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Moving money internationally

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Re: Moving money internationally

#71

Post by bjornsteffanson »

izzydata wrote: post #59
pinephoneguy wrote: post #9

Last time I sent money to someone internationally Etherium really was pretty convenient. The Coinbase fees were a little high but otherwise it was near instantaneous, I already had some anyway, and I didn't have to deal with any real hassle.

If your only goal is to send digital value across the planet why would anyone use Ethereum or Bitcoin? There are a ton of alternatives that cost fractions of a penny in transaction fees.

What services are the best for transferring large sums of money cheaply, safely, and quickly? In my experience, you can only choose one. I would prefer to chose two: cheaply and safely. I am not as worried about time. Recommendations?

Re: Moving money internationally

#72

Post by adtac »

I looked a bit into the company SWIFT and found this: https://www.swift.com/swift-resource/250836/download (warning: downloads the file)

Page 3 is interesting (ignore the rest, they're mostly buzzwords). It shows you the numbers behind the financial infrastructure of the world for international transactions.

>FIN availability: 99.996% >Institutions connected: 11k >FIN messages: 9.5b

That's about ~300 messages/sec, although I imagine it's mostly bursty and peaks during US/EU common business hours

Re: Moving money internationally

#73

Post by Aperocky »

Galanwe wrote: post #32
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can easily bypass SWIFT restrictions and transact with the affected Russian banks directly “Easily” is the squishy bit here. If they’re settling in dollars, probably not, unless someone’s carting around paper dollars. (This has been done.) If they’re settling in rubles or yuan, for most definitions of “easily,” yes.

> If they’re settling in rubles or yuan, for most definitions of “easily,” yes. Completely agree with your comment, just wanted to add that the vast majority of international companies will require a settlement in DM currencies (mainly dollar). This ensures that the relative size of the deal stays stable, as these currencies are highly stable and not subject to domestic manipulation. For a deal to be settled in, say,…

yuan is highly stable over the past 2 decades, in fact it gained about 20% on the dollar over that time frame.

The problem with Yuan are more with its low convertibility (read: usage rate outside China), but that may change eventually. Using currency sanctions to achieve political goals are simultaneously expending trust in those currencies.

Re: Moving money internationally

#74

Post by lowkey »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #44
fuoqi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>these currencies are highly stable Can you truly call them stable with 7+% official inflation, negative real interest rates, and China owning 3+ trillion USD-nominated assets, which it probably will start to gradually sell in the wake of sanctions against the Central Bank of Russia?

None of these factors, other than inflation, point to instability. With respect to inflation, that’s being directly addressed. Compared to every other currency, historical and extant, the major trading currencies of the day are highly stable across multiples of even the longest transaction time frames. They aren’t good long-term stores of value because that’s not what they’re built for.

> With respect to inflation, that’s being directly addressed.

Please explain. I don’t understand how that’s true.

In last night’s SOTU President Biden said inflation was mostly due to car prices or something equally silly. I don’t see any nation seriously addressing inflation which is officially 7.5% but I believe to be much higher for most.

Re: Moving money internationally

#75

Post by izzydata »

bjornsteffanson wrote: post #71
izzydata wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your only goal is to send digital value across the planet why would anyone use Ethereum or Bitcoin? There are a ton of alternatives that cost fractions of a penny in transaction fees.

What services are the best for transferring large sums of money cheaply, safely, and quickly? In my experience, you can only choose one. I would prefer to chose two: cheaply and safely. I am not as worried about time. Recommendations?

Algorand, Avalanche, Solana, Cardano and Terra are all cheap and safe, but like that other guy said. I have no idea what kinds of crypto are listed on foreign exchanges. I'd imagine anything sufficiently popular though.

Re: Moving money internationally

#76

Post by Nursie »

olegious wrote: post #70
Nursie wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Because it looks to me like the current state of crypto is worse than ever - https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-less-green-than-ever-before... Emissions on a par with Greece. And just for one coin. Ethereum is still going to PoS any day now, totally, just a few months off. Like it has been for several years. So what is it about "the current state of crypto" that you think you know better than these?

