After I had to add a special animation for one email system so that user was sure that "the core functionality of encrypting" was indeed working (it took milliseconds in reality), your experience doesn't surprise me that much. But, in my "IoT" system we have a mix of devices. Our service can handle most requests in sub millisecond, but some devices (gprs) need at least minimum 1 second (20sec is still within time limit) to respond only because of slow connectivity. And then I have a parking ticket machines where you press button, wait 2 seconds, it beeps, then after 2sec it changes screen to "printing ticket", then after 2s you get the ticket, where everything can be a local action (free ticket without payment). Technology is wild.

Maybe it needs up to 5 seconds to warm up if it's in deep sleep, so splitting this into three 2s periods provides the least frustrating user experience.

As soon as you need to deal with real hardware things always start to get complicated.

https://www.sharetechnote.com/html/Handbook_UMTS_RrcStateCha...

- press button

- gprs roundtrip about button press with "no payment, free ticket" (2s)

- machine shows "printing ticket", asks server what to print (aka the idiotic unnecessary step)

- gprs roundtrip (2s)

- printer warmup? (?s)

- prints ticket

> to save power (and possibly SIM cost)

Nope, costs per sim are monthly per card, until you hit the data limit, then per MB. Those machines typically have enough power to keep connection alive.

It's not a new scenario. It happened to me.

I'm not mildly inconvenienced by some honking. That's just aggravating. I'm inconvenienced by having to call to get a receipt.

In my country, we have a similar system, and before my bank sends me a push notification about the outgoing transfer, the push notification for incoming transfer pops up for most of the time. The delay between push notifications rarely goes above 2 seconds.

Ours has an upper limit to prevent abuse of the system, but you can't beat instant, actually.

- no card

- technically not a specific app, its a payment method that any app with a checkout flow (for example) can chose to implement.

- you register some id with your financial institution of choice (any of CPF - equivalent to SSN, CNPJ - for businesses, phone number, email or a randomly generated key).

- keys are fully portable, as in you can revoke em or change the bank institution they're associated with any time.

- you can generate a QR code on the spot so the person paying can just scan it

- transfer is pretty much instant (under 5s seems to be the norm)

- no NFC (so works with any crappy phone)

- since its a bank transfer, and since bank transfers are insured up to 200k (afaik), its pretty safe.

You can also generate a R$0,00, print it and leave to the other person input how much will be transferred.

PS: Pix is so trivial to us that only in places like HN we can see how amazing it is

It is possible to pay using NFC now

why can't we just use qr codes with ibans in that case?

But it seems to me like banks don't really want to make bank transfers more comfortable for small transactions.

Pix has several rules that makes up for a nice UX, such as being free for personal use and a 10-second limit to get a response after a transaction.

Pix is an open source specification, btw: https://github.com/bacen/pix-api

Yes, and it's a small privacy leak in Pix: it shows the person's name and part of their CPF.

I really dislike the lack of a more anonymous way to transfer money but given how prevalent scams are here I feel like there was no better option.

Also, before PIX bank transfers required a person's full name, full CPF number, full account and branch numbers so arguably PIX is helping to improve privacy a little bit.

However the big issue is when people register their phone numbers as PIX keys because it means strangers can easily get full names from phone numbers.

(Googler, opinions are my own.)

- SPI: responsible for the payments

- DICT: responsible for mapping keys to accounts

The API documentation of those services are available, but only banks can use them. When a person wants to send money to another, there's an option in the bank app for sending through Pix.

Then you have many options to define to whom you'll send that money:

- typing the bank account information

- using the Pix key (which can be an phone, email, CPF/CNPJ (brazillian documents) or a generated key)

- scanning a QR code

Note that the two latter options don't require the account information. That resolution is done by DICT.

After that, you type how much you'll send (sometimes the QR code already contains this information). Then it'll send through SPI.

And yeah, it's really, really fast.

Note that it is from a bank app (Nubank), Pix itself is not an app. Other banks have similar interfaces

From my reading, the system seems like it's intended to be used with a connected device and scanned/copypasted rather than typed or read over the phone.

Isn't paying with some phone apps the default in China? And I think transferring using phone apps has some success in Africa, too.

Except for Hong Kong, they have their own thing. I just used Google pay there.

I remember encountering that before London launched Oyster, probably inspired by it. Worked in station vending machines as well as for tickets.

They protect against tracking and provide anonimity. That might be valuable.

"Can I buy some milk today? No!, let's visit our branch first and give some papers which will require significant time/effort to get for you."

Most just not experiencing things like this but once that happen it is hard to ignore this possibility.

Does it work internationally? Does it send USD as well, or only the real?

If it solves th same problems, why is Brazil considering banning self-custodial USD stablecoins? And why has there been an ongoing discussion about launching mBRL, and stablecoin pegged to the real?

https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2024/brazil-considers-...

Everything from m-pesa in Kenya to Gcash in the Philippines to PromptPay in Thailand to Alipay in China to SGQR in Singapore to MPay in Oman....

The pattern is that these systems are nearly all fully centralised, require ID, zero privacy, usually government sanctioned, and not cross border.

> require ID, zero privacy, usually government sanctioned

Unfortunately systems that don't have those requirements are going to be money laundering channels. I wish it wasn't such a big concern but it's unavoidable.

> Unfortunately systems that don't have those requirements are going to be money laundering channels. I wish it wasn't such a big concern but it's unavoidable.

There same requirements also make the likelihood of these systems scaling beyong one jurisdiction very unlikely. Tourists don't want to set up a payment account for every country they visit. Or other way around, banks don't want to KYC and set up an account for every foreign tourist.

As Visa and MC work globally, I'm betting that the dominance from those will continue. Cryptocurrencies might have some change of becoming the "global" transaction method as well.

China, India, Brazil, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and others are all trying to expand their own transaction networks.

