Comment · Fri, October 20, 2017
How long will credit card processing be down for? I've heard it might be down for good. Is this true? And if it is, might we see the return of a number of products?
What they were answering
baronjpetor · 3 points
Well said, and I'd like to add 2 things:
If I wanted to send $100,000 to a bank account in Europe, I would need to go down to my bank and instigate a wire transfer. Then I would have to pay a $45 fee to send it, and the receiver would have to pay anywhere from $15 to $45 to receive it.
And you didn't even mention the change rate: banks don't give you the official exchange rate on currency conversion. If you want to make a USD --> EUR transaction as in your example, the receiving bank generally pulls a change rate out of their ass that's 1.5 to 3% higher than the official change rate. So that's basically $1500 to $3000 out of your initial $100000 that go to the receiving bank.
That's why when you do international transfers it's generally more interesting to make it through a currency exchange institution: they take care of the currency conversion and usually "only" charge between 0.25 and 0.5% instead of 1.5-3%. It's still a ripoff but it's the lesser of two evils.
It's a decentralized, near-instantaneous, worldwide, system of asset transfer built off math and proof of work
Spot on. However, people who never used bitcoin don't understand what these words really mean. For those who want to grab the basics of how bitcoin works I highly recommend the [Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Nick Szabo \(who might be the real Satoshi Nakamoto btw\) and Naval Ravikant](https://tim…
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
Yeah, there are so many other improvements that I did not even touch on. That's just Bitcoin. When you start to realize how Ethereum's smart contracts could be used, it gets really exciting!