I was able to send funds from US directly to a bank account of my friend in Ukraine near instantly for low single digit percent and I could do the same using western union(to my surprise). All without a fear that my currency will drop 10-20% in a day.

Now about decentralization, I believe that most people hold their transactional crypto funds in a handful of exchanges and thus the dream of decentralized crypto transactions is rarely realized.

But most importantly why does the end user care if the transaction was decentralized or went through a series of transactions through one or more centralized intermediaries.

All people care is have funds that left place A showed up in place B

You can do this w/ crypto but pay only a few cents. I can show it to you if you want.

I am extremely skeptical that it will only cost few cents. (I've sent and received BTC in early 2010s)

On ramp and off ramp to fiat will kill you - whether through transaction fees or through slippage.

Let's say I am in US with 10k USD cash and I want a family in Ukraine (let's say somewhere safeish like Lviv) to have that 10k USD in hand.

Crypto is going to be more expensive than Western Union/Transferwise/SEPA/regular bank transfer/courier through friends.

That is the problem with crypto transfers - sure most crypto coins can be transferred cheaply.

However that "cheapness" only works as long as you stay in crypto verse.

I mean there is no way you can get them USD as cash in hand if that's what you mean. Do you mean USD as in a multi-currency bank account like revolut?

Onramp via onjuno, convert to USDC, send to your polygon wallet, convert to jEUR on Jarvis, send jEUR to friends wallet, they offramp jEUR with 0 fees to their IBAN bank account in ukraine via mt.Pelerin.

You only pay the polygon token transfer fees here.

Times have changed since 2010!

i wonder if usdc to jeur is more efficient than usd to eur. it could be- many banks are opaque about their conversion rates.

Could be. Although USDC to JEUR is using chainlink feeds (which is aggregated data), but they do advertise 0 slippage.

Wow, what a use-case.. sending money from the main NATO member to a country that the NATO supports and wants to win the war.

Now do the same thing with sending money to Russia. I just checked WISE. "We temporarily stopped sending money to Russia".

Yeah.. thanks..

Okay, so how much has the Ukraine situation actually resulted in crypto transactions? Enough to justify multi trillion valuations?

Note that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon all have $1T+ market caps, and before the recent market meltdown had multi-trillion valuations.

Most Americans - particularly those who grew up before globalization - underestimate the scale of global markets. The U.S. is about 4% of the world's population and about 15% of global GDP. Anything that's Internet-based and has truly global appeal will be significantly larger than anything we would've been familiar with pre-globalization. Hell, the product I work on has about 3B users, 10x the population of the United States.

So we should ignore that crypto is being used a fraction of the time as much as financial products that are worth several times less, because global markets are large? Should every product have a 1 trillion plus valuation because global markets are large?

I just never actually see evidence that crypto has taken over global finance or is well on its way to doing so.

The point is that it's not being used a fraction of the time, because you take small fraction of total humans on earth (7B+) and it's a larger number than a large fraction of total humans in the US (320M). There are 100M crypto users in India, for example - that's only about 7%, but 7% of 1.5B is a larger number than 11.8% (market share of JP Morgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank) of 320M. Worldwide, crypto users are about 3% of the total population of most countries - but the U.S. as a whole is only 4% of the global population, so 3% of a global market is the same size as 75% of the U.S. market.

I have a wallet and bought crypto once. Am I a user? By your statistics, yes. Do I even matter? No.

The only thing I used this crypto for is to sell it later (and gain something like 15 euro profit). Am I a user? By your statistics, still yes. Do I even matter? Still no.

Additionally this use case (trade crypto hoping for gains in actual fiat money) is the absolute vast majority of what crypto is used for. Is this replacing traditional finance? Ahahahaha, no. AliPay has a bigger impact on "traditional finance" than all of crypto now or ever.

Outside of your rhetoric, I do think this is a fair point - with bank transfer ultimately you are constrained by the political people in who you can transfer to.

2-4% seems like a bad deal compared to sending usdc, which should be around closer to 0.1-1% after the ukraine exchange takes their usdc to local currency exchange fee. minimal volatility, less fees.

Single digit percent is unacceptable to me. Also, how long did that take? I assume your friend needs a bank account too..

the majority of crypto is being held in non custodial wallets, not exchanges.

a better way to frame your comment: why does the world use Stripe and PayPal when you can just go to your bank and ask them to setup a multi day long wire process from bank A to B for less fees?

