You have a point in the case of a volatile cryptocurrency: if 1 MOB is worth USD 10 one day and USD 1 the next, nobody will want to keep their MOB, so you have one bank transfer for one MOB transfer. It sucks.
If MOB becomes less volatile over time, you could imagine people having USD 100 in MOB that they would trade for small debts, and they could be fine leaving this sum in MOB. In this case, you'd have several MOB transfers for just a few bank transfers, and it'd be an improvement.
How stable they'll manage to make it, frankly I can't say, I believe it's still an open problem for them.
> In this case, you'd have several MOB transfers for just a few bank transfers, and it'd be an improvement.
It'd be less inconvenient that a worse cryptocurrency, but more inconvenient than hitting a button in your bank app (the uk has instant transfers already).
I should have been clearer with the IBAN point. In particular I was not talking about people outside of the banking system. I'll respond here to most replies I got so far.
What I meant is that you need the IBAN of the person you want to send money to (of course you need to have an IBAN, as in, you need a bank account for your MOB to be actually worth anything). Assuming Alice and Bob are contacts on Signal, and Alice wants to send money to Bob, Alice still has to ask for Bob's IBAN. We can safely assume that Bob does not know his IBAN by heart, and has to use his ebanking app (for instance).
You already have some kind of identifier for Bob, Signal would allow you to reuse it. Some ebanking apps already allow you to do that, but I think in most cases both have to be clients at the same bank (?)
The idea is that you have less friction. The chat would be something like:
> B: can you send me 5 USD
> A: sure, here it is
> A sent you N MOB, equivalent to 5 USD.
Of course the UX is still far from being there (volatility is the biggest problem I think).
These are standard things people have when they are savvy enough to own a mobile phone. In UK/EU they don't solve a problem tiny bit but rather make it more risky because of volatility and more difficult abs expensive to cash out.
If MOB becomes less volatile over time, you could imagine people having USD 100 in MOB that they would trade for small debts, and they could be fine leaving this sum in MOB. In this case, you'd have several MOB transfers for just a few bank transfers, and it'd be an improvement.
How stable they'll manage to make it, frankly I can't say, I believe it's still an open problem for them.