[Normati]

That won't be wire transfers, that'll be some kind of local interbank transfer. A wire transfer is still complicated (paper forms), slow and expensive to send to other countries.

You also have to give your name and address to the recipient bank to somehow prove you're not laundering money or funding terrorism.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The UK has some of the worst banking in the developed world - not the best.

The quick-transfer system is only available for certain transactions. Most payments still take a while, and anything that involves a paper cheque still takes at least a week.

As for money laundering and terrorism - it's been proven over and over that it's easier to get a bank account for both than it is to get a bank account as an average Joe.

Not a few banks are knowingly involved in illegal transactions of one kind or another. So giving Bitcoin a hard time for the same thing is hypocritical.

Banks are certainly going to be killed by a global digital currency sooner or later, but it's going to need some kind of independent OpenMoney initiative.

BC is not that initiative, because the creators seemed to believe that starting a digital goldrush was more important than creating a rock-solid and secure peer to peer infrastructure for all transactions.

I doubt banks will still be around fifty years from now. In an all-digital economy they're not just parasitic, they're irrelevant.

[jtbigwoo]

If you're a business with the right initial approvals, you can initiate wire transfers online. There are all sorts of monitoring and checks that the run in the background, but an innocuous wire can go end-to-end without little or no human intervention. It's just folks like you and me who rarely send wires and have to go through all the paperwork.

[matt4077]

It's called a "wire" transfer for a reason. In the EU, they take a day and are free.