The 'wire process' is not "multi-day-long", plus a huge number of banks now participate in Zelle, which can be used for instantaneous fund transfers with zero fees. The biggest problem with Zelle is that it looks and feels like a circa-2002 web application.

You could Zelle your friend in Ukraine? Doubt it.

many wires will be multi days long, encumbered by weekends, holidays, business hours, international checks, and occasional bounces (ask any company their experience with wires for international contractors).

Zelle is between US banks only. some people live outside of the US, surprisingly.

The EU has now mandated fast transfers between banks in the EU.

So, for EU (23 countries) it's not a problem either.

Sending money between banks is both a technical and a regulatory issue (and crypto is discovering why regulations exist at great cost to crypto users). However, "instant money transfer between banks" is not an unsolved issue.

large (> 10K) bank and wire transfers within UK and EU are still in the order of days, not seconds. the last large bank transfer I did took 5 days without any way for me to track this transfer. the same amount I was able to transfer within crypto networks in 30 seconds and the transaction progress and it’s validation status was visible for the entire duration.

the EU and UK banking system is far better than the US but still it is not a global payment processor network and API, hence why the web even in EU and UK relies on Stripe, visa, Apple Pay and PayPal and their corporate and centralized infrastructures. building an alternative infra that is not based on a single corporate entity is net positive for the world long term

No idea which bank you used where a payment took 5 days (are you American?). I made a high five figure payment online when buying a property and it was in the destination account the next day.

Crypto bros really have to drop the idea that it's going mainstream by allowing people to transfer money. Crypto is NOT easier or safer for anyone than a faster payment in the EU/UK. Unless you are doing something illegal.

this was with CHAPS.

> was in the destination account the next day

that’s probably CHAPS as well then as FP is within 2 hours. still a a lot slower than crypto’s 30-60 seconds, and extremely opaque process that could have taken additional days without any information to the customer.

but undoubtedly, both CHAPS and FP are very fast and inexpensive, and some of the best systems in the world for interbank transfers. unfortunately it only works from one UK bank to another UK bank, which makes up a small portion of global population. even within UK you will often have need to pay somebody who doesn’t have a UK bank.

This isn't true for transfers within the UK using Faster payments - upto £250K, near instantaneous.

that limit depends on your bank. for large transfers you will often need to visit your branch in person which can be a multi day process.

and yes UK faster payments system is great but it is not yet the backbone of global payment processing. the world is larger than the UK and as we continue to connect globally online and become more digitally nomadic there will be more need to pay users outside of a UK-to-UK bank system.

If you're the kind of person that regularly wires six digit sums in and out of your personal account, I suspect that one, if not both of the following are true: 1) that you've chosen your banking institution with a view to being expedient in such transfers, and 2) are on a known basis with sufficiently senior branch/bank personnel as to help establish parameters with them on legitimacy of such transfers.

yep. the rich tend to be given access to better banking services than the poor: higher limits, direct line of contact with a bank manager, additional services. when your account reaches a certain wealth threshold the bank will step in to ensure you have a better experience than the poor.

banking is a radically different design philosophy than a protocol where all addresses and transactions are treated equally regardless of wealth, class, and other social factors like race and family connections.

It is self-fulfilling in regards to your point though.

"Oh, that's not a useful system, because there are limits."

"Well, when you get near those limits the bank starts to work with you so those are still not roadblocks."

"Oh, well that's just because they prefer the rich to the poor."

No, you miss the point. At lower amounts, it's a non-issue because you're not hitting limits. At the point where you are hitting limits, it's facilitated to smooth those things. End result is that there should be few issues, regardless of amounts.

the system can and does favour those by social class, connections, race, gender. discrimination in financial and lending services is a well documented issue. the fact that the banking system “imposes limits and barriers until you reach a certain social class” is not a point in favour of the banking system.

most private clients are getting cushy services such as better lending and interest rates, faster payment times, better wealth management services.

but I digress. the banks are useful obviously, despite their flaws, and in the EU and UK the banks tend to be some of the best in the world. this is not to say banks as a whole are useless, but banking systems on average across the globe have many aspects that fall short of our ideals. crypto does not fill all of those, and has plenty of flaws and issues as well, but it does excel in certain areas and at the very least provide a competition that forces us to more closely consider the pitfalls of our typical financial structures.

it always comes back to the same argument: crypto is bad because a couple centralized companies handle this all for us just fine, and people in some countries already have great interbank transfers.

also please lose the ad hominem, it is not needed.

