| > Have you tried international money transfers? They transfer real money, immediately available upon receiving them. International money transfer follow international regulations, you can make them speedier by breaking rules, which is usually not what you want if you receive or send money abroad legally (imagine a mom receiving money from her son having to explain why she received it from unofficial crypto channels) International money transfer is insured, lost crypto are lost forever. International money transfer it's a highly regulated market users have the rights to be informed of the cost of the operation before starting it, costs also include exchange rates (the operator does the operation for you, you send X and the receiver receive dollars or pound or euros directly, crypto don't include that), taxes collected upfront (crypto skips that) and of course service fees. International money transfer also pass through IRS (or the equivalent agency there is in other countries) for amount higher than a certain threshold, to avoid money laundering. Crypto skips that. etc. etc. etc. That's why it costs more. But it is also more secure and less suspicious for the authorities. E-mail had no such downsides. |
Just like a Bitcoin transaction (unless you're excluding it from "real money" because of it's low adoption, but that's not a technical limitation).
> International money transfer is insured, lost crypto are lost forever.
Is it insured against your own mistake when selecting the receiver or amount? I doubt it, and that's the only way you'll lose crypto during a transfer.
> International money transfer it's a highly regulated market users have the rights to be informed of the cost of the operation before starting it, costs also include exchange rates (the operator does the operation for you, you send X and the receiver receive dollars or pound or euros directly, crypto don't include that), taxes collected upfront (crypto skips that) and of course service fees.
Actually crypto can do all that (minus the taxes) and it's actually the standard, assuming you're exchanging between different crypto-currencies and not Bitcoin -> Euro. As for taxes it's just a question of making a wallet that automatically pays the correct tax to the taxing agency address.
> E-mail had no such downsides.
E-mail definitely also skips lots of steps of snail-mail:
- It can't send any physical items
- There's no government agency monitoring your mail for tariffs evasion or other unlawful activities.
- You can't just say you don't want to receive ads by e-mail and then sue the companies that don't comply
- There's no registered mail
- Etc, we could probably come up with other limitations