While it's still piecemeal, a Chinese or Indian tourist in Thailand can use UnionPay or UPI to transact without using Visa/Mastercard, a Russian tourist in Vietnam can use Mir, a Brazilian in Argentina can use Pix instead of Visa/MC as well, and a Japanese visitor in Singapore can use JCB instead.

Even the ECB has recently started considering this option (though it might also be an attempt to force the Trump admin to negotiate).

The biggest thing blocking international payment competitors is FATF, which has some regulations biased in favor of Visa/Mastercard.

> Cryptocurrencies might have some change of becoming the "global" transaction method as well

I'm not sure. Most jurisdictions that aren't the US and EU heavily regulate cryptocurrencies, and at best allow state managed or regulated cryptocurrencies, which basically makes the whole point of crypto moot.

If you can find a place that actually accepts it! It’s certainly not as ubiquitous as the local Napas247 QR codes.

The point is there is a steady decoupling towards non-Visa/MC payment systems outside the US and EU, and it wouldn't be too surprising if a number of these systems begin supporting inter-operability within the next 10 years.

I find very likely Netflix or Amazon will be one of the first companies to support this in June now.

This was made initially to replace old school automatic debit for phone/electricity/etc bills, but it will support all services.

In Brazil, installments with credit cards are also super common... Basically when you put a credit card on any website or buy on a store, you can just choose to pay in 12x.

Well, they will add in September Pix Installments as well.

> Brazil, installments with credit cards are also super common... Basically when you put a credit card on any website or buy on a store, you can just choose to pay in 12x

Yea that kinda makes sense. The market dynamics in Brazil reminds me a lot of India albeit better regulated (thank you OECD reforms), but tbf, there has been a lot of cross-pollination between Brazilian and Indian policymakers - Cambridge MA is that kinda melting pot, and Brazil has a very similar political dynamic.

Brazil Journal too, but it usually focus more on market as a whole. https://braziljournal.com/

But most of the news are usually covered on Infomoney, Valor Economico, with the together with daily market coverage.

NeoFeed and Brazil Journal focus more on "high-quality", less content.

Let's grab some cacha or other trashy/bourgeois booze when I'm back in São Paulo! I'm am Arak kinda guy

the best source I could find is this: https://finsidersbrasil.com.br/

Until there will be a stable coin we can trust and which can be accepted by most businesses.

By the same thinking we should forbid cash, too.

We have two ways:

Give up all freedoms, forbid anything and transform the society into a mass surveillance society where everyone spies everyone, where is no anonimity and no privacy.

Or require law enforcement to do a better jobs without people giving up their freedoms.

There are neighboring wallets (like Belo in Argentina) that support it, and I believe tourism will drive even more integration over time.

Does crypto? You may have heard of this thing called "tariffs" lately. Even purchases of software licenses are tariffed in Brazil[1]. The average person purchasing goods with crypto is just going to ignore this and several similar laws.

If you say crypto works to transact internationally, keep in mind: so does TF2 hats.

1: https://www.machadoassociados.com.br/en/2021/05/brazilian-fe...

Pix can't facilitate cross-border micro payments.

But payment processors in Brazil are already offering “international pix”, that Brazilians can use to pay foreign companies. It’s the same experience as pix for the customer but behind the scenes the company deals with the cross border payment.

There are even stores accepting pix in Portugal: https://www.publico.pt/2025/01/23/publico-brasil/noticia/pix...

No reason it couldn't. Bizum (mobile payments in Spain) started with just Spain but can now be used for payments across & to/from Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Andorra.

Bizum is also a member of European Mobile Payment Systems Association which I think will eventually lead to all members being able to make transfers to other members, but that might a somewhat dream rather than actual reality today.

The practicalities are very different from transferring between say Brazil and the US.

Is this a joke? Of course it's cross-border, it crosses international borders. It works because the countries involved put in the work to make it easy. The fact that you can't use Pix in the US has no bearing.

The comment I replied to was claiming Bizum operating "cross border" showed that Pix could do so, so it is very much relevant in context.

It is a very special case of cross border. It is technically cross border but does not have the difficulties of cross border in all of the rest of the world outside the EU.

In any case it is arguable whether these are separate countries or just states of the EU. It has a common currency, a parliament that can legislate (in certain matters - rather like the US Congress) for the whole EU, courts, a central bank, a public prosecutor and many other "national" institutions etc. it also have the symbols of a state such as a flag and a national anthem (albeit both shared with the Council of Europe), EU passports state they are EU as well as the issuing country's name etc.

Even if you do regard it as a cross border one it is very much atypical and cannot be replicated elsewhere.

The umbrella interoperability initiative that includes Bizum is Swiss (neither EU nor Eurozone).

Maybe you have a radical viewpoint, or maybe you're just unfamiliar with the subject matter, but individual EU countries are very much separate entities, notwithstanding many helpful treaties.

There are lots of transnational entities like the EU and monetary unions like the Eurozone.

There's nothing so special about this arrangement that means it couldn't happen elsewhere.

https://empsa.org/news/leading-european-mobile-payment-solut...

and yet Switzerland is not one of the countries where Bizum can be used?

The UN does not have a common currency or a parliament etc.

So what? Sweden has it's own Swish system, Sweden is well integrated in EU, Europe and Eurozone yet it only works within Sweden AFAIK.

That Bizum works across four countries is not a given just because they're all within the Eurozone. Just like how Brazil and US would need to figure out how to send electronic money between themselves if Pix was available in both countries, so did Italy<>Spain<>Portugal when it came to Bizum, which is a private company btw.

So although only Finland uses Euro (and rest have their own currency), you can easily transfer money between persons using just their mobile number as an example.

Across the whole EU, there's already a pretty low limit on card transactions and a deadline of later this year for banks to implement SEPA instant transfers.

As far as I can tell the legal landscape of the solution currently only allow the actual government to look at the data with the standard court orders. I believe not even the 10k report limit is applied to pix atm the same way as the other methods.