The ETH PoS chain is already in beta with the expectation of transition (the merge) later this year. BTC mining is creating new business models for renewable energy [0][1], BTC uses less energy than many other activities that don't get the same flack- AC usage, Data Centers, etc [1] [0] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/10/11/bitcoin-mining-is... [1] https://blockworks.co/mining-mutualism-renewable-energy-and-...…

Yes, it's in beta. The expectation of moving later this year has held for several years.

> BTC mining is creating new business models for renewable energy

It's also helping bring fossil-fuel power plants back online in the US, purely to service cryptocurrency - https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-58020010

AFAICT there are others in the works too.

> BTC uses less energy than many other activities

Pointing desperately at other things doesn't change the argument at all.

> Finally, if energy is one of your biggest expenses, you're economically incentivized to reduce those costs as much as possible.

So? This doesn't make bitcoin clean?

There is already huge demand for clean power in this world, adding to it with PoW systems doesn't actually help, and as we can see by the power plant and by the article linked above about a fall in renewable use in BTC, we're not in the "Bitcoin has incentivised green energy and helped the world get cleaner" stage, we're in the "Bitcoin is adding pressure to an already over-pressurised system and is making the problem worse at a critical time" phase.

Even your own linked article is sub-headed "Cryptocurrency mining has the potential to address the obstacles to more widely adopting renewable energy" - not that it has or is, but that it could.

These pseudo-intellectual economic arguments about "helping the world move to renewables" are tripe.

Re: Moving money internationally

#77

Post by glerk »

For those saying that crypto is useless, here is a great use case. Authoritarian governments are currently preventing individuals from moving their property across borders. Crypto fixes that.

Re: Moving money internationally

#78

Post by tomnipotent »

nawgz wrote: post #64
tomnipotent wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean there's value to it. This is a perfect example of manufactured moral outrage, justified post-hoc. The onus is on the outrage to justify it, not on the accused to defend against it. In this context, someone was expecting another person to exhibit a particular response to earn redemption based on an absolutely benign incident. At a certain point, the yelling just becomes tedious and unproductive regardless…

> Doesn't mean there's value to it. Well, to bring the concept of "value" into it only drives this further philosophical; I personally consider all debates of moral relativity to hold some inherent value, due to the topic, but I admit some are vacuous nonetheless. > This is a perfect example of manufactured moral outrage, justified post-hoc. I don't really understand what is "manufactured" about this. The individual…

> what is "manufactured" about this

There is no moral position of substance that you can argue from, where Patrick owes anyone an apology. Dead stop. He's been more than humble enough to publish an admission of error, one for which the original OP was too lazy to look for prior to impugning Patrick for it.

He's not Fauci. He created a bingo card creator and shared the experience and his personal perspective with this community. This does not oblige him to meet everyone's unrealistic expectations of how he should conduct himself.

It says far more about the people caught up in the orbit of his mistake, than he does about him.

> Again, your language is very telling of the media you consume

How do you imagine throwing an ad-hominem was going to help make for a more productive debate?

Re: Moving money internationally

#79

Post by tomhallett »

glerk wrote: post #77

For those saying that crypto is useless, here is a great use case. Authoritarian governments are currently preventing individuals from moving their property across borders. Crypto fixes that.

When most people say "crypto is useless", that is rarely about BTC being used as a currency, and is more about everything else in crypto (NFTs, web3, smart contracts, decentralized apps, ICOs, etc). The idea of a currency which has value because people give it value makes sense, regardless of how speculative it is.

Re: Moving money internationally

#80

Post by larrysalibra »

> “Sorry, you have citizenship from the High Risk Country list, accordingly I’m not allowed to open this account for you. This is a commercial decision of the bank and will not be reversed.”

This sounds like what I heard from a lot of non-US financial companies when I used to be American and then didn't want to open accounts. Frustrating but predictable and probably intended outcome from regulator behavior.

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