> it always comes back to the same argument: crypto is bad because

No it always comes to the same argument: crypto bros argue that traditional finance is bad and their claims get refuted again, and again, and again, until they fall back to the same old tired "but what of the unbanked?!"

No. Crypto will not save the unbanked.

> also please lose the ad hominem, it is not needed.

There was literally no ad hominem.

People do both, every day, what is your point?

the point is that Stripe achieves some features for certain users that a wire does not. and crypto achieves some features for certain users that Stripe does not.

I’ve been hearing that use case for crypto for a decade now. I don’t see people using crypto that way, they overwhelmingly use existing services which are cheaper and work fine the overwhelming majority of the time. People ignore this and speculate trillions into crypto.

My issue is that people don’t even need to see crypto actually succeeding at the use cases people talk about to be considered a good investment. People will invest in crypto regardless. I believe crypto does have value but the valuation in no way matches the actual present day value of the crypto or even a plausible projection of its future value. People just say “crypto to 100 trillion! Smart contracts!” and nobody has to see any real results that justify those numbers.

Why should I be impressed that something has potential? Many things have potential.

> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi.

To me, it’s strange that you can agree that most cryptos are scams but don’t understand why there is so much hate for them.

90% of emails and websites are spam or scams… doesn’t stop most people from loving the internet. You just have to look past the junk.

> Currently there is no way to send "money" to someone in another country on the other side of the world, in a decentralized way, and without transaction fees.

Why is this necessary? I have banks in three countries and generally pay nothing to move money between them or to pay others. This really doesn't feel like a problem that needs to be solved except by those trying to avoid taxation.

You never wanted to send your friend money for them to buy something in the moment?

And there are dozens and dozens of ways to do that: Venmo, PayPal, iPay, bill pay, ach, wire transfer, iBAN, payconiq, biscuit, cash, check, beer.

And that's just in my neck of the woods, I'm sure I'm forgetting more.

Venmo is USA only. Paypal takes egregious transactio fees. Everything you listed has transaction fees except for biscuits, cash, check and beer. Which will take much longer than 60 seconds to arrive

Ach and bank wires cost me nothing, iBAN costs me nothing, payconiq p2p costs me nothing, all are roughly instantaneous, except ach which is still same day.

iBAN takes days. And they also need a bank account...

and now there is one more way to do that: crypto.

it is like asking “Why Does PayPal Exist When We Have iBAN?” obviously some subset of the globe finds it more useful than iBAN transfers for their needs (like setting up an online shop).

So you have friends that you transfer crypto to if they need to purchase something at a shop and don’t have the funds?

God that whole process sounds painful.

In the Uk we would just transfer the money across with a bank transfer as all banks support instant transfers which have no fees (including between banks).

not everybody lives in the UK.

the point is not to be a system that beats a single service for sending GBP from A to B in the UK. the point is a system that has a variety of uses and applications accessible by anybody, regardless of which country the user resides in.

even in countries with good banking like UK, many e-commerce companies will still choose Stripe VISA and PayPal to reach customers outside the UK and integrate a payment processor API. an online shop could offer crypto as a payment mechanism if they wanted to avoid using these companies and if it met their needs.

You complain about the lack of timeliness with wire and interbank transfers in the regular system, and talk about the 'underdeveloped' economies that don't afford people many luxuries...

... so suggest that they use crypto, which for many, comes with an onerous fee too, to be timely. Your "buy from the shop" example better not be urgent, otherwise you're paying gas for someone to verify it, or it sits in the queue.

ETH fees at time of writing are about $1-3 for a transaction finality of < 60 sec. note that is fixed, the same if you transfer 1 or 100 or 1000 tokens.

though eventually as these networks scale most users will be transacting and interacting with L2 rather than L1. fees in L2 are in cents on the dollar, transaction finality is often very quick, and security assumptions are typically good enough for most use cases.

https://www.useweb3.xyz/gas?source=ethgas.watch&referrer=eth...

This doesn’t explain why paying with Crypto is better though in this use case.

The UK example just shows that a decentralised blockchain approach isn’t required to meet the use case you are describing - in fact it’s worse for the described use case in almost every metric.

Having a different, worse alternative isn’t exactly something to shout about.

use case depends on consumer. paying for an abortion in a southern US state or paying a Russian or Iranian contractor for web design services might be a suitable example of crypto. paying for an in-game asset to avoid 30% App Store fees may be another use case in the future. or purchasing digital assets like art, domains. and smart contract functionality like escrow, auctions, loans and lending, global crowdfunds is another use case.

whether it is better or worse for each of those depends who you ask and what their goals are, and also in what year you ask. ten years ago it was inconceivable to do these things with crypto, ten years from now it may be that these systems will continue to improve in terms of fees, privacy, scalability and user experience. consider the current cohort of users to be beta testers who are taking on additional risk and technical burden while the system continues to improve.