Regarding fake transactions, that would be a non concern to me, the system is only centralised in parts, the banks still hold most of the data so they would have to collaborate on this potentially leaving lots of evidence behind. Governments do not need to be subtle to screw you over, see current US deportation news.

Its not that much different than how bank transfers in Europe work in practice. The US is particularly archaic in banking technology available to the public.

Yes, of course it is. How could anybody think otherwise? What is the worst thing Visa can do and what is the worst thing Visa has done? What is the worst thing the government can do and what is the worst thing the government has done?

There must be a non-repudiation and integrity check to verify transactions (e.g., in Estonia I sign digitally all my transactions), so the latter problem is easier to mitigate.

So there would be more safeguards

As a citizen of a still kind-of-functioning democracy, I'd happily make the trade if that means Apple, Google, Visa or Mastercard don't have the information anymore.

Pix mostly replaces and eats on credit card transactions that were done for the convenience aspect and no the credit aspect. As well as allow a whole new part of the country to accept electronic payments, and although that would increase tax revenue from business it also substantially increase their revenue since there is no x% from card processors and don't require special rented/bought equipment.

(If you're reading this, please note this comment was written in 2025)

On top of that, it will provide the said information to government agencies if asked.

It's not different from what we had before.

EDIT: it didn't actually change a thing. Banks are still required to maintain transaction data private, and agencies, including the government, MUST obtain a warrant to break transaction data secrecy.

And if a government decides to just ignore those, it will also have no need to watch your transactions or create fake ones.

...except for inflation.

Technically a pre-paid option should be possible, but I could not find anything about something in that vein.

This isnt a take down of Pix. Sounds excellent and should be replicated in other countries. Lets just not pretend its a viable solution for tourists.

https://blog.remitly.com/money-transfer/complete-guide-brazi...

Similarly Revolut has an announcement but I don't believe it is available yet.

And you can also use the bank account number, effectively replacing older bank transfer mechanisms like DOC and TED.

At least with PIX, you scan the QR code directly on your online banking app, so there's no risk of going to a "fake site" (and the app also displays the information extracted fron the QR code, it's not a blind payment).

Scanning a PIX QR code with your camera will just result in text, not a payable URL. You have to scan it in your online banking app for it to be processed as something.

Your banking app will load the details about the payment and you'll see the recipient details before performing the payment.

Even with regular barcode payments, these barcodes are registered with the bank before it's a valid barcode. A lookup is done, if it exists the recipient details are displayed, often the amount, and verifications that it has not expired. (Do not receive after date X)

Brazil has a pretty decent banking system, though the worst online-banking experience I've ever had. (Slowly improving)

If you have moved about 15 years before that, you'd have experienced the hyperinflation years and you've come to understand why Brazilian (retail) banking systems were always pushing the state of the art.

(You'd also understand that cryptocurrencies are not meant to compete with payment networks that have institutional backing, but that's a lesson for another day)

btw, Pix is not an app, it is a service/infrastructure that can be used by any bank

The recipient's name and part of their ID are displayed on the confirmation page. This allows you to verify their identity, as the name must be linked to a real ID.

Users must set transaction and daily limits, with any changes taking effect only after 24–48 hours.People are encouraged to maintain lower limits.

Since transactions are tied to real individuals, it becomes easier for law enforcement to track down the recipient after a scam is identified.

The bad thing is that Pix shows it will work for many, many years.

Lucky you. I've been living here since i was born. :(

Pix is surreal. It was launched in the Bolsonaro (mal)administration, designed by the proverbially incompetent public work force, and is as Orwellian as can be. Its code is nowhere to be found.

The funniest thing is that is has been adopted feverishly by the rabid right wing crazies, the same lot who want to destroy everything 'government'.

I take pleasure in listing three of the problems:

1. Lack of Transparency

2. Potential for Abuse

A government-controlled payment system centrally-controlled, with no auditability? Oh please give me more (/s)

3. Censorship and Political Control

https://exame.com/economia/questionado-por-apoiador-bolsonar...

- PIX project started in 2016, public launch in 2020

- It was not "launched" by any President; the Brazilian Central Bank is an independent authority, with it own mandate, not a branch of the executive power

- PIX was co-developed with institutions of the financial sector

- It's a protocol that participants must implement, not an app. The specification is even on GitHub. I don't know what you mean by "its code is nowhere to be found".

- The Brazilian Central Bank is acknowledged as a benchmark, rather than "proverbially incompetent public work force"

It might as well be illegal today.

Art. 16 da Lei nº 14.063, de 23/09/2021: estabelece que os sistemas de informação e de comunicação desenvolvidos exclusivamente pela administração pública são regidos por licença de código aberto, permitida a sua utilização, cópia, alteração e distribuição sem restrições por todos os órgãos e entidades públicos.[0]

Art. 16 of Law No. 14,063, of 09/23/2021: establishes that information and communication systems developed exclusively by the public administration are governed by an open source license, allowing their use, copying, alteration and distribution without restrictions by all public bodies and entities.[0]

[0]https://www.gov.br/governodigital/pt-br/plataformas-e-servic...

So, lets open up its code!

Oh no, my government might be run by nazis -> Let's make the government services crap

The nazis don't need to use your crap government services, so you're just pointlessly making things worse, this is the same delusion as "But it's illegal". Why on Earth would crooks care whether what they're doing is legal?

I suggest:

Oh no, my government might be run by nazis -> Ensure this does not happen OR leave

I really want a system where I can transfer money effortlessly but I also want a guarantee that I won’t be restricted access to my banking.

Preventing convenient payment technology only hurts the rest of us. If you want redundancy buy gold coins.

There is no way to “get rid of cryptocurrencies” at this point save for shutting off the internet. It is not within the power of the state to prohibit, any more than prostitution or cocaine.

There’s plenty of legal ways of exchanging cryptocurrencies for real currencies, shutting those down would be a good start.

