Right, because an immigrant working in the US and helping their family to buy a house in their home country is exactly the same as being a drug dealer.
Even though I could just tell you that blindly following rules is a trait of morons and authoritarians who have a control fetish, or go on a diatribe about "legal != moral"... notice how I didn't say anything about not following the rules. The point was about the cost of doing large transfers with crypto vs a traditional bank or currency exchange shop. You can report the crypto transactions just the same, you know?
(Maybe it is time to change HackerNews' name to something more reflective of the current audience. What do you think of "Conformist 'R Us"?)
Of course you didn't say explicitly, you implied it... since if you add the bureaucratic costs of international money transfers, then crypto is much more expensive than a wire transfer, it would make absolutely no sense to use crypto if you followed the rules.
> since if you add the bureaucratic costs of international money transfers it will be more expensive
That is plain, utterly, provably wrong. You have no idea of what kind of fees a bank will charge to exchange a wire of tens of thousands of dollars.
> it would make absolutely no sense to use crypto if you followed the rules.
Some of the rules are very specific at about the source and means of the funds. E.g, some taxes in Brazil are applied only for purchases done through credit cards. Others apply for financial operations between different banks. It is not illegal (and much less immoral) to know about the loopholes that allows you to avoid paying the exorbitant fees.
A distributed system that employs a consensus mechanism where service providers compete by wasting as much electricity as possible is provably less expensive that a centralised system where providers compete by trying to become more efficient at providing services?
Nice gaslighting. We were talking about the cost of sending a transaction vs the fees that a bank will charge to make an international transfer.
Now, if you really want to talk about the cost of blockchains: Ethereum's transition to PoS will mean a 10000x reduction in electricity consumption. If you look at the total number of validators vs the required power to run one, the most pessimistic estimation puts the cost of securing the whole network at $8M/year. That would be less that the amount that banks spend on physical security of their armored cars alone.
Ethereum doesn't use PoS. We're not discussing science fiction or hypothetical scenarios, here. We are discussing the reality of crypto-currencies vis-a-vis the banking industry.
As I mentioned, when you remove trade barriers, such as the EU did, the cost of international transactions falls to zero. This is because 1) the technology that banks use to transfer money is efficient, and 2) competition drives prices down to the average cost per transactions (which is near zero, thanks to 1). Now, in the crypto-currency industry you do have competition among crypto-currency transmitters, but you don't have an efficient technology to transfer crypto-currencies, instead you have a technology that performs horrendously in terms of cost-effectiveness, so transacting in crypto-currencies will always be more expensive than using banks. If this is the case, why do international transactions sometimes cost more if you use a bank? I already explained, it's because governments require banks to perform a series of checks therefore incurring additional costs that they pass on to customers. Transmitters of crypto-currencies don't perform these checks, and therefore they don't incur these extra costs, but of course this results in transactions that are not compliant with financial laws and regulations, and so the end-user will likely have to spend additional money laundering the funds and evading law enforcement. If you say that you can prove me wrong (this is what 'provably' means), then prove me wrong.
There is no science fiction about PoS, the transition is well under way and it is a matter of a few months.
> when you remove trade barriers, such as the EU did, the cost of international transactions falls to zero.
See, the whole point of crypto is that it gives us a globally interconnected trade network. If I just want to send money to someone in the EU, then of course I will just use SEPA. But SEPA means absolutely jack shit for someone trying to merely send money to a place where these basic freedoms are not granted.
Why should people should put up with the artificial barriers, when there is a parallel network that can work better for them? Do you think they can just be waiting until the powers-that-be at their local sphere to reach enlightenment and remove the barriers? I think it is a lot more efficient if we continue to work on a competing alternative for the people, at the very least to keep the goverments in check.
