> more friction, slower transactions, higher transaction costs.

Bitcoin, sure. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies which don't have these issues.

Cardano has faster transactions than any monetary transfer method (besides cash), with low fees. You also get

Bitcoin cash has negligible transactions fees with 10-20 minute transactions.

Nano has fee-less, near-instant transactions (could actually compete with cash for p2p transactions)

Everything you said is true, yet still getting downvoted.

HN doesn't like crypto. Say anything pro crypto (even when it's true) and get downvoted.

very sad.

I'm in EU, you in US? Send me $50.000 in the weekend through your bank. Let's see how fast it goes.

I'll send you any amount you want with Nano: <1 second transaction, 0 fee.

Try to beat that!

Feel free to send me as much nano as you like, but I'm pretty sure that since I can't actually buy things I want with nano, the process of linking a crypto gateway to my bank account wouldn't be quicker and cheaper than waiting for funds from Transferwise or similar to clear.

That's like saying email was bad since none of the people you know have an email address.

Just wait and see which solution will come on top.

I'm sure people compared Cuecat to email too. Turned out the problem wasn't "lack of adoption yet".

I mean, you could also send me fee-free payments direct from your bank with rapid settlement if I had a Euro bank account. I don't, but the reason isn't because I can't but because I don't need or want to hold non-domestic currency - exactly the same reason why I and most of my fellow countrymen who do have Euro bank accounts don't hold nano. The hurdle is reluctance to adopt universal international currency, not a technical shortcoming of Target2 settlement.

It'll presumably take more than one second to convert it to a usable currency, i.e. Euros.

How often do you need $50k without being able to wait a business day?

Ok, then send me a $0.001 micro transaction. Same deal.

How are you going to convert $0.001 to Euros?

Why is receiving $0.001 a matter of urgency that can't wait until tomorrow?

Funny how this conversation started how crypto is slow and expensive, and now turned into slow and expensive is OK :P.

In a crypto world, you don't need to convert to Euros. Are we in a crypto world yet? No. Will we live in crypto world in the future? Maybe, when it's faster and cheaper ;).

It's a bit of both.

For the common transactions people make, crypto is both slow and expensive. I can Zelle someone instantly, for free. In the EU, Australia, etc., bank-to-bank transfers are similarly instant. I don't know that Bitcoin etc. ever get to totally free in this fashion, and it's probably 99.9% of most people's money transfer usage.

For the uncommon transactions - like the $50k international transfer you mention - slow tends to be OK, and it's likely gonna have some expense either way.

Short version: In contrived scenarios, Bitcoin may come out on top, but that's not likely to convince many people.

How many "common transactions" do people use "money" for?

All "common transactions" use credit (even when you use a debit card). The banks approve transactions quickly, but reconcile those transactions slowly.

It'll be the same for any crypto that takes off but needs to reconcile slowly.

> Why is receiving $0.001 a matter of urgency that can't wait until tomorrow?

I'm not making a value judgement whether this is utopian or dystopian but imagine streaming money. Instead of paying for the use of something in advance and in coarse-grained chunks (driving through a tunnel, running on a treadmill in a gym, watching netflix, parking somewhere, etc...) you'd instead stream money throughout usage. On-demand with continuous settlement for the duration.

>more friction, slower transactions, higher transaction costs. And wicked exchange volatility.

You are taking a look at the start of the speedrun and claiming that it's already over. All of those issues will eventually be solved.

>Plus no way to expand or contract the supply

This is simply not true. It is entirely possible to make it possible to mint new coins. You can burn coins by buying them back and sending them to a wallet owned by no one.

> All of those issues will eventually be solved.

When does "eventually" arrive? For 12 years I've been hearing that all of the problems of cryptocurrency will be solved very soon. But merchant adoption peaked years ago and has notably declined. Most of the problems are still problems. At this point, I'm pretty sure "eventually" means what I mean by "soon" as a teen when my parents asked me to clean my room. That is, "not now and I'd like to keep ignoring the topic please".

> I like my fiat and central banks, thank you very much.

I do too! But some people don't. And it appears that there are now options for everyone, which seems...good?

Entirely unregulated markets are not good, they are awful, and they can go on for quite a while before blowing up, taking the life savings of lots of ordinary people with them.

I mean, no disagreements that unregulated markets can turn out disastrously (and hurt ordinary people).

But regulated currencies can also turn out disastrously bad (see: Venezuela, Zimbabwe hyperinflation, Nigeria, Argentina). This hurts ordinary people too. There's an Argentinian in this very thread that's chimed in with their personal experience.

I won't pretend one approach is strictly superior to the other, nor am I suggesting that one ought to put 100% of their life savings into BTC or US T-bonds, but having options allows the ordinary person to hedge. That's the point. Optionality is good, and because BTC isn't legal tender (nor will it ever be), nobody is forced to use it anyway.

Very true some jurisdictions are very risky, I’m just sceptical than Bitcoin is a) a viable currency and b) not riddled with fraud.

Cars are not replacement for horses. You have to have factories, they break, you need to rely on fuel supply, they also pollute and go too fast - they can kill you. I like my horses, thank you very much!

> the evolution of the modern financial system is less and less friction for each transaction

Still, buying shares of a company is much more "friction" than buying coins.

> crypto: more friction

Can you elaborate?

> slower transactions

Huh, even bitcoin will settle with 6 confirmations in an hour. Settlement to buy a share or FX is 2/3 days.

> higher transaction costs

Hmm, no.

> And wicked exchange volatility.

Volatility is a property of the underlying currency, not to "crypto currencies" in general. The volatility of USDTxUSD is zero.

> Plus no way to expand or contract the supply to prevent economic shocks.

You are mixing "crypto currency" and "bitcoin".

You are comparing crypto currencies to stocks. In that case what you said is true. But I think the fairer comparison is crypto currency to a fiat currency. There is more friction involved in using crypto currency to make a purchase. It does take longer to processes a bitcoin transaction than it would for visa to processes a transaction in usd. And the transaction costs for a typical transaction are usually higher for bitcoin (maybe not all crypto currencies though). I think the fact that a lot of people compare crypto currencies to stocks is telling that they are not being used for their intended purpose.

> You are comparing crypto currencies to stocks. In that case what you said is true. > I think the fact that a lot of people compare crypto currencies to stocks is telling that they are not being used for their intended purpos

Absolutely not. If you take the top 10 crypto currencies sorted by marketcap, half of them are actually stock-like tokens. It is not a misinterpretation, or a deviation from the intended purpose at all. These tokens are intended to replace shares of the company, and they have rather similar capabilities: by owning them you have voting rights, different token (share) classes exist, etc.

Honestly, the term "crypto currency" is very misleading, most of the tokens issued nowadays are share-like, and buying them is just a form of venture funding for these startups.

One could get a crypto credit card and spend transparently in fiat. No friction involved.

That's spending a Bitcoin balance, not Bitcoin. You might as well hold a Bitcoin index, and sell that. Or sell a Satoshi and transfer out the fiat, which is what it is. It has nothing to do with the transfer of Bitcoin: the same person holds your Bitcoin balance and your fractional fiat balance and decides the exchange rate. There's no blockchain there.