[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.