Have you transferred money across borders to an individual lately?
As much as I want to criticize this FB is probably in an excellent position to navigate the kyc minefields.
And FBcoin won't make it any easier, capital controls in India and China won't just go away (not that FB is even allowed in China). Centralized entities will be regulated to maintain the status quo.
>Do you think it's as easy for those in India, China, or Kenya, for instance?
Actually yes. Take a look at xoom.com and it's competitors for example (flat rate money transfers at a fraction of swift fees). Only issue is getting money out of those countries. But that is a political and national issue.
Are people actually using BTC in Venezuela, or do they just claim to be from Venezuela, and are asking for donations into their wallet?
> Or for people without a bank account?
I'm having strong doubts that you actually understand how the world banks. There are hundreds of millions of people who don't have bank accounts, and use electronic payments through their cell providers.
You’re right. I find it stupendously easy to move money within/into Kenya.
I can easily pay a street seller from my US bank account, directly to his/her phone, in seconds.
Pains me to say this because I had this international bank/credit card to M-Pesa transfers idea a decade ago, a professor dissuaded me from pursuing it.
5 years later, a bunch of services launched and many are thriving.
Both the US and the eurozone are kind of single market currency unions where you would expect money transfers to be relatively convenient. As soon as you make a transfer outside of the EU you'll get hit by arbitrary and outrageous correspondent bank fees and delays. Payment services like TransferWise's "borderless accounts" get around this by pooling capital in various banks internationally, matching transfers against each other, etc.
It totally depends on the source and destination of the transfer. My girlfriend's small art house cinema recently transferred money to pay a filmmaker for festival participation and the correspondent bank fee was something like 60 euros on a 100 euro transfer.
So instead of a 60 euro fee, they need to spend ~.5-1.5 hours walking the director through how to set up a wallet and how to turn the internet money into actual hard currency? For someone that isn't already familiar, using bitcoin isn't exactly the most user-friendly experience.
SEPA is okay, but it's typically not "same business day". Just this week I initiated a transfer on Tuesday and it only arrived Thursday morning. This was between two Belgian accounts.
N26 is German. Revolut is London based but has an ECB license.
Yes, the SEPA scheme is old and working only during business days according to the TARGET2 calendar, but you definitely can process a transfer within a couple hours (my online stock broker does).
It creates a burden for people in that they have to do more paperwork. That time could have been spent on productive economic activity instead.
On another level, why should the state have a list of my accounts at all? It already sees all the accounts at banks within their territory. They don't need to concern themselves with accounts outside their jurisdiction.
In the context of income taxes, it should be enough to report total earnings, regardless of which specific account holds them.
The N26 app is garbage. Revolut is OK, but it's a money changing service, not a bank. I did a transfer from the Revolut account and it took 3 days. Topping up is fast because it charges your card, rather than doing a transfer.
The Transferwise borderless account is pretty good, at least I much prefer it to Revolut - since SEPA transfers happen same day, the app is better and the debit card is free.
Have you transferred money across borders with good recommendations lately?
Sending money across borders is historically super complex and expensive, you're right. The WorldBank estimates that it costs an average of 8% in total fees (transfer fees + exchange rate mark-up) to transfer money internationally.
For international transfers with banks and cash-based money transfers, this is still true.
But, in the last 10 years, we've seen hundreds of new online money transfer operators innovating in the field (way before crypto) starting with Xoom in the first wave and then TransferWise, Remitly, WorldRemit, InstaRem, Azimo and hundreds of others...
Don't know about Monito but I've used TransferWise many times. First it's not straight forward, it takes time (several days), and it's freaking expensive. These numbers you quote are pretty far from what I spend when transferring money between France, the UK and the US.
> Have you transferred money across borders to an individual lately?
Yes, frequently. Using TransferWise or FairFx, depending on where the recipient was, but inclusive of Thailand, USA, Ecuador, and Canada. The process was entirely painless, fast, and the transfer was cheap as chips, while bringing to bear the full weight of European bank regulations to protect me as a customer.
> The process was entirely painless, fast, and the transfer was cheap as chips, while bringing to bear the full weight of European bank regulations to protect me as a customer.
I wish more people on HN would understand the importance of this. I've said it here before but I think it's worth repeating. Banks want to send your money internationally and, as you've said, are more than capable of sending your money quickly and cheaply. Any time an international bank transfer is a pain in the ass it's by design to protect consumer interests and/or to protect government interests. There's a reason you can't just rock up to the teller at Wells Fargo and send $1,000 to North Korea the same way you can if you needed to send $1,000 to Canada.
I used TransferWise once a few years ago from USD to CAD and it cost ~1.4% all-in. That's cheaper than my bank but still very expensive if you're transferring your whole salary every pay period like I was. I ended up using Bitcoin instead.
Sidestep regulations - if you build a system that doesn't allow you to do certain things (e.g. change balances at will), then the government cannot force you to do them.
But again - it's not about regulations. It's about interoperability. Centralised money transfer stuff is not new (PayPal? Banks?), the problem with it was always integration with other systems.
Also, if it's a centralised database, it's hard to build real startups on top of it. Look at what happened to startups building on top of Twitter APIs when Twitter decided to change them. If you build some parts on top of a public blockchain, it gives guarantees related to accessibility of those parts in the future.
fair call, considering it's all permissioned, to pathetically argue the point I don't really care much for:
I guess you could claim some sort of providence of money movements using a git like system but realistically I think it's likely the marketing department had far more to do with the decision than the engineering dept.
You only have to look at wechat's dominance thoughout Asia to realise whatapp could get absolutely blown away by the all-in-one messenger/payment system if it took off in the West.
>My question was "what does blockchain bring to the table compared to a regular database?".
You cannot compare blockchain with a regular database. A blockchain is more like an append-only store, or a WORM drive where each "file" or "record" is digitally authenticated and signed/hashed in a way to make undetectable modifications extremely difficult and/or expensive.
I can almost guarantee you that regulators will step in and regulate the living crap out of this system if it's found to be actively used for high rates of cross-border transfers and foreign exchange. Governments are a lot smarter than people give them credit for. Once the regulation kicks in, all of a sudden the value of this diminishes greatly.
