[lxgr]

I'm in Germany as well, and bank to bank transfers across Europe (not just Germany) usually take either 1-2 seconds (when both banks support SEPA Instant) or a few hours otherwise.

Both methods are significantly cheaper (usually free) than Bitcoin transaction fees at the moment. As a concrete example, EUR withdrawals from Coinbase to a SEPA bank account are both faster and cheaper than BTC withdrawals to a wallet at this point.

If a transfer takes any more than two full business days (IIRC), one of the banks involved is out of SEPA compliance.

The only thing that _really_ slows down bank to bank transfers is when your payment gets flagged for review for security or compliance reasons, but arguably, both also benefit you (as a customer not wanting to lose money or a citizen not wanting to indirectly cover the effects of somebody else's tax evasion or money laundering). In my experience, this also happens very rarely, but performance of this can vary from bank to bank.