How does crypto compare to this?
Those are typically risk factors concerning fraud. Which is a feature.
And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too.
You can't. That's a hard cap imposed by Wise for all transfers into Japan.
> And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too.
Nobody proposed using bitcoin.
Maybe you mean the worst fee tiers on US exchanges like Coinbase? I pay 1.5bps taker fees and receive maker rebates at my primary exchange. My primary exchange and one of my Japanese banks also provide extremely competitive OTC forex rates which I cannot currently use because my primary exchange does not have fiat withdrawals in Japan and because Wise is not willing to send dollars to my Japanese bank (I wonder why).
If you want to avoid those regulations, they propose sending multiple transfers.
Crypto exchanges are broader more than Bitcoin ofc.
I don't think sending larger transfers would save much on fees though. The fees paid to Wise are dominated by the percentage fees for forex conversion.
Larger transfers are cheaper... ( calculator: https://wise.com/gb/pricing/borderless-convert )
Forex conversion is not exactly how Wise works. They have balances in multiple currencies and trade between that mostly...
Ugh...
The calculator you linked says they'll charge 45bps on transfers of 1000 usd and 45bps on transfers of 100,000 usd. That's a lot. I don't want to pay 45bps. If they charge 45bps either way then paying additional fees to my Japanese bank for sending a SWIFT transfer instead of many small domestic wires won't save me anything.
Absolutely not, in any way.
If you want to claim this works, you will need to actually show what exact steps to take, and what fees that will cost, to transfer money into my hand.
Because there are a LOT of fees in that process.
As an aside, an upcoming update to the software that runs this particular slow database will greatly lower the cost per byte of permanent storage such as the USDC account discussed above.
If you want to obtain dollar bills in your hand, I guess you'd need to also go to a bank and a crypto exchange or something. But this is a really general-purpose gotcha, like if I told you Japanese yen were worth money and you asked me how to get dollars in hand, then you'd probably have to go to a third party to fix your problem of having Japanese yen instead of dollars, and you'll probably have to go to their branch with your ID and do a bunch of paperwork if you don't have an existing relationship with them. You'd be in even more trouble if I gave you a Japanese transit card with a stored balance of Japanese yen on it, because then the process for recovering the yen would involve showing up in person to a certain office in Japan, and the fee implicit in all this (buy card -> load yen on card -> redeem card for yen) would be a backbreaking couple dollars. But I think it would be silly to deny that you are in posession of yen if you have such a transit card, and silly to deny that you are in posession of USDC tokens that entitle you to dollars held by Circle (supposedly invested in US treasuries) if you control a keypair that controls the USDC.
Thanks.
[0]: https://docs.solana.com/cli/conventions
[1]: https://sollet.io/
[2]: https://phantom.app/
Of course you can charge less if you do less of the work. But that is meaningless. Tell us the actual fees from money in hand to money in hand.
Why? Do you pay for everything in cash? Most things I buy I cannot pay for in cash, so it seems silly to go out of my way to make my funds less useful temporarily.
For most people, the first step to getting dollars in hand from Wells Fargo is a decades-long immigration process. Should we count that?
I am enjoying imagining you telling your brokerage or your bank that you don't want entries in their databases, you want cash!!! It is less enjoyable to imagine you falling victim to civil asset forfeiture for self-custodying cash though.
Edit: Anyway, the additional steps for you as the recipient, after you have a checking account at a US bank and KYCed account at FTX, are that you would send the USDC to your FTX account, then you would request a wire transfer from FTX to your US bank, and you would pay less than a penny in fees for the first step and $0 for the second step. Then you would physically go to your bank or ATM, which probably costs like $50 worth of your time or something, and get the cash.
Edit again: The reverse process, I don't know much about it because I don't generally keep all my funds in physical dollars, but I think it also costs $0. It certainly could cost more depending on the details of banking and crypto exchange regulation in the countries involved though. For example, FSA-regulated crypto exchanges in Japan do not accept USDC deposits, and the one I am registered at but have not used yet will charge me 250 JPY for a domestic wire withdrawal.
What happens in the next crypto crash, with exchange risk being huge, and then you can't buy tomatoes because they're denominated in a stable currency not linked to your crypto?
In the event of a decline in the market price of cryptocurrencies, I sort of expect USDC to still be worth about 1 dollar.
> As a backend engineer, I would say yes, backend is easier. But also you'll be concerned with completely different things.
You're promoted extremely fast. Lol
> I am the CEO of an automated trading firm
Edit: After checking, I wouldn't put CEO of 'Lol Term Capital Management' on your resumee ( https://www.ltc ).
Seriously, what is this bs.
Some people would like to tell you "It's a temporary bug that you can pay for stuff with database entries at your bank or at PayPal but not database entries on this particular slow distributed database," but I don't have to tell you that to get the sum of the fees to be less than a penny here.
If you deposit to FTX via ACH that costs $0. If you send yourself SPL USDC from FTX that costs $0. If you send someone else SPL USDC that costs less than half a penny. If that person sends SPL USDC to FTX that costs less than half a penny. If that person withdraws USD from FTX via wire transfer that costs $0. The sum of these figures is less than a penny. As I've written upthread, this might not work out exactly the same way depending on your choice of exchange, country, and bank.
Not according to my grocery store.
The argument was, cryptocurrency is good for remittances. Remittance is mostly used to send money to people who actually need to use it to buy things. You need to get that money into a form that is actually usable.
Long-term, it should drop to fractions of a cent once sharding is implemented. But, that's years away and hardly relevant.
Go from actual money from the sender, to actual money for the receiver. Sum up the fees.
The situation for current L1 users is obviously different, but those people probably aren't the most fee-sensitive users anyway, since sending money with $5+ fees is hardly viable for so-called everyday use.
Remittances are when a person in one country sends money to another person in a different country. Usually, the first person works to earn wages, and sends them back home to their family, who use them to pay for living expenses.
To do this, you need to go from money in hand to money in hand. Anything else is useless. Again, the claim is that cryptocurrency is good at this. If you want to claim that it is, you have to actually show how to do that exact thing.
That, in any reasonable reading, would mean that the sum of all feels required to do "international remittance" would be less than a penny. This is clearly not true.
The claim that one small part of the fees is actually less than a penny is not really relevant to this.
February 2021