerned about hyperinflation, you should assume the bank (or "exchange") will be subverted and transactions will be censored. Bitcoin was built to solve those problems, but does not scale and so cannot.
This is, by the way, the only situation where I'm at all sympathetic to cryptocurrencies. If someone can come up with a cryptocurrency that scales and that isn't controlled by cartels, I'll be glad that it can be used in unstable parts of the world.