1. Establish a presence at an exchange (you need to do this only once)
2. The receiver needs to establish presence at their exchange (every receiver of yours need to do this)
3. Transfer money to the exchange
4. Buy coins and move them and the receiver exchanges back them to money
5. The receiver needs to move money from the exchange to their back account
Reminder: you want to transfer money and crypto"currency" is merely a vehicle to do this. And so turns out the hard part is #3 and #5 -- integrating into existing banking systems and #4 is completely superflous. For example, wise.com (nee transferwise) solves the same problem except without the receiver needing to do this nightmarish rigmarole.
Not trusting the middle man would require the entire world to switch to some crypto"currency" and this is completely unfeasible with the current ones.
You don't want to transfer money, you want to transfer value. If the recipient can use the crypto currency to buy something else, they don't need an exchange.
Here's my very simple setup: have a bunch of mbtc sit in a wallet. Open the wallet. Insert the password. Insert address and amount. Insert the password again. Done.
I can do the same with a bank, but it takes much longer (i.e. days instead of seconds or minutes) unless the recipient is at the same bank, or I pay extra and they're in the same network, and I need to rely on the bank to allow my payment. Want to buy porn, drugs, or want to gamble your hard earned money away? Good luck using your VISA or PayPal for that.
There's plenty of potential in crypto, it doesn't need to replace any and all usecases of banking to be useful.
Everyone wants to transfer money except a vanishingly small percentage of the population who wants to use these things. Aside from a rounding error, no one even understands what they are or how to use them. I get invoiced for services in money, I pay my taxes in money. There's nothing else.
This has been the favorite poster child of bitcoin shills but it's been, again, thirteen years and it still doesn't work so much that there has not even been a credible attempt making it work.
You're not one of them. That's fine, not everything has to include you to be useful.
Who does? People who sell bitcoin hardware and one small tourist shop in colorado that sells christmas ornaments.
Wow, what utility!
I also occasionally spend money at international businesses on things PayPal, VISA and MC aren't fond of, so short of putting bills into an envelope and sending them it's difficult to do. Crypto solves that for me. It's quick and I don't need anyone's approval of the industry I'm spending money on. It's like cash for local shopping, minus the large acceptance. I'd love to see more businesses use crypto, and for it to be less roller-coaster-y, and to have less energy waste etc, but it is what it is, and it still works for me.
Not at all, a simple wire works , yes , even for porn.
That's getting better, and some day it will probably work globally and near-instant, but we're not there yet.
I mean international money transfer using Bitcoin doesn't work. Currently Wise leads in the international money transfer business and something even better Bitcoin should have arisen if the crypto bros' claims were true -- but there's nothing.
And yet, we have these middlemen like Coinbase and what not. IN theory, decentralized currency is awesome. In practice, almost impossible. Novel idea for sure but it is time we admit that it cannot be implemented without middlemen.
IMO there is one saving grace of cryptocurrencies, but ultimately this is also the reason why they simply won't be accepted: they are temporarily out of government control. This allows one to funnel funds in and out of hostile jurisdictions. This is a genuinely beneficial use case for people trapped in these jurisdictions. However, I'd argue this is such a vanishingly small portion of the mindshare and "business" conducted with and on behalf of the crypto industry, that it doesn't offer even a shred of redemption. The one altruistic use case is practically drowned out in the insane amount of buzzword laden echo chambers coming up with ever more hare brained structures and concepts to sell to each other. I wonder if these people even recognize how much of a caricature they have become.
I really connected the dots when I read some banker's messages to Elon Musk about how SBF was pitching some blockchain silliness for Twitter (as he would), and even Elon Musk, the master memer and troll, recognized how silly the idea was.
Banks controlling who gets to participate in sending and receiving payments is obviously bad in my opinion. Being able to participate in the economy is fundamentally important. The government cannot outlaw a legal business, but banks and payment providers can do it for them. That doesn't bother anyone that buys a pop album off Amazon, but that's a different issue if you want to sell porn or drugs or whatever US morals have issues with and just get cut off from payments, so that your willing customers cannot pay you. When that happens, people get out the old "it's a private company, you have no right to their platform"-spiel and crypto-currencies solve that.
Crypto-currencies are to finance what the fediverse is to social media. They have shortcomings, in a perfect world we wouldn't have any need for them, but they fill a niche in the real world we inhabit.
I'm sorry but I deeply disagree with this. If you want to do commerce and your area of business is shady/illegal, then the way to change it is to campaign for a change in the law. All that cryptocurrencies accomplish is that people are able to sidestep the law.
I'd like drugs to be legal, government controlled and taxed. But until that day comes, the fact that drug dealing can't be conducted using the official financial system is a feature, not a bug.