[tomca32]

I live and work in the US, but originally I'm from Croatia. I wire money every month to my family back there.

It takes 5 work days for the wire to fully clear. Since 5 days is a full work week, it almost always bleeds over to the weekend and in reality takes 7 days.

BTC might still be a terrible system for international transactions but it's still 168 times faster than the one that exists now.

[sorbits]

> BTC might still be a terrible system for international transactions but it's still 168 times faster than the one that exists now.

It is 168 times faster than what you currently use.

There are services like TransferWise who specialize in fast international money transfers.

I could imagine that part of your delay is because the bank your family use (in Croatia) does not themselves handle international transfers, so they go through an intermediary bank, only adding delays.

I have often done ~12 hours international wires from Wells Fargo (U.S.) to Asia, and here the delay could simply have been due to the time zone.

Within the European Monetary Zone I often see money arrive in 10-30 minutes (crossing borders).

[tomca32]

That's a fair comment. I don't use Transferwise, rather just wire money via Chase Bank to an IBAN account. You are right that there is an intermediary bank involved in the process.

Also yes, within Europe, an IBAN to IBAN transfer is pretty much instantaneous. However US is not in the IBAN system, so that's a different story.

There are probably multiple reasons why the transfer takes a week, but the spirit of my comment was that an hour long (at worst) transaction time for BTC is actually very fast if you look at it through the international money transfer lens.

[omegaworks]

My worry is that we will continue to see the pace of international money transfers increase as competition, trust and infrastructure improves. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is limited structurally by the very mechanism that guarantees its accuracy. Today miners burn 77Kwh of energy to mine the block that records your transaction[1]. Sure hashing tech might get more efficient, but the block mining complexity increases to keep their discovery rate constant at one every 10 minutes[2]. This does not set a cap on the energy usage of mining for the network.

1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electr...

2. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

[brianobush]

Staking (for Ethereum 2.0) will be the mechanism over the current proof of work method. This will reduce the energy cost significantly by removing the requirement of mining.

[omegaworks]

How do people plan on transitioning? Bitcoin holders will find themselves unable to transact their coin if miners move to Ethereum en masse.

[brianobush]

I wouldn't consider TransferWise fast. I used to send money to Canada from the US and it took a day or so for verification and settlement.

[africanboy]

honest question: what's the advantage of bitcoins over amazon gift cards (or any other prepaid credit)?

they are immediate, cheap and can be exchanged for real money for free.

[tomca32]

I don't know. I never tried doing that. Amazon is pretty useless in Croatia so that probably wouldn't work, but there might be some prepaid cards that would.

I don't know, haven't explored that option honestly.