If you want to claim this works, you will need to actually show what exact steps to take, and what fees that will cost, to transfer money into my hand.
Sure. You can generate a solana keypair with solana-keygen[0] or using a wallet such as Sollet[1] or Phantom[2]. Then, if you share your address, I can send you USDC. I will pay a fee of less than a penny worth of native tokens for the transaction, which will settle in seconds. I will also pay about 20 cents worth of native tokens to create the USDC account associated with your solana address, but this cost only occurs once. Additional sendings of USDC will not incur this cost of about 20 cents. In fact, the about 20 cents worth of native token will be recoverable by you! If you move all the USDC out of that account, then you can delete the USDC account and receive the native tokens that were locked up to pay for storage of its data.
As an aside, an upcoming update to the software that runs this particular slow database will greatly lower the cost per byte of permanent storage such as the USDC account discussed above.
If you want to obtain dollar bills in your hand, I guess you'd need to also go to a bank and a crypto exchange or something. But this is a really general-purpose gotcha, like if I told you Japanese yen were worth money and you asked me how to get dollars in hand, then you'd probably have to go to a third party to fix your problem of having Japanese yen instead of dollars, and you'll probably have to go to their branch with your ID and do a bunch of paperwork if you don't have an existing relationship with them. You'd be in even more trouble if I gave you a Japanese transit card with a stored balance of Japanese yen on it, because then the process for recovering the yen would involve showing up in person to a certain office in Japan, and the fee implicit in all this (buy card -> load yen on card -> redeem card for yen) would be a backbreaking couple dollars. But I think it would be silly to deny that you are in posession of yen if you have such a transit card, and silly to deny that you are in posession of USDC tokens that entitle you to dollars held by Circle (supposedly invested in US treasuries) if you control a keypair that controls the USDC.
Yes, you need to include all the steps, from dollars in the hand of the sender to local currency in the hand of the receiver. That is what Wells Fargo offers, and you want to compare to them, you need to provide the same service.
Of course you can charge less if you do less of the work. But that is meaningless. Tell us the actual fees from money in hand to money in hand.
> Tell us the actual fees from money in hand to money in hand.
Why? Do you pay for everything in cash? Most things I buy I cannot pay for in cash, so it seems silly to go out of my way to make my funds less useful temporarily.
For most people, the first step to getting dollars in hand from Wells Fargo is a decades-long immigration process. Should we count that?
I am enjoying imagining you telling your brokerage or your bank that you don't want entries in their databases, you want cash!!! It is less enjoyable to imagine you falling victim to civil asset forfeiture for self-custodying cash though.
Edit: Anyway, the additional steps for you as the recipient, after you have a checking account at a US bank and KYCed account at FTX, are that you would send the USDC to