What an ignorant article. It's unrealistic to expect cryptocurrencies to behave as flawlessly as wire transfers. The technologies need to mature. But for those with patience, they're pretty awesome.
It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
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Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#32Bitcoin was never intended to reduce the cost of Banks, but rather supply an alternative.
It doesn't need to reduce costs. If it performs so poorly that it's not a viable alternative, there's no alternative.
Banks are alternatives of each other.
Don't like Paypal? Use Dwolla. Don't like Dwolla? Use Bank of America for direct transfers. Don't like BoA? Use Venmo.
Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#33This article should be titled "The Disaster That Ensued When I Forgot to Look Up Fee Schedules." And this is from a self-professed day trader?
I'm guessing this also makes me a "Bitcoin defender."
Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#34Bitcoin transactions are not easy enough for general consumption.
I think in the Bitcoin lifecycle a number of these early services exist at the pleasure of serving pioneering Bitcoin users / miners who have a lot of digital currency already.
Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#35What an ignorant article. It's unrealistic to expect cryptocurrencies to behave as flawlessly as wire transfers. The technologies need to mature. But for those with patience, they're pretty awesome.
> It's unrealistic to expect cryptocurrencies to behave as flawlessly as wire transfers.
Wire transfers are $35.
You'd think that BTC would be able to be cheaper than that.
Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#36> Look, it’s the whole ecosystem that is fucked. All these fees, complicated steps — it just doesn’t work for the normal Joe.
Yeah, cooperative/reversible financial fund transfer systems that interoperate with bitcoin are at enormous risk during these transactions, so they charge large fees and create red tape to avoid/mitigate fraud. It's probably been bitcoin's biggest stumbling point since forever. I don't think that it's a disaster though.
> The Bitpay invoice has a 15 minute timer. So I wait and wait ... last few minutes on that timer so I start to get a bit nervous.
This problem could've actually been one to blame on bitcoin. It might be due to bitcoin's low transaction throughput. I haven't followed the blocksize debate but IIRC there have been lots of talk about slow transactions.
Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#37I used TransferWise last time I had to move some money internationally, and had a good experience. Significantly faster and cheaper than wiring the money.
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Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#38Transferring bitcoin when all relevant parties are using bitcoin is more efficient than transferring USD when all relevant parties are using USD. If people are presenting bitcoin as a good alternative to wire transfers then they are being misleading.
Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#39While I agree that those fees are extravagant and the underlying process should have been much easier, it probably would have been prudent to investigate the process first, before starting it. I can't imagine being unaware of fees associated with using Coinbase before perusing their services.
His overall loss, including the drop in BTC price, is 4%. I wouldn't call that extravagant.
Specifically in the context of the usage (that is, transferring USD), the fees were about 6 times what they would have been if he were to use a bank account. In the big picture I do agree with you, though. 1% fees on individual services are not a lot, even when they stack across different services.
Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin
#40Interesting article. But none of the problems described are actually with bitcoin. I see criticisms of CoinBase, WB21, TradeZero, Bitpay. All the problems were due to issues with exchanges & intermediaries and with handling USD. It seems the actual bitcoin part worked fine.
Seems like this guy should have had some idea what he was doing before he trusted $6k to it. He's also bitching about an overall 4% fee, which isn't a whole lot.
It's freaking huge when you consider a wire transfer would have been less than 1%.