[pavlov]

To be clear, this is primarily a US problem.

I live in New York now, but previously I lived in Europe and UK. Bank transfers there are instant. If you want to send 20k EUR from Finland to Spain, it can be done immediately, 24/7, with minimal fees. Same in UK for GBP transactions.

So it’s perfectly possible to do this without a cryptocurrency. It takes some political will though. But then again, it also takes political will to prevent cryptocurrency exchanges from being shut down if they truly threatened central banks.

US wire transfers seem to depend entirely on goodwill of banks. I regularly send wires between Wells Fargo and Schwab, and they always complete in a few hours. Yes, it sucks that banks get away with bad service. But routing money through unregulated cryptobanks isn’t a long-term fix because the regulators will come for them.