Well paying for an abortion isn't really an issue at the moment unless i'm missing something (you can just use cash? The issue here is insurance cover, but that doesn't change). Also I have tried to search for 'pay for an abortion with cryptocurrency' but can't find anything relevant on this happening in reality (other than people suggest it could possibly happen?).

How would paying in crypto avoid app store fees? Presumably you mean the Apple / Google App Stores, when Apple or Google will still want to take their 30%? How do you bypass that?

> purchasing digital assets like art

Who is using Crypto to purchase art? (Note: NFTs are not purchasing Art, you own some metadata that refers to a piece of art publicly hosted somewhere else). I can certinaly use my fiat currency to purchase both the rights to artworks, to purchase actual physical art pieces without having to jump through payment hoops, and even to purchase on-demand streaming of performance art. I cant really do any of that with Crypto without turning it back into regular fiat currency first (without searching out the tiny amount of places that accept crypto directly, but even then - whats the advantage to just paying in fiat?).

I mean I'm entirely unconvinced there is a compelling real use-case in anything listed here.

> ten years ago it was inconceivable to do these things with crypto, ten years from now it may be that these systems will continue to improve in terms of fees, privacy, scalability and user experience.

IMO if a technology is actually transformative, it will find a valid use case quicker than this. The only real use-cases I have seen seem to have been creating ponzi-schemes, effectively laundering money and speculative gambling on the price.

it’s easy to dismiss nft and the like if you are dead-set on your opinion that it’s all ponzi, but it is making traction in art and media: see Christie’s and Sotheby’s and a variety of notable artists and galleries not to mention Meta, Spotify and other platforms.

> you can just use cash?

this question sorta gets at one of the primary values of crypto, that it’s peer to peer, transferred non custodially and pseudonymous. many countries are moving away from cash into digital only forms of transactions, and having a system that upholds peer to peer transactions can be useful.

replace abortion in that example with other legally questionable actions depending on your state. maybe buying marijuana or psilocybin for medical purposes, paying somebody like Edward Snowden for giving a lecture, or purchasing a VPN subscription. for citizens who are rebelling against their state in some way, such as abortion rights protests, or climate activism like extinction rebellion, or a person that lives in a less democratic regime, it may be desirable to use certain crypto systems to mitigate state oversight.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/style/abortion-crypto-don...

> it’s easy to dismiss nft and the like if you are dead-set on your opinion that it’s all ponzi, but it is making traction in art and media

The point is it's not buying art though.

I can sell you an NFT of my house, and promise to only ever mint one NFT of my house, but that's different to selling you my house.

I'm not anti crypto, I simply argue that the problems alleged by OP don't really exist except in the mind of people who once had a bank twenty years ago. By and large, if I want something that holds its value pegged to the US dollar, I hold a US dollar. Moving a US dollar costs me nothing anywhere in the world. Moving a USDT or whatever means I now have to set up an exclusive banking relationship with someone I trust even _less_ than my bank. Maybe it solves a problem for some subset of the globe, but I'm not convinced their problems are the noble ones stated above.

sure, if you just want USD then hold that. if you want an asset that tracks USD, but has the freedom to exchange in crypto markets, be held in a non custodial way, and operate with smart contracts, a USD pegged stablecoin makes sense.

> without transaction fees

You also have to pay transaction fees transferring crypto, it's build into the protocol.

Yes but it doesn't scale with the amount you are transferring.

"Decentralized" is the keyword.

It's not solved by real world implementations of any major blockchain.

Centralised mechanisms solve the problem for less cost

Okay, tell me how I can send money to my friend in Macedonia from Australia without transaction fees.

you can't do that with crypto either (and crypto likely will have higher transaction fees)

> crypto likely will have higher transaction fees

If you are sending a fair bit of money, I very much doubt that.

most transactions are small. crypto might put pressure in banks to lower transaction fees for large transactions, but that is a very niche benefit

My impression was remittances were typically in the hundreds of dollars.

"Hi, I should be able to use your systems and infrastructure, for my benefit. And to be clear, I'd like it to be free, and near instant. Thanks."

Okay, tell me why you should be able to send money to your friend in Macedonia from Australia without transaction fees?

