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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

#81

Post by rndmind »

zajd wrote: post #28
jstanley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is it's perfectly possible to use Bitcoin on your own without dealing with intermediaries. But you can't send cash over the internet.

I find it amusing that you consider the internet "on your own" like there isn't a gigantic investment being made into that infrastructure that even enables bitcoin in the first place. Do people who are in to Bitcoin think intermediaries solely exist to extract value from transactions? There's actually a service being provided.

The argument here is that the protocol itself is independent and can run on the internet like bittorrent, IRC, SMTP, XMPP etc. This is not about the physical laws and resources governing the internet.

Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

#82

Post by daveloyall »

brassic wrote: post #78

He is missing 55 cents because WB21 appear to be miscalculating the fee. They add 1% to the transfer amount ($5500) to get a total ($5555), and then take 1% from that ($55.55) as their fee. In other words, their fee is really 1.01%. If the author can be bothered he should explain this to them and ask for his 55 cents back.

Superman 3

Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

#83

Post by aidenn0 »

adrusi wrote: post #38

Transferring 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.

If bitcoins can't compete with wire transfers, then how will bitcoin ever become mainstream? The world isn't going to switch to bitcoin overnight, so there will be a period of time in which bitcoin will need to be converted to other currency at one or both ends.

Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

#84

Post by School-Cotton »

_xhok wrote: post #69
loeg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open a brokerage account, click BUY, enter AAPL. That's about it. :-) Fun fact: brokerage accounts were easier to open in 2005 before the recent more stringent money laundering regulation.

Oh. Is opening a brokerage account that easy?

yes.

Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

#86

Post by loeg »

vonmoltke wrote: post #71
loeg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you love the simplicity and lack of informed investment Robinhood represents, you'll love slot machines too. Put money in, pull lever, boom. If you don't know enough to stock pick, buy the index.

> If you don't know enough to stock pick, buy the index. While I am in general agreement with your position, I see statements like this frequently when stock trading comes up. References to the market or the index. There isn't one, monolithic tradable "market". Rather there are dozens of different index views of the broader market, some of which are better than others. If you know so little about stock trading that y…

Yes, that was an oversimplification. I had typed it as 'buy indices' but decided that would require explaining which indices, and I didn't want to get into that rabbit hole. And I didn't want to look like a shill for some particular vendor's fund. In any case, some concrete examples are VTI, VXUS, and BND/VTEB.

Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

#87

Post by zajd »

daptaq wrote: post #79
zajd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well let me be the first to invite bitcoiners to rejoin us back in reality where the internet isn't. If the entire argument of the bitcoin community is "providing an alternative to fiat currency" and they can't, what's even the point? The internet IS NOT neutral. Never has been, never will be.

Could you elaborate ob your last point? Regarding the first point: To my understating, as a Ex-Bitcoiner, the whole point is a massive distrust in financial institutions + the idea that the whole hierarchy of banks and clients seems superfluous, and could be done away with. Insted of giving up your responsibilities that you get by having money, you take them into your own hand, leaving banks and the similar with noth…

It's more or less that all value created from Bitcoin only exists because of the fiat currency systems in place today. It's not like banks hold your money for days when transferring for no reason.

Trust is a social problem and simply cannot be solved via technology because the infrastructure that technology is built on cannot be neutral... we live on a planet with limited resources. If your master plan includes chopping down the tree that holds your treehouse... sounds pretty terrible. Look at international politics to see what "neutrality" in the real world looks like. It's just power dynamics that are outside our control. Is that really what we want out of our financial system?

You see the same thing in the eth community thinking they can use "code" to solve the problem of trust. You can't. Lawyers have been trying for millenia. Bitcoiners are going to need a much more compelling reason/feature than they do now if they want any sort of widescale-adoption (and beyond that, to avoid being smashed when the illegal activities that take place on the network force someone to care)

Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

#88

Post by zajd »

rndmind wrote: post #81
zajd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amusing that you consider the internet "on your own" like there isn't a gigantic investment being made into that infrastructure that even enables bitcoin in the first place. Do people who are in to Bitcoin think intermediaries solely exist to extract value from transactions? There's actually a service being provided.

The argument here is that the protocol itself is independent and can run on the internet like bittorrent, IRC, SMTP, XMPP etc. This is not about the physical laws and resources governing the internet.

The protocol cannot be separated from the physical infrastructure required to carry it out. Until Bitcoin separates from the internet itself and shows it can actually fund the infrastructure required to maintain it... don't see what the pull is.

Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

#89

Post by AsyncAwait »

hackcasual wrote: post #74
AsyncAwait wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems the actual fiat currency part worked fine. I don't think Bitcoin is made at will out of thin air like flat currency routinely is. You can still argue that this is not a problem with flat currency itself, but the problem is, unlike Bitcoin, the laws regarding printing and production of flat currency are not governed by hard-to-break math.

But it's not really based on math. A majority of miners could decide, say after the next halvening that future block rewards should be held as is. Sure, it would split the network, but a majority of miners may decide it's in their economic interest to do so.

I guess I could have phrased it better, but the point is that the majority of the network needs to decide something and the enforcement of the decided upon rules is based on math, rather than good morals.

Re: It’s easier and cheaper to use bank wires than Bitcoin

#90

Post by zajd »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #61
zajd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting article. But none of the problems described are actually with fiat currency. I see criticisms of the Fed, Banks, Credit Card Companies, Credit Unions. All the problems were due to issues with exchanges and intermediaries and with handling USD. It seems the actual fiat currency part worked fine.

> It seems the actual fiat currency part worked fine. I don't think Bitcoin is made at will out of thin air like flat currency routinely is. You can still argue that this is not a problem with flat currency itself, but the problem is, unlike Bitcoin, the laws regarding printing and production of flat currency are not governed by hard-to-break math.

Unfortunately for Bitcoin all of the issues 99% people have with fiat currency today have literally nothing to do with how money is created. Yes, it's a difficult problem to solve. No, Bitcoin has not solved it. Piggybacking on the electrical grid to turn "fairness" into "how much electricity you can afford"... how is that fair?
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