ACH is free to the user, convenient, safe, well understood, and the energy requirements aren't insane.
Any banks foolish enough to process cryptocurrency transactions will have to meet all the same banking requirements for anti-moneylaundering, anti-terrorism, rogue states, etc. These sort of requirements are part of the reason for delays. International transactions can also get delayed because of shoddy foreign banking servers which may simply be down.
All of these problems remain, but an additional constraint of requiring consensus and hashing is imposed.
This is a version of second system syndrome where even the naive variant doesn't sound good on paper.
Agreed that crypto and banking seem like oil and water for the issues you mentioned.
ACH is far from safe. The keys are printed on every check, the transactions aren't reversible, the settlement times are practically untenable for business. I've sold and bought payroll services, charged my customers with ACH, paid vendors with ACH, read the gawdawful spec, and I haven't much good to say about it, other than it mostly works, and enough people know it well enough.
This explains the 30% 24hr growth of Stellar. Stellar has been working in this area for years and is built to facilitate exactly these types of transactions. I think they are probably the best positioned to take this on.
Also, Stellar USDC support was already slated for February.
Definitely not. Ethereum is on top of the DeFi world, for sure. But DeFi is not CeFi. As an analogy: DeFi is to smart contracts as CeFi is to “dumb” contracts. The legal entity behind Stellar has significantly more of the latter than the entity behind Ethereum--which has none, to my knowledge. ... Plus, gas fees. It's currently cheaper to wire money than to send some ETH.
> Plus, gas fees. It's currently cheaper to wire money than to send some ETH.
Wrong. If all you wish for Christmas is to send some ETH, look no further than into ZK-Rollups such as zkSync & Loopring.
1) A transfer costs around $0.01 in fees.
2) ZK-Rollups are not sidechains. These are layer 2 solutions that settle on Ethereum with a novel trust model of 1-of-N: you only need to trust that a single node is honest!
3) Exchanges (such as Coinbase) would eventually support depositing/withdrawing to a rollup, which means most folks would never need to interact the expensive base layer directly.
Sending money across countries has never been cheaper, faster & as secure as it is now on an Ethereum ZK-Rollup.
Replacing a currency beholden to people through government, fiat, namely world-reserve USD, with one that is beholden only to who owns it and who owns the most cutting-edge computing power, what could possibly go wrong?
These are generally not considered features of Bitcoin.