I believe it also requires that you put your assets one of their accounts if you're going to use it, so you're relying on the credit of the U.S. government (which is pretty good, but still adds risk, and subject to U.S. laws) until you withdraw your funds. And there's probably a lengthy process to deposit and withdraw funds.

I'm tempted to conclude this is something that happens so rarely you may as well count the times it happens as a rounding error.

It's a bit like saying government will just work if we only vote for the right candidate.

Everyone's tempted to conclude things like that, but there's a subtle fallacy happening when we do. Generally speaking, we notice government programs of all stripes when they get in our way. When they don't get in our way, we don't. It's very easy for someone paying attention to the news to be able to rattle off incidents where the FDA and FEMA and the SEC screwed up, because the screw-ups are in the news. But when they do their job correctly we never hear about it. Basically, the dataset we carry around in our heads about How Well Government Works is substantially biased toward instances of failure.

The only way to really measure how useful a regulation is or isn't is to determine what it is the regulation is supposed to address and examine a substantial set of "before and after" data points; trotting out vivid but essentially anecdotal examples of WHEN REGULATORS GO BAD makes for great editorializing, but it doesn't actually tell us very much.

I guess, not from you. Is that the reason to question it?

"Was tax paid?"

What makes you think that this money supposed to be taxed?

SWIFT transfers usually are not: SWIFT is a way to communicate messages about transfers between banks, but they would still need a way to do the actual settlement. This could be very fast in the case of two large banks in different countries: if you are a customer in bank A, which has a correspondent account with B, and the recipient is also a customer with bank B. Then bank A can use SWIFT to say “please transfer $1 trillion from our account to the recipient’s account”, and that could happen instantly. (It usually doesn’t.)

But if the final recipient is actually a customer at bank C, then the money needs to get from B to C somehow. That could happen in the recipient country’s RTGS—Fedwire if it’s the United States—but it might also be slower, through ACH or an equivalent.

One problem with fast transfers is that many banks don’t have straight through processing for RTGS. This means that the money can get instantly from bank A to bank B, but may not get posted to the recipient’s account with bank B until a clerk gets around to verifying and booking the transaction.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_policy.htm#...

You can login to your bank, transfer money to someone elses bank, they'll login, and see the money.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-...

Aren't Bitcoin transaction times generally in minutes?