Because we can send emails from Australia to Macedonia for free.

I think the point they're trying to make is the current (lack of?) Global financial system is a joke.

Crypto is enabling something that has the value and utility of "money" with interconnectedness and simplicity of the Internet. How does that not click in ppls minds?

For the 7Billion ppl on earth, easy low fee international money transfers are a joke. And in this context low fee is 1-3%.

I can send $1B USDC for 60 cents using crypto.

And before anyone says "but you need to have crypto and a wallet and an exchange and a ..."

The same is true about email. You need to have a computer, and internet, and a email provider/server.

We take for granted the things that are already engraved in our lives, but it wasn't that long ago when someone could make the same argument about snail mail/fax vs email.

It doesn't click in peoples minds because it is not simple. It is patently more complex than Visa or Mastercard. If there really was the "simplicity of the Internet" then a system better than Visa or Mastercard or logging on to your bank and sending money would have appeared in the last 12 years.

Secondly, no government is giving up control of their economy to Crypto miners and the "global financial system". It will not happen, it will be regulated until it is controlled (a state owned coin effectively). I certainly don't want anonymous miners or the whims of Crypto casino controlling the economy in the country i live.

At least with the current system I can vote for a government that has control of it's economic policy, even if that vote has minimal effect. Some control is better than none.

I'm guessing the scorn is a reaction to the religious fervor that permeates the crypto space and that bleeds into the "mainstream" like the front page of HN and parts of Twitter. Based off the explosion of "told ya so" articles that have followed the Terra/UST scandal and sentiment among friends, anyway.

The fervor of the crypto space definitely does not bleed over to the front page of HN.

> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.

> Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi.

That second sentence explains the first, really.

Anyway, so the remittance industry is estimated to be USD 15.27 Billion as of 2021 so if you could tap into that market, you'd do pretty well. Or rather, you would, if you charged some sort of fee to use your services, so you need to charge some sort of a fee, which negates that advantage of using crypto. Coinbase makes it easy to get into crypto, but they do charge a fee for that.

It’s a very niche use case. For most use cases, you can send money perfectly fine using a credit card or Apple Pay etc. To receive money you can open a Shopify store or whatever comes next. To send money to relatives in countries with little infrastructure, there’s already Hawala, Western Union, etc. Not perfect but will be incrementally improved.

I don't need to send money to the other side of the world in a decentralized way. There's a good chance I never will and similarly 99% of people do not and never will have this problem.

I hate crypto as much as the average HNer, but "I don't need it so therefore nobody does" is a stupid and short-sighted reply.

There are at least a dozen countries that I can think of that have massive restrictions on how many flows in and out of the country, preventing people from being able to keep their money safe from raging dictators or changing rulers.

It's a lot more than 1%.

It's not nobody, but I think it's a lot less than 1% of people that are going to need to send a meaningful amount of money to places like that.

Obviously providing some service to even .01% of people or whatever is valuable. But at this point Bitcoin is valued like Google which is used by tens of percents of all people.

Ethereum based stablecoins are hardly the best way to do this. From a user standpoint you have to 1) buy your stablecoin on some exchange 2) transfer it to your own wallet 3) pay a hefty fee to transfer it to the recipient (>$20 when the network is busy) 4) Recipient pays another hefty fee to transfer it to an exchange so they can offramp.

If I'm sending a remittance or similar paying $$$$ in fees is absolutely not desirable. And with current gas prices the cost of sending anything less than 50k is pretty comparable with just doing a wire transfer.

A lot of exchanges (and fiat onramps) now directly with L2s like Avalanche or Polygon where gas fees are a lot lower

On/offramp is still there if you have to get back through ETH.

I remember feeling the frog water warming up when I first heard how "wrapped ETH" was another required fee in-between... craziness.

You don't need to use ETH mainnet at all. The top On/Offramps work fully on low-fees chains rn.

the fees on exchanges are very small compared to paypal and similar products. Coinbase Pro fees are less than 0.6% and go down to nearly 0%.

for payments over 10K the fees may be less than Wise or a wire, and faster.

for average users the end game is L2 and direct on- and off- ramps from CEX and services like Ramp, and more payment processors accepting crypto so off-ramps will not be always needed. fees in L2 are in cents.

You don't need step 1), there are multiple ramps that sell and buy straight from wallets now.

Just pay lower gas and wait for your transaction to be completed when the network is less busy?

> I don't get all the bandwagon hate of crypto on this site.. Sure 99% of crypto schemes are b.s and ponzi

wish i could frame this quote