Customers and merchants generate a keypair and CSR. The CSR by design contains no personal information. You submit the public key/CSR and seperate identifying information to a KYC authority.

The government generates a signed certificate the bank can use to open an account, and the customer or merchant signs their transaction requests using their private key to associate them with the account.

The bank has a paper trail showing KYC was performed, but does not have any personal information about the participants, almost akin to the old "numbered Swiss account" cliche.

Ideally, the KYC authority deletes the personal data after issuing certificates, but I'd expect it would be more "information can be released under court order" or "revocation policy blah blah blah".

That's the level of tradeoff I'd expect is politically viable. Bank of America doesn't know you're buying hentai, but if it turns out the 1000-year-old character is actually 12, a court can lift the veil.

It is also single currency - Euro only, right? Swift is global.

Dealing with many currencies and laws (e.g. countries with capital controls) is very complex.

Swift is just a messaging standard and a message exchange network (distributed). SEPA is that, plus a settlement system (in a nutshell). That allows for speed and much more (instant payments, request to pay, pay by phone number, credit/debit transfers, etc).

You're bound to deal with currencies once you make any kind of transaction that originates in one currency and settles (finishes) in another.

The transaction cost compared to most domestic systems is absurdly high.

Relatedly, most company payments here, including water/electricity/etc bills, are paid using a system called Bankgiro, which is also a private company (and you can pay Bankgiro bills using Swish, of course).

And even the de facto national electronic identity system, BankID, is developed and provided by a private company. It is used to login to your bank as well as most government systems and any company can use it for login (which most Swedish companies do).

So, it differs from the Brazilian model in that all services are provided by private companies, not by the Government. Not sure which is better, to be honest. On the one hand it's hard to trust a Government like the Brazilian one given its history... on the other hand, trusting a private company even for public services seems wild: what if they go bankrupt, get sold to foreign investors, started using shady business practices??

That's why our railways are falling apart and why we have 2500 pharmacies but people up north have to travel to the town 100k away to get meds.

I wish the government that we elect every 4 years with public voting and kindergarten bartering could take ownership of things that are essential to life in Sweden, but nop it's all privatized so the companies can optimize profits by removing utility (BankID seems to be an exception here where the incentives align between companies and citizens).

But for the record Bitcoin and it's cousins are the exact definition of free and open source software as it is both free and open source. Just because you don't like it doesn't change the facts.

Until this line I forgot crypto was even competing!

Sounds like WeChat Pay. It's been years now that beggars in China only carry QR codes.

> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.

They solve a different problem or have the potential to: predictable/unbiased money issuance and on/off ramp for payment platforms.

I make a point of carrying cash. Especially for buskers. It's just so simple to push the "cash back" button at the PoS when I'm buying something else.

(I miss the days when you could buy a CD from a talented busker.)

Sounds like WeChat Pay. It's been years now that beggars in China only carry QR codes.

I saw a guy at a freeway offramp in north Texas with a Venmo (?) address scrawled on a piece of cardboard.

You bet. Every pix transaction is reported to the brazilian authorities.

Watching the Indian and Brazillian governements solve this problem by by building the payment networks themselves and removing the profit incentive has felt vindicating.

You're far too optimistic. The current administration is trying to work itself out of a major economic crisis and there's nothing they would like more than to tax the crap out of every single Pix transaction.

This is a country with obscenely high interest rates, currently at over 14% per year. It's just ridiculous. And inflation is still hovering between 4% to 5% per year, just under pandemic levels. The solution is for the government to stop spending money. They don't want to do that, they want to increase taxes instead. As a result, we're at record breaking taxation levels, last year Brazil achieved its highest tax revenue since 1995.

The current administration spent the last two years crying about the central bank's high interest rates. I can't even fathom what'd happen to this country if they got what they wanted. Mercifully, central bank has some degree of autonomy from their stupidity. After a couple years they get to appoint the head of the central bank. It turned out even their own guy wasn't stupid enough to lower the rates.

I think the only reason they haven't taxed Pix yet is the fact Pix is too popular already. I have no doubt they're still gonna manage to increase revenue by cross referencing Pix data for tax purposes.

> Cryptocurrencies don't stand a chance.

Yeah, if you enjoy having your money one hundred percent controlled by the brazilian government. I can't think of a more frightening proposition. You do realize this is the country that once suddenly confiscated everybody's money directly from their bank accounts, right?

Why did they do that? Runaway inflation. Just like its fellow latin american neighbors, Brazil has mismanaged all of its currencies and it will inflate the real to zero just like all the others, it's merely a matter of time. Just look at the country's economic situation. BRL is an absolute garbage currency. Why would you even want to hold onto this crap? You're better off holding USD if you can. You're better off holding real property if you've got the capital. You're better off holding bitcoins.

Cryptocurrency? They're basically the light at the end of the tunnel. You say you've lived here 20 years. Surely you know that judges are basically gods in this country. And we have judges admitting in writing that it's essentially impossible for them to seize or in any way touch your bitcoins without your secret keys. Do you seriously believe they have no chance? In this place? They're basically the solution to nearly every single problem in the "government is stupid" category.

Surely you know that the brazilian government sucks at pretty much everything except taxing you. And you're advocating for a system that essentially implements nation wide financial surveillance. Because our number one priority is to make taxation of an already heavily taxed people even more efficient, right? So that the politicians and judge kings can enjoy their world tours on tax payer money?

Pix is very convenient. That's all it is, and unfortunately that's all it needs to be to win the hearts of people. People won't be smiling after the government starts blocking their Pix keys for arbitrary reasons, preventing them from participating in society.

The only hope for any system is if the people fight to not live within these kinds of fascist states. Crypto is not some magic solution - and has a lot of downsides which are mentioned often.

The thought does occur to me. Quite frequently in fact.

My parents lived through the military dictatorship. They once asked me to stop posting online because they were afraid I'd become some kind of target. I'm not kidding.

