I just wired money from my brokerage account to my checking account at a different institution. It happened in thirty minutes and I was charged no fees. Digital cash has been the bulk of cash for many, many years.
That meets the /digital/ criteria but not the /cash/ criteria. consider that there are banks and accounts that you can't wire to, or that an account can be frozen. cash & bitcoin don't suffer this. there are a number of desirable properties that bitcoins have, and some downsides as well - digital is only half the equation.
Yeah I remember reading that around 80% of the world's currency is now digital. Although I think the key word in the original comment was "true". As in, it is the first currency that is entirely digital, which before bitcoin wasn't possible. Regardless of how valuable you think that notion is, it's still a very interesting technological development.
> [Bitcoin] is the first currency that is entirely digital, which before bitcoin wasn't possible
It is absolutely possible. Sweden is close to achieving it [1]. The hurdle isn't technological. People like physical cash. Consider the shitstorm that would erupt in America if the Treasury announced it would stop printing and minting physical currency.
> it's still a very interesting technological development
Fair enough, although "entirely digital" has broader implications than whether the currency itself is physical. It's more that the backing of the currency is digital. In Sweden's case, the backing is still the government. And there are physical representations of crypto in the form of QR codes and such.
> I live in the US and don't pay fees on transfers between my brokerage account and checking account. They take a few days to clear though
They're probably doing an ACH [1] transfer, which is net settled [2]. They take longer but are cheaper than wires. Fedwires, once transmitted from the sending institution, take seconds to be received [3]. They're real-time gross settled [4], i.e. faster but costlier [5]; many institutions waive (i.e. eat) these fees for clients with more than ~$50,000.
[5] Why? Because they're immediate and irrevocable. The first part means the bank has to use actual funds on hand, versus hoping a countervailing transfer cancels out the work or letting a profitable (relatively speaking) investment pay out. The second part means mistakes are more resource-consuming.
I can give an example, at Chase bank in the United States, if your account balance is over $65k in your combined checking + savings accounts, or you have an investment portfolio through them via Chase Private Client of at least $250k, all wires are free.
Typically if the sending institution or receiving institution maintains a nostro account at the other end of the transaction, they'll process the transfer immediately.
> Had you wired that money from Coinbase, you'd still be waiting for it months later.
While this may be the case in some wire transfers into Coinbase/GDAX, this is certainly not the case in all cases. I've made three wire transfers of differing amount within the past three months and in each case the funds were deposited into my Coinbase account within 36 hours. Two close associates of mine have had similar experiences depositing via wire transfer in the mid- and late-December, 2017 time frame.
Granted, I have not deeply investigated all of the "my wire transfer has been pending for multiple [days/weeks/months] and still hasn't been deposited" complaints I've read on Reddit or the Coinbase forums, so it could be that I'm an unusual case vs. the norm.
