[u678u]

No if you have millions or billions basic wire transfers are instant and cheap. It is more interesting for if you have a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, where a $10-$50 fee is significant. Or you want to bypass regulations or bureaucracy eg send money to a friend in Argentina or Lebanon which have currency controls.

[whatshisface]

Bitcoin's use as a way of bypassing currency controls is one of the best arguments against it, because governments, already prone to suspicion towards anything that might upset their monetary policy, will have no quarter towards anything that upsets their laws.

[Alupis]

That, and folks like Elon Musk perpetrating blatant Pump 'n Dump Schemes[1].

Eventually it'll be regulated after a bunch of opportunistic "investors" get hosed - which ironically, will make the dump even worse.

[1] https://www.valuethemarkets.com/2021/02/09/if-dogecoin-is-a-...

[cacarr]

The dump doesn't seem to have happened yet, though. DOGE has stabilized at about $.07, down from ~$.08.

[red_trumpet]

That's just not true. Every Bitcoin transaction is conserved in the blockchain, so a government can easily reconstruct the money flow.

[smartties]

And the transactions made on the exchange ? and decentralized exchange ? Can they all be tracked and reconstructed ?

[faffe]

BTC is not anonymous. In theory, it is possible to track all the transactions. That the main reason why others crypto like Monero or Dash had emerged

[heavyset_go]

Pretty sure exchanges need to follow KYC laws.

[anonisko]

https://twitter.com/JackMallers/status/1346867753253220356

[ur-whale]

> basic wire transfers are instant and cheap

This is woefully incorrect. Wire transfers are neither instant nor cheap, depending on the source and destination country.

If you wire from US to US, or EU to EU, they yeah, maybe.

The moment you move large sums across borders, especially to /from countries that aren't in the US's "good guys" list (as dumb and childish as that sounds, this is typical language in USistan for politicians and media), things gets very tricky.

[heavyset_go]

It costs a few dollars to transfer money via Western Union, and the receiver can pick up the money almost instantly.