Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible intermediated patchwork solutions like Zelle and Venmo and USDC-on-Ethereum and whatever.

But the whole world is not Sweden. Even in America, which is relatively first world with relatively decent institutions, our regulators failed to coordinate a decent electronic money transmission system. Now imagine being in Turkey or LatAm or Sri Lanka. (Or even just being in Europe and needing to interface with anywhere outside the European utopia.) Agree that decentralized protocols come with many inherent inefficiencies and frictions. But when institutions fail, the only alternative are decentralized protocols.

In many ways I see the pro- vs. anti- crypto division coming down to how much people believe in institutions. Most crypto criticisms come down to an appeal to just focus on building better institutions rather than waste mountains of talent on overly complex decentralized protocols. "Instead of all this on-chain stablecoin nonsense, why don't we focus our efforts on electing better financial regulators, who can bring European like money transfers to North America and eventually the globe?"

Whereas I think pro-crypto people (myself included), tend to think of any attempts to change public policy as /dev/null. Most of the world is saddled with horribly dysfunctional institutions, and it's not easy to fix. I have much more confidence in our ability to engineer solutions than mustering the necessary political and social coordination necessary to fix governments, policy, regulators and institutions.

Transferability is a basic primitive of crypto but not the only feature. Others like decentralized escrow and multi-signatory wallets achieve new functionality that is non trivial in traditional banking system.

Uhh, multi-signatory bank accounts are about as old as banking.

In comparison you and several friends can set up a m-of-n account in a couple of transactions, closer to the flow and ease of setting up a new WhatsApp group.

The value fluctuates but this is where users would typically send USDC or DAI which is pegged to the dollar.

My crypto transfers also arrive in seconds and there is no US company extracting rent, blocking my funds, asking for third party data, or dictating how a payment protocol should operate.

Now, what makes you think that the regulators in well-run countries will continue to accept this inefficient and unregulated money alternative full of scams?

Crypto currencies could be banned to quite an extent (mining, on/off ramps, maybe even the network traffic, which is unencrypted, if I am not mistaken.)

You can always count on one thing in government. Profit Motive! Gerry ginsler was the professor of crypto at MIT for crying out loud. I'm sure US politicians have tons of BTC.

Brazil has had same business day electronic transfers (TED) since 2002 and next day electronic transfers (DOC) since 2001 or earlier. However people often didn't want to use them for small amounts because of the flat fee.

Brazilian also rarely use checks to pay rent, utilities and other similar stuff. Since 1993, we have a thing called boleto bancário which is like an invoice that has its own number and bar code ao that people can pay them at any bank (with some rare exceptions).

Brazil's Central Bank (BCB) recently-ish introduced Pix, a digital and near instantaneous electronic transfer scheme that is free for natural persons and that is supported by every bank and bank-like financial organizations due to a BCB imposition.

So overall I would say that banking in Brazil is way more standardized and practical than in the US.

Crypto is the only payment rail that is practically accepted nowhere (I cannot use it to pay 99,99% of the places I do business with).

I think it already works...

locally in EU means SEPA is available in 36 countries (includes some non-euro area and non-EU countries) and to more than 500 million people.

While true, I do think there is value in a permissionless protocol that anyone can plug into like this. Anyone in the world can send USDC to someone else (and any bank can integrate with this). The same can't be said for banking systems.

FedNow is supposed to launch in 2023.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

Canadians don't live in the same country as Americans.

Canadians don't have the same banks as Americans.

Canadians can do money transfers instantly between any bank using e-transfer.

He was talking about transferring money out of the Canadian network of banks to a foreign entity (guessing based on it being denominated in USD).

As a European can you transfer money to, say, Vietnam without using clunky 40 year old technology like wires?

Not to mention that money send to a crypto wallet also needs to be cashed out locally, which takes both fees and time. And god forbid your crypto exchange goes bankrupt or decide to pause withdrawals

clunky like for a flat fee of less than 5 euros available in a few hours as real money, directly available without having to setup anything?

the need for a new payment system not based on available infrastructure or an evolution of it is marginal at best.

Trivia: there is a video of Bezos telling the story of some customer sending money to buy books in the early days of Amazon hidden inside a 3.5' floppy disk.

Once they received the floppy they retrieved the money and shipped the books.

True or not, most things don't need nearly instant money transfer to work and that's a feature.

Interesting, for me e-transfers usually take around 20-30 minutes to go through (where the other party receives the notification with the ability to deposit it).

