[notahacker]

If it's not a decent payment method, it's not a currency. Sure, there are plenty of non-currency assets which are deficient as payment methods highly valued to investors, but they tend to have some use value or return.

Why would banks function on top of something which has no use value, generates no returns and whose sole claim to be a useful asset rests on its fungibility, which is now inferior to that of currency except in cases of regulation evasion? If people are concerned credit instruments are too risky because debtors sometimes fail to repay, it makes no sense to swap it out of their portfolio for something with no more intrinsic value than a credit instrument but also no repayment obligations.

[grondilu]

> If it's not a decent payment method, it's not a currency.

Before bitcoin, was there any currency that was also a payment method?

I would also add that though it's not great a payment method, it's not to a degree worse than payments in euros for instance. Bank wire transfers take up to three days in Europe. I don't hear anyone stating that this undermines the value of euro as a currency.

[JumpCrisscross]

> was there any currency that was also a payment method?

Every currency has, by definition, native payment methods. (If it doesn't, it's a settlement system, not a currency.) Most simply: physical cash.

Electronic payment systems are more complicated. In some countries, consumers can directly access them. In others, e.g. the United States, consumers indirectly access the settling-in-seconds and costing-pennies Fedwire system through banks.

> Bank wire transfers take up to three days in Europe

Maximum settlement time for SEPA transfers has been 1 business day since 2012.

[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/sepa_brochure_2009en... footnote on page 20

[grondilu]

> Maximum settlement time for SEPA transfers has been 1 business day since 2012.

I had not noticed. It's still much longer than 10 minutes, isn't it?

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's still much longer than 10 minutes, isn't it?

Wrong tool for the task. Ironically, every transaction I’ve done in Europe used U.S. dollars and Fedwires, which close immediately and cost basically nothing. When people go off about petrodollars or whatever, the simple fact of American international payment superiority is often missed.

(The ECB has been taking about an always-on instantaneous system for a while [1]. I haven’t kept track of its progress.)

[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retpaym/instant/html/index.en...

[notahacker]

People have only been paying with coins for six or so millenia now...

(And of course the reason bank credit has more recently become treated as currency and accepted as electronic payment is because it's exchangeable on demand, at parity to and often instantaneously for legal tender)

[grondilu]

When you exchange coins physically, the payment method is ... your hands.

> bank credit has more recently become treated as currency

A bank credit is not a currency. The thing it is denominated into (EUR, USD, BTC...) is.

> And of course the reason bank credit has more recently become treated as currency (sic) and accepted as electronic payment

I think the real reason is that people had little to no choice in that regard.