try not to focus on the alice and bob portion of the explanation

People had little problem with transportation when all they had was horses and sailboats.

Just because you don't technically have a problem doing something now and no one is complaining, doesn't mean there's not a drastically more efficient way to do the thing, and those organizations that start doing the more efficient thing rapidly out compete and make irrelevant those who hold onto the legacy ways.

Bitcoin is the horse and buggy in this comparison - while attempting to naively remove control possibilities and making it "trustless" aka a free for all/wildwest where nations can't use financial levers to try to economically punish known bad actors, e.g. Magnitsky Act.

>where nations can't use financial levers to try to economically punish known bad actors, e.g. Magnitsky Act.

Probably unknowable but I wonder what has caused more damage to the world, financial crimes or centralized financial levers being used to steal the time/savings/wealth of 8 billion people and redistribute it to a small group of people.

Most of that wealth occurred through policy layers, corruption within systems, or bruteforce/violence - not because there's a financial-transactional later.

Also,

- $1.9B in crypto currency stolen by hackers last year [that's known about/reporter]; https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/94627-19b-in-crypt...

- Bitcoin extortion: How cryptocurrency has enabled a massive surge in ransomware attacks (Crypto revenues from ransomware surged more than 300% in 2020 from the year before) - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-extortion-how-cryp...

How does that criminal activity keep scaling? And you do you think criminal enterprise won't target to infiltrate organizations who hold large amounts of Bitcoin et al to infiltrate to steal the keys to the vault? Then the only way to counter that is centralized database/service to check all transactions through to make sure the funds didn't originate from criminal activity, and then centralized authority for enforcement, etc.

Bitcoin Maximalists or crypto-"currency" enthusiasts skip over, don't respond to such criticism as it doesn't fit into their glossy propagandist narratives that Bitcoin etc al are godsend - they keep the scope of conversation and talking points narrow or cordoned off - which is super obvious with most Bitcoin spokespeople, though the most popular are intelligent ideologues who speak beautifully, poetically, in inspiring way that's motivating - but still lacks the rigor of challenge by peer confrontation; Jordan Peterson recently had a popular Bitcoiner on to speak, it's good he's diving deep into it, let's hope he doesn't get too indoctrinated into an imbalanced/out of balanced doctrine spread by financially motivated individuals; imagine if being part of a religion and proselytizing was financially advantageous - where the earlier on you're in on the pyramid (with contributions to the church to "show your commitment") lead to a potential windfall or promise of such if and once everyone in the world is part of that religion/cult.

I think it's a grand experiment.

Perhaps the primary output of bitcoin will be that it lights a fire under the lazy ass of government to actually have a service mindset towards people, because they now have an alternative that they can use however they want.

We'll see.

Yes, I agree with you - it's likely been a necessary mechanism as a counterweight to the current corruption and lack of integrity in the system.

How do you know?

Because there are no articles about big companies having money transfer problems with their suppliers.

The complains are about the "buy now pay 90 days later" part, not about the actual money transfer.

How hard did you try to find such articles?

I would imagine the suppliers of Wirecard do see it as a problem that the $2B WireCard said it has in the bank did not exist. In a blockchain setup, they would have known it.

Ducking for "supplier" and "insolvency" brings up quite a lot of stuff about this topic:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=insolvency+suppliers

Supplier insolvency has nothing to do with money transfer.

And if you think that you can "lock bitcoin" into an account to avoid this, you obviously don't know much about how these things work. Hint: you can also "lock dollars" today, it's called "escrow". But it wasn't used in WireCard (I take your word for it, I don't know the case).

Explained like I'm five: BMW will not accept it's bitcoin being locked for 90 days, so that it's supplier can be sure it will receive it's pay. Because if BMW would have accepted such a thing, it would pay today, not 90 days later. So crypto doesn't solve any problem here, because BMW doesn't want this problem solved.

And today, the supplier would use "factoring" so that it can receive the money instantly, instead of 90 days later, and the bank which provides the factoring service will make sure to take it's money from BMW later. Hint: you need capital to be able to provide factoring, since it involves credit risk, so crypto can't replace that either directly (it could with some fancy smart contracts that pool liquidity and yield)

    BMW will not accept it's bitcoin
    being locked for 90 days

The way I see the future, BMW will not only lock their Bitcoin for 90 days but much longer. And not only the Bitcoin they owe to one supplier. But a large portion of their Bitcoin. Aka their virtual bank account. They can still use their account however they like. But if one of their suppliers feels that the balance goes dangerously low, the supplier can block further spending or settle everything.

Surely suppliers want to be paid? Accumulating a huge pile of IOUs is of zero benefit to someone who has actual real-world costs, such as taxes, payroll and capital outlays.

What do you mean by "be paid"?

Usually, one is "paid" when "the money is in the bank", right?

And this is what happens here. The initial step is to create a bank and then "payments" happen there.

As for how to pay someone who is not "customer" of this bank, see my answer to this question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227788

Lots of firms, especially those whose value is based partially on "predictable" profits, want to schedule payments in Q2 rather than Q1.

Lightning transactions are final. Anything else is FUD.

I've heard stories about the difficulty about payments at AirBnB, where the suppliers are local people across the globe in different languages with varying levels of access to financial services. It's one of the things that inspired the Coinbase founder, who was an ex-AirBnB employee, to start his company.

And Net X(Net 90 in your case) is part of business, so it' not going away because of a blockchain.

What about Venezuelan or Iranian companies?

Tesla didn't like paying banks to store its money in Europe via negative interest rates, so they moved in into Bitcoin.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/263185/20210721/elon-musk...

That has nothing to do with transferring money.

Tesla also holds bonds and other stuff that pays a dividend.