I prefer using cryptocurrency for near-instant transfers for exactly this reason. When I've gone to pay for items via e-transfer there's a lot of waiting around for the other party to receive it (and ATMs generally limit your daily withdrawal amount, so for me, withdrawing cash isn't a good solution for purchasing things over $1000)

I also think you meant cheap, not free. By the way I find it funny that some banks tax the receiver, so in order to get money, you have to lose money :-)

That said, I know at least a couple of (admittedly rather large/corporate) companies that explicitly opted out of instant transfers for some reason.

As for fees, they tend to lure individuals with free this, free that, while taking kidneys and other organs from businesses.

Another option that is often very convenient is the "Lastschrift", I can simply grant a company permission to withdraw money from my account. The protections for the customer are very strong with this, I can revert any withdrawal without any reason, so this is essentially no risk for me.

I think the assumption a lot of people in crypto make is that everyone has a crypto account/wallet setup.

So the 'call my bank' option won't work here and wire transfer is no different to transferring money in crypto as they are both irreversible.

But I don't know how entering a .eth/.sol/etc address or scanning a QR code to send USDC over is harder than typing in the sort code, account number, IBAN number, etc to do a wire transfer.

Because I don't possess any USDC and acquiring some requires me to open an account with Coinbase or FTX or whatever, send them dollars, and then purchase USDC. And even though sending the USDC has a low fee, the exchange fee for purchasing USDC is nontrivial (1% at Coinbase).

How do I send USDC within 5 mins? I would have to 1) Open an account on a crypto exchange app

2) Go through the KYC process and hookup the same wells fargo account to buy USDC.

3) Purchase USDC, usually while paying a fee. And then still wait the day for the funds to be sent from WF to the exchange.

4) Send USDC to address, while also paying a fee.

There is a reason international remittances haven't worked as a use case, for ex Coinbase just closed down that entire project. How would immigrants who get paid in Cash buy USDC and how would their family in Mexico or El Salvador be able to convert that USDC into local spendable currency. I hate western union but it works better than any crypto money sending service.

Opened bank website, selected "Transfer Money", entered the recipient and confirmed the amount. Got an email notification, and when the wire transfer clears we will receive a second email. This is pretty standard for the major US banks.

It's like people in crypto have never actually tried to use existing money transfer methods and just make up problems that don't actually exist.

You're going to be the edge case for a long time.

Sending someone USDC for international payments is admittedly much easier, but you’re likely going to run into expensive regulation on that front since it carries too much money laundering risk

Receiving CHF (Swiss Francs) via an IBAN transfer 1) cost a lot, 2) take several days.

Switching to a traditional money transfer provider requires KYC'ing.

I was once denied because my website seemed sketchy. It just has my company's name and a link to my personal homepage. I already have customers, so my first motivation to create a website was so that money transfer providers think I'm actually running a business and will allow payments.

It’s true that US banks are slower at transfers but most people don’t hit that often enough to balance out the extra cost and risk, and if they started losing significant amounts of business it’s a lot easier to improve there than it is to duct-tape performance, privacy, or fraud protection onto a blockchain.

I get pretty tilted when people complain about the banking system, because most of the "problems" they're complaining about are features. A really good metaphor is a programmer complaining about being forced to use a version control system, and wishing they could just dispense with all this pointless waste of time. "All this thing does is cause me trouble" — well, yeah, because you've never experienced the problems it utterly eradicated.

It's a Chesterton's fence issue at best. At worst, it's wolves repealing the laws that prohibit eating sheep.

That’s not as dodgy as e.g. Tether’s claims were but it’s not bank-level and I would weight that into my personal risk assessment, especially given their past history of printing new tokens whenever they get in a jam.

On "famously expensive and slow" Ethereum, the USDC transfers took 15 seconds and cost under $2. Oh and even better, I was able to just use a simple human readable [X].eth address, instead of an incomprehensible string of routing number digits.

And yes 15 seconds is slow.

Indeed, a human readable address is nice if you trust whoever gave it to you (ENS is naming not identity, someone else can register dcolkitt.eth or dcolkit.eth or dcollkit.eth if they like).

There's some good bits and some bad bits. Not advocating for or against crypto.

Oh I didn't know that's what the answer was. Having used both (and living in Europe), I'd thought the 'cheaper, faster' option OP mentioned was a modern wire transfer service.

A CBDC will supplant most use cases for crypto simply by being a practical currency.

What will be left is pretty much what you have now --- criminal activity, anarchist cult and naive speculation.