This is the story in most countries with good economies: Local transfers are free for private individuals up to a certain amount. Exceed the bounds and you'll be offered a paid solution. So if one end of this system pays for the other, and the other thinks it's free, you're just paying indirectly via price adjustments.

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.

With one single integration, AngelList can receive USDC from anyone, anywhere in the world. It doesn't matter if you can transfer CHF very cheaply locally.

Kind of like how having a bank account allows you to receive wire transfers from anyone? Anything will sound simple if you leave out most of the hard parts like meeting legal requirements, fraud protection, etc. (better hope the reason USDC is cagey about their assets isn’t because they’re hiding something)

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.

Yeah.

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.

USDC isn't cagey about their assets. They get audited by big-4 financial firms regularly. I don't own a single coin and I know that.

Yeah, they’re better than average for the field but they changed the wording from "backed by US dollars" to "backed by fully reserved assets" last year and those reports are not official audits (a term which has specific requirements with professional repercussion for the auditors) but attestations that they’ve reviewed the companies statements and found them consistent, a lower level of review which notably does not require a CPA to attempt to validate the details - note in particular the claims that they’ve seen things like internal controls but are not rendering profession judgement on the effectiveness of those controls.

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.

I've on/off ramped CHF to USDC. It's a pain in the ass. And you lose 1% in process. Certainly not easier than a CHF->USD wire.