> The only hope for any system is if the people fight to not live within these kinds of fascist systems.

Brazilians in general tend to agree with you. That's the end game of quite a lot of brazilians. "The only solution for this place is the airport", they say.

Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil - it's not even used in other Mercosur countries, what's the chance of having that adopted in other countries... And, that's problem #1.

How much do you trust your government with your money? A system like Pix don't stand a chance to get a worldwide adoption - maybe people are naive but governments won't unify to adopt a common system controlled by just a single entity / country.

What we may however end up with, are dozens of systems like Pix, one for each country, union, etc. Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant (see point 1)

To you second point, I think the pix penetration/popularity proves that the majority of the people trust the government for that. There are 2 key reasons for its success: It was mandatory for Banks to adhere to the system and there are no fees for using it.

Once multiple countries have their own PIX, they just need to build a federation structure to connect them and allow cross-border transactions.

Crypto-currencies have their place with people who don't trust the government, want to speculate and/or simply want to do tax evasion, but they are not and probably never will be mainstream as a transaction medium.

Most people want something that works well in the ways they care about.

People turned to piracy because it was a superior experience to the then-distribution-models.

Then, the majority of people didn't care that iTunes / Steam cost money and had DRM, because it provided a superior experience to piracy.

People want an outcome, easily, reliably: they don't care about the method of getting that outcome.

Each transaction is somehow only known by sender and receiver

To add to this, this is already happening. For example, you can already pay in the Middle East with India's UPI at quite a lot of places, or with China's Alipay or Unionpay.

Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.

Still cryptocurrencies as-is remain relevant

And somehow less relevant than cash.

I can take cash from any country in the world to my local bank, and deposit it into my account. I can get a dozen different foreign currencies at my local branch in minutes, and almost any other currency in the world can be delivered to me by FedEx the next morning for a flat $10 fee.

I can take cash to any other country in the world and get it converted into the local currency, whether that's paper or digital in almost any city.

Crypto is great if you do a very few, very specific things in a vanishingly small number of places. But if I'd tied my finances to crypto instead of cash, I'd have been stuck many times in foreign lands.

If you are at a institution bank, probably but that's a non-existent use case - I never had Argentinian Pesos, Turkish Lira or Bulgarian Lev I suddenly needed to deposit into my bank account !..

> Try to use cryptocurrency for anything other than a few very specific transactions at a number of places in the world so small that it's a rounding error.

I'm not sure whether you travel much, but I always travel as a digital nomad. I pay small transactions with local cash or mostly bank cards as everybody does. But big amounts? That's where crypto comes into play. I've paid in crypto transactions worth a few thousands dollars because that's the only way to do it without incurring huge transaction fees and / or long processing time.

You're joking right? I just did a $25,000 wire internationally with a currency exchange in the middle and it cost $75. It went through in one business day. You'll get more hassle trying to withdraw from your exchange than that.

When I bought my house and did the wire it cost $15. Where are you getting huge transaction fees?

Meanwhile you could transfer $25k in crypto to Dubai and walk away with it in cash at an OTC desk in an hour via a wallet to wallet.

Thats a use case 99.99999999999999999% of humanity does not care at all about.

Yes if you are poor as dirt and can just take your life savings of <$10k (probably 99% of humanity) on an airplane if you need to use it in another country, you can do so no problem and you do not care, the idea of a crypto OTC desk likely does not even occur to you. It is still solving the same problem, but by being small enough that no one cares.

The data pretty well speaks for itself. Humanity with money cares a lot about escaping capital controls. This is inviolable, the more the banking system handicaps itself the more capital flows into less regulated products.

There's a reason Wise is a huge business and people in Canada resort to "Norbert's gambit" to exchange currency with minimal transaction costs.

This is exactly what I'm talking about and I'm not certain whether you're sarcastic .. Paying $75 on a 25k amount with a transaction time of 24 hours to complete is absolutely insane. You'd have used USDT or USDC or any other stable coin, you would have paid <$1 of fee and got the transaction done in seconds.

I was a "digital nomad" before that was even a term.

I've done "work from home" in Japan, China, Macau, South Korea, Belgium, and at least ten American cities. Even way back when we did it with payphones, Telex and fax machines.

Get off my lawn.

Cryptocurrencies will likely never go away, and will remain in use for certain use cases from a cross border value transfer perspective, similar to gold; either the token moves or the ownership is updated. More interesting is offering digital wallets for a single or basket of currencies to anyone you can remotely identity proof in the world (similar to nsave [3]).

[1] https://www.volt.io/real-time-payments-world-map/

[2] https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/fmis/nexus.htm

[3] https://www.nsave.com/ | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nsave

No one pays FX fees on each transfer. Single large rebalancing transfers allows them to actually move money at optimal times and rates with bulk discounts. Then they can currency hedge and get larger spreads on the actual fx rate.

Similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

I think the best way to explain it is an example.

My contact needs to get money to his family across the world. I happen to have a cousin that I love and trust who lives there and runs a gas station. My contact gives me 10k USD + a fee and then I call my cousin and tell him to give 10k to the contact's family member if they give the right password. At the end of the year, I meet up with my cousin and I bring him some gold or other goods depending on what our deficits are to each other.

My assumption was that it usually comes down to finding someone else with money in both currencies (i.e. a large bank or government) and exchanging one for the other. Of course that's unsatisfying: it's not just turtles all the way down.

Ultimately if I'm running out of, say, USD, and have a lot of CAD, I have to to buy a bunch of something for CAD and sell it in USD. If you wanted a "zero banking" currency transaction I guess the way to do it is to park on the Canadian side of the border, buy imports to the US, walk across to the US, and sell them.

Or maybe there's a magic money shredding / printing machine that I didn't know about. I guess an international treaty could actually authorize such a thing.

If you drill far enough... well anyway

> I don't know of any machine where dollars go in one side, are destroyed, and euros are created on the other side.

