[ForHackernews]

The US ACH system is extremely slow and still involves nightly batch jobs.

Many other countries have systems that allow for nearly immediate person-to-person money transfer without blockchains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service This is not a good argument for cryptocurrency.

Regarding "trusting" an algorithm: in the real world you also have to trust the implementation, and the configuration, and eventually humans involved in the transaction. How often do we see some big data breach on HN? Very rarely has any cryptographic algorithm been broken, but often one of the other links in the trust chain has broken.

[rhlsthrm]

> Very rarely has any cryptographic algorithm been broken, but often one of the other links in the trust chain has broken.

The whole point of Ethereum is to reduce/eliminate those links in the trust chain.