361–370 of 732 posts
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y'all most not have heard of https://strike.me/ which operates on the lightning network to send whatever local currencies through btc instantly for little / no fee
And before people ask, it uses the lightning network so it's non-custodial.
Yes you can run LN in a non-custodial manner, but the user experience is really bad.
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How do you think bank accounts get hacked? It's much easier to yank a password/credit card number people use daily. The benefit of private key is you only need to use it once. Then store it away in a safe or _bank_. More UX will develop over time as adoption grows. We already have hardware wallets that even babies could use. Finally you somehow imply that FIAT theft doesn't happen. Even in recent modern history peopl…
"More UX will develop over time as adoption grows. We already have hardware wallets that even babies could use." The difference is this: If people have a hardware wallet they use digitally they think it's like a bank account on their phone. They do not realize that with that wallet if the wallet is gone so is the money. Wheras if the phone is gone, nothing happens to their money.
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I am salvadoran myself and I do not support the current president but I should say that the law passed by congress says that El Salvador will have it's own bitcoin reserve and an exchange for bitcoin against USD (our current national currency), so there will NOT be a transaction fee involved as you are just moving within a national reserve with a national exchange.
But Bitcoin is so volatile. You deposit today let's say 10k of your USD and in one week if the market doesn't like the twits of the day you find yourself with half that.
I mean fiat currency and gold's value still fluctuate on a day to day basis, nothing is set in stone.
> The El Salvador President has previously said the move will open up financial services to the 70% of Salvadoreans who do not have bank accounts. Right. People who can't even afford a bank account would now all be using financial services by paying 10 dollars per transaction.
What the normal people will use in the beginning is going to be non-custodial LN based solution like strike. Minimal fees, easy to use. If you get a bit more, move to custodial LN wallet/onchain transactions. More fees, more security and less trust. And once you have too much BTC start storing them in an offline cold storage.
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The internet says that WF has no bank-to-bank fees outside of WF. At least, as of 3 weeks ago.
Can you post a non-Zelle link with instructions?
You can add non-WF banking destinations once you are logged in. They put up a disclaimer to expect registering the account as a recipient to take up to 3 business days.
Articles on the Internet from May of this year claim that there are no fees, even outside the WF ecosystem. However, they refuse to publish fees as they vary by account.
I do wish you luck, and I hope that it was just a matter of that link being hard to find (they definitely try to funnel you to wire instructions.)
Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails. People keep talking about it being slow while massive web applications are being built with and billions of dollars being processed.
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Why would somebody who doesn't have a bank account be more capable of using a provider on the lightning network?
This is a good question and I think the clues are in the way informal vendors in parts of Asia and Africa have already caught on to transacting through mobile. In remote parts of ES there aren’t any bank branches and villagers have to travel an hour or more by bus into town just to open an account, when they get back to their village that same lack of infrastructure means no POS or businesses accepting cards. Feature…
We have Bank QR codes and something simillar to M-Pesa, but its not that widespread because there is no one standard for QR payments or similar. That makes it less practical to use because both you and the vendor must use the same bank. (El Salvador is small and there are many finatial instituions.)
Something like U.S. Zelle or Swedish Swish would help, but banks have not standardized yet.
If WhatsApp started something like WeChat payments it would become a hit. Like they did in Brazil.
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The dollar is a central bank currency. Numbers in a retail bank's ledger are not digital dollars. They represent an obligation of the bank, and not direct ownership of dollars. Digital dollars exist, but only banks can hold them, as they're the only ones with accounts at the central bank. The rest of us use retail bank accounts, which are the equivalent of custodial wallets in the crypto world.
> dollar is a central bank currency The term "dollar" encompasses central bank money (including but not limited to banknotes) as well as private money. > Numbers in a retail bank's ledger are not digital dollars Yes, they very much are. Modern money creation is public-private and only semi-centralized.
With dollars, individuals have to choose between bank accounts, which are subject to counterparty risk, and cash, which cannot be transacted digitally.
If your holding of 'digital dollars' in a bank account is subject to counterparty risk, then there's something different about the dollars you hold and 'real' dollars issued by the central bank.
With cryptocurrency, anyone can transact the real thing. There's no counterparty risk. (Of course, there are issues with blockchain scaling, use of custodial wallets etc., which negate this to some extent.)