The Treasury is the machine you're looking for. And the wire transfer, SWIFT, usually, is the tool of choice. In a sense, yes dollars are "destroyed" in that they leave that monetary system. Banks like BoA hold a ledger with the country's treasury which gets discounted during the outflow.

So euros are then credited to whatever institution you transferred it to.

This is why places like HSBC, CITI have free transfers for intra-bank but you still pay $15 for the same via wire transfer? Why would you ever want to do that? beats me, but the point is you can and it has a very real affect on the system other than some internal database going +/-.

But in the end, it's the country's treasury credit/debiting any institution and then just... printing? when it wants? but other countries... m1... foreign debt.

so yea, turtles.

So are you saying there's an procedure where the US treasury takes USD out of circulation, and the ECB introduces the equivalent in Euro, according to some official exchange rate? How do they set the exchange rate?

Go ask chatgpt, it will explain it quite well.

You'll need to provide more constructive feedback. Or are you suggesting that it's not "destroyed" and that the origin country can freely transfer money without discounting its books?

Really, it's bad form to comment on something technical where you are just miles out of your depth.

It should be satisfying in the following sense - the financial system is nowhere near as complicated as it seems. There is no magic. If you find yourself feeling like there is some magic somewhere, just ask another question because there is likely just a word or a layer of indirection that is making something quite simple seem mysterious.

But yeah, it's mostly just market forces that keep things stabilized, it seems.

[1]: https://www.cfr.org/tracker/central-bank-currency-swaps-trac...

The main trick that folks get hung up on (and, you might be too) is that most "money" is just an IOU from a bank. We've just created a sophisticated way to trade the IOUs and call it "money".

It's not inconceivable (nor magical in any way) to imagine treaties that would allow an actual conversion from one currency to another, where USD go in one side and Euro come out the other. Situations like this have existed in the past: currencies have been converted when, for example, the former currencies in the Eurozone were converted to Euros.

No such situations exist right now: entities just hold multiple currencies and exchange them for you.

Your mental model is falling down around the definition of "currency", "money" etc. It isn't what you imagine it is. We just have a system for trading bank receivables and call it "money".

It took some prompting to get it to say "It's really not rocket science." though.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67fa2c5f-d940-800a-bdad-b723e763e0...

Off-topic, but: this is possibly one of the world's dumbest rebranding exercises. I forget now how many years ago they made the change, but I've never heard anyone outside the company itself refer to it as just "Wise" without adding "(formerly transferwise)".

Could've at least gone with calling themselves "Wise.com" or something, like "Make.com" does.

Got nothing on "X" though. Have yet to hear someone in person say "on X" rather than "on Twitter".

I've been a loyal user of wise for more than a decade, since I used them to pay for my cross-currency wedding, and I can accept the name change since they wanted to show they were more than just money transfer (but just make it "bankwise", ffs), but the new brand style was a disaster.

Notice they dialed it down over time,it's now more neutral than at launch, so someone must have listened to the complaints.

Site from 4 years ago "The cheap, fast way to send money abroad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210305145221/https://wise.com/

vs now "Send money globally for less" wise.com

But mostly, it's the light-green-on-dark-green text which I dislike, and I _think_ they dialed down its usage compared to e.g. the brand announcement[0] and how the blog looks[1] compared to the main site. Then again, de gustibus.

[0] https://wise.com/community/en/brand-new-look [1] https://wise.com/gb/blog/welcoming-libby-to-the-board

Fine keep using crypto as a store of “value” but as a way to handle day to day transactions it has failed.

Most people in Brazil will need to do this so who gives a shit? You may as well say, "now try to use Pix on the moon!"

When you use Pix, your money is not in custody of the government. The money goes to/comes from a standard commercial bank, just like a wire transfer. What the government (Central Bank) does is just the infrastructure for moving money between bank accounts.

The point about not being a global standard is valid, though. Although there are initiatives in progress to connect similar instant payment systems from different countries as other users have noted.

It's a permissioned system.

Crypto is intended to be fundamentally different. Good crypto is permissionless. If you own it, you can spend it, regardless of what anyone thinks.

Which is also its primary drawback.

Transactions are non-reversable, which inherently makes it unsafe for wide-scale use. Consumer protection is so important, clawing back payments is an incredibly important part of that.

Wrong copy-paste and all my money could just be gone forever? Yeah no, that's never going to fly in countries where consumer protection is seen as an important public good and always expected.

What you tout as a plus, is a major negative for the vast majority of people in developed democratic countries. In quite a few of them, access to a bank account is even a fundamental right.

And all that just because of some abstract fear? nty.

I like the idea of my money being my money and not just mine as long as my government isn't annoyed with me. I don't much care if other people are afraid of it. That's a great thing about crypto. You are free not to participate, unlike the corpo-fiat systems.

Your government already has a monopoly on violence and owns your whole life.

You can pay with Pix in Paraguay since the largest privately owned payment processor implemented it and it's available within all payment terminals (POS) across the country.

The government of Paraguay also runs a similarly good system called SIPAP, that is replacing card payments because it's faster and free to use.

Eh, the money was printed by government and any value it has is based on how much people trust their government. Using government payment processor is small potato compared to those...

I guess that alternative scenario sounds more dystopian the more wealth you have - but with enough wealth you can also imagine having a private security force providing that threat of violence to keep the community in check.

> How much do you trust your government with your money?

Do you trust crypto companies? Mt. Gox, FTX, Bybit…

Do you know that crypto companies must follow government rules, regulations, and laws? Russians were banned from using many crypto exchange platforms. China has strict rules for its citizens. You can buy and sell crypto in Brazil, but you must use only Brazilian reals.

Pix isn't global, but no one government person outside of Brazil can block this system.

MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and UnionPay work worldwide, but only a few countries regulate them, can block their usage, and can use data for tracking and statistics.

Pix is free to use, so no one needs to pay an additional "tax" to MasterCard and Visa (it's about 3%).

