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.
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.