[Cryptography] Banks are not all the same, My Identity definitely not Satoshi Nakamoto

[iang]

On 16/10/2024 00:23, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that efc--- via cryptography <efc at disroot.org> said:
>>> But more to the point, #2 is actually banking without KYC or AML. ...
>> To give you some background. I'm a business owner, and my programmer I
>> hired was based in the US with a neo-bank. That made it impossible
>> (apparently) for my bank to transfer to his bank, and the cost was about
>> 50 EUR as well. When the transfer didn't go through due to unspecified and
>> unexplained reasons, we resorted to crypto, and it worked like a charm.
> I believe you, but you're overgeneralizing from "one bank is lousy."


The generalisation here is that the US banking system is lousy. Most 
foreign banks are more or less equivalently bad, US is a special bad 
category all of its own.


> The US is a large economy with, for historical reasons, a lot of small banks.
> Most Americans never send or receive foreign payments, and our small banks, which
> includes all the neobanks, are clueless about them. So don't ask a small US bank
> to do international transactions.


Yes, these are all FFT - for further credit - banks if I get the acronym 
right.


> It is not hard to find fast cheap international transfers. My current favorite
> is Wise, formerly Transferwise. For example, I can send €1000 from an account in
> France to my account in the US for €6. It typically clears the next day, and they
> guarantee an exchange rate within a fraction of a percent of the wholesale rate.
> This works to any US bank since they send the money with a domestic US ACH
> transfer, and from any European bank that can do € IBAN transfers.


They must have fixed their issues then, as last time I tried (a couple 
of years ago now) they could not send to any banks in the US except the 
largest. Literally, only those with direct International payment 
incoming instructions, no FFC banks, which was the vast majority by number.


> Wise is not alone here, competing with others like XE and CurrencyFair. If you
> think you need crypto for this, you're not paying attention. (Well, you might if
> you're in Russia or Iran, but that's a separate issue.)


Good there is competition, but I also noticed that Wise choked on 
numbers as low as $3k which is why I ultimately had to stop using them. 
When paying programmers (and that's what I had to do) 3k is a bad month 
bc it's too low....

For the squeaky clean, there's plenty of solutions.  For everything 
else, there's crypto.


iang


ps; dragged it back to crypto in the end ;) ;)