Google and Apple cannot say that if you want to pay, you must use only our devices.

> Now, try to use Pix outside of Brazil

Now, try to buy ice cream from street vendors using any crypto coins.

the conversation is supposed to be about cryptocurrency technology,

but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.

Not just one feature of its existence.

Common conflation.

Nuclear Energy is great, but governments and international organizations want to control it because it is too dangerous. So, if we need to use Nuclear Energy, we must play by such rules.

Money is the same thing. Each government wants to control them, regardless of their form.

If someone wants cryptocurrencies to be widely adopted, there is no option but to give them to businesses and governments.

So, crypto would be regulated like usual money. Major blockchains have records for all transactions, which can be tracked and used by businesses and governments to implement more strict control over the whole world. Therefore, the more people use crypto, the less privacy they have.

The Internet and Web were designed to be anonymous, but cookies, IP addresses, data collection, ML/AI, IMEI, MAC, and the control of registration in ISPs and mobile operators have led us to a situation where the government and companies can easily track people. The same situation would be with crypto, which was designed to be anonymous but used in another way.

Don’t lie to yourself, bro.

The classic one is some FOSS people inventing a protocol where servers can talk to clients, and declaring a problem solved, when in actual fact, most people don't have a server. Mastodon is this, but so is XMPP.

HTTP took off because there were servers you could fetch things from with HTTP, not because it theoretically allowed you to fetch things from servers.

Paper euros aren't cool because I can "have money". They're cool because I can go to the grocery store and trade them for something to eat. My bank card isn't cool because I can "have money". It's cool because I can go and swipe it and not have to count paper euros. If you want cryptocurrency to be cool, you're going to have to get it integrated into grocery stores, which is, of course, impossible because it can only process 7 transactions per second. You also need a way to convert my paychecks into cryptocurrency, but this is basically solved with crypto exchanges now.

> but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.

That's because the middlemen are inevitable and they work the way they do for a reason—governments won't let them work any other way.

Cryptocurrency is a technological solution for a human problem, and you can't analyze the impact of the technology divorced from the human reality without losing so much resolution as to make your analysis meaningless.

Because I've done the reading.

Which is ironically what's keeping us from adopting proper food, air, healthcare, and financial systems. Everyone doing the reading.

Anyway, I think I meant "unironically", in retrospect.

Creating efficient payment rails for its own currency is one of the most obvious roles for government imo. If the government provisions the currency, why would they not also provision the infrastructure (like the printing of the paper money).

That said, you’ve not offered a good rebuttal to any of OPs concerns, just repeated how good pix is within Brazil…right now with their current government.

Digital payments does present a uniquely frictionless route for tyrannical governments to assert power should they ever decide to weaponize it…unlike paper money which is harder to control.

Also, international payments is absolutely an issue with these systems. So you hate crypto due to its 2010s association with annoying Twitter bros. I get it.

But what are you offering instead as a solution to global money? Paying Wise stupid currency movement fees and waiting for them to close your account because you tried to buy a house for your family in the country you moved to?

If we want to have global money and a global payment system, they would be controlled by governments, international organizations, God, Devil, Cthulhu, Spaghetti Monster...

There is no magical solution. We, as a society, need to establish competing social institutions, and try to control them, and try to force them to compete. There is no solver bullet.

Don’t lie to yourself, bro.

This is true, and there's already a proposed law to ban paper money in Brazil.

You mischaracterized that.

> You have bizarre logic here. For example, in a topic discussed about GPUs, someone would say that it's not possible to run databases on GPUs, so GPUs don't have any chance of succeeding.

He's saying it wont get adopted worldwide. Not that it wont succeed (which is a very ambiguous metric).

If you’re not able to trust the government to not steal your money then I suspect you have bigger problems and should look to claim asylum elsewhere.

Who I don't trust completely with my money is banks and financial institutions. That's why I have a government who regulates them. And hey, it has worked where elsewhere it has failed (see 2008 global financial crisis).

The money that they issue? Your question is radically flawed.

That aside your main point is that crypto continues to be as relevant in cross jurisdiction payments even after the introduction of a pix like system of payments in each country.

Crypto transaction volumes across all crypto currencies are so low compared to FOREX in any of the worlds currencies (even relatively unused ones - currency speculators still drive transactions even there) that it’s basically irrelevant today in this use case. So your argument becomes it’s irrelevant today and will continue to be tomorrow.

If you’re to express the volume of all crypto transactions, not just those for the purpose of international transaction, just everything in all crypto currencies. The daily volume compared to transactions in all the other non crypto currencies ends up looking like a homeopathic dilution ratio, 0.00000000000000…%

Lol It's not that we may ended up like that, systems like Pix are built for the sole purpose of domestic transaction.

Globally, Visa / Mastercard trumps crypto.

Money is (for the purposes of this conversation) created and guaranteed by the government, and regulated by law, so I think it’s a little weird to not trust the government with my money.

I cannot fathom the reasoning that would lead you to believe this question is a big gotcha.

The value of any currency comes from the trust in the economy and military of the governments that stand behind it. The USD's value is backed by the economy and military of the United States. The Euro's value is backed by the economy and military of the Eurozone countries. If you live in the US and the economy collapses to the point the USD loses its value, the value of the USD will be your least concern - same if the US were invaded by a hostile military force and unable to defend itself.

Your currency is literally backed by your country. Your country issues the currency and your country sets the rules for how much additional currency banks can conjure into existence. Whether you use that currency in cash, bank transactions or payment systems doesn't affect that point. Cash is the only one of the three that's meaningfully different in that it allows the physical transfer of money without a "paper trail" because you can exchange it for goods and services directly (which doesn't apply to e.g. handing over keys to crypto wallets as part of a transaction because you can't move the balance off the wallet without leaving a digital trail).

There is no inherent value in cryptocurrencies just as there is no inherent value in state-backed currencies. The value of cryptocurrencies primarily hinges on their use as a speculative investment - even stocks or futures have a more concrete value basis (representing ownership of parts of a company and future ownership of trade goods respectively). This means its value is not tied to the performance or power of any one state but it also makes the value much more volatile and unreliable and much easier to manipulate.

Cryptocurrencies also stil rely on trust: for most cryptocurrencies you have to trust the people who issued it (and in some cases the underlying code), given how many have suffered from "rug pulls" and pump-and-dump schemes before. For currencies like BTC you also have to trust that no single actor can be able to perform a 51% attack. For currencies like ETH, you have to trust the smart contracts that might be involved (and have been exploited/abused before). Most people also rely on third party services to actually trade crypto currencies, so they need to trust those as well and there have been plenty of scams involving them even where they didn't turn out to be unreliable outright.

All currency is vulnerable to manipulation by agents with control over disproportionate amounts of it - billionaires, megacorps, banks, states using it as a reserve currency, etc. But non-cypto currencies suppress some of that control with their own and they have a symbiotic relationship with their currencies (i.e. if the USD does badly, that affects the US economy, which affects the US government budget, which affects its ability to maintain its institutitions including the military).

So the question then is not how much do you trust your government but do you trust your government more than the wealthiest other actors (domestic and foreign) that would exercise influence over the currency in its absence. Given that the state is not only the only thing enforcing the idea of property rights but also able to take everything away (including your physical freedom and life) from anyone who lives in its sphere of direct influence, even if you distrust your government more it's a moot point unless you also have the ability to flee it at a moment's notice if necessary - and I'd wager that's not the case for the overwhelming majority of people.

You say we may end up with systems like Pix for each country/union - sure but there's no reason there can't be interoperability between them the way there is with SWIFT transactions. At the moment Brazil seems to offer Pix International and Pix Roaming to open the system up to tourists and Brazilians travelling abroad but there's no reason similar systems can't develop a standard for direct compatibility without having to require support by each foreign bank or POS system.

Like if you want to bet on "Elon out of Trump administration before July?" you kind of have to go to polymarket or similar. (current price 41c)

Crypto is only worth something because you can convert it to fiat and with that fiat can sign fiat denominated contracts that are enforced by the government.

>How much do you trust your government with your money?

Well I'm in Canada, I would trust the govt and the banks with my money before I trust anyone else (yes yes, trucker protest bullshit still didn't shake my confidence)

Which is ultimately the problem. The govt and well regulated banks are the only ones you should be able to trust, but in many case you can't trust governments or their ability to regulate things.

Bitcoin can never be a Pix replacement. It's too damn slow, and others have pointed out, having to manage the entire transaction history is just stupid. (A end customer might not have to do serious book keeping on transaction history, but companies would.)

Pix works great for Brazil. That's what it was intended to do. And that's what it does. Case-closed.

I wonder about a few things.

Is it safe? I'm pretty sure everyone not carrying cash is very good for physical safety, but can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?

Are there scams? Can stolen money be retrieved?

Given the dimension of Pix, I never heard of someone losing money directly because of using it (for example, here in the past was common to see where credit cards were cloned)

> can someone be coerced into emptying their bank account at knifepoint?

There are limits of use. Banks have different settings for limiting the amount of money that will be transferred in different situations, like when using their apps outside a trusted network, at night, etc

> Are there scams?

Just like any other payment method. I dare say that it is even safer, as some banks (e.g. Nubank) alerts if you are trying to transfer money to a suspect account.

> Can stolen money be retrieved?

Perhaps if you contact the bank, but as far as I know it is not a feature :-(

Cryptocurrencies are full of scams because you can't put the money back, and some are anonymous.

and the transaction size limits is also too low, for me (I think you can send multiple in quick succession though)

to avoid random fintech platform and bank scrutiny for normal transactions and the higher scrutiny given to international transfers, I've used crypto for over a decade. For investment, to pay or be paid by vendors in other countries. Places where paypal/wise/revolute/n26 will flag, hold, or western union was the only option. This hasn't changed in that decade, only more onramps and offramps for crypto has changed for more proliferation.

once our crypto is within our respective domestic jurisdictions, cashing out typically has an extremely fast, non-scrutinized option, similar in speed to Pix

another comment mentioned that the Bank of International Settlements is working on instant cross border transactions, I suspect the scrutiny and transaction size limits will remain inferior to the unlimited size that crypto provides, and lack of scrutiny that a transaction converted to a domestic transaction will provide.

Been using stablecoins for a decade and the transaction costs have dropped as blockspace has become more abundant, and the stablecoin issuers create and redeem for free.

there is also the benefit of not needing the domestic currency or banking rails, since the crypto ecosystem has many investment options for different risk profiles, and many vendors to pay for goods and services.

It is very common that people do not find this competitive because they aren't aware they have a problem, or don't have a problem. But many people do encounter a friction once they branch out into another industry to try to change their circumstances, or earn larger amounts. That attracts enough people to crypto.

And if you start your own community, people come out of the woodwork early on or after any AMA session

Outside of that there are job boards and word of mouth

I do not see how this is better than cryptocurrency, which, while not fully anonymous aside from Monero, is at least decentralized.

Technologists repeatedly get this wrong. The best money system is the one that lets me buy groceries in exchange for working, not the one that's cryptographically unbreakable. Unless I'm running an illegal internet-based drug empire, in which case, the ones that aren't cryptographically unbreakable are disqualified, since I'd need the government to not be able to trace the money flow in my illegal drug empire. But even real illegal drug empires that are not internet-based mostly use government-issued currency, with measures taken to hinder tracing!

What if they deny service to or apprehend the assets of people they politically dislike? Also couldn't they crush any hope of anyone's profitable business? Could a person or business function without it? What about in ten years?

What if they track people by their transaction and built profiles of them? They could essentially make it too dangerous to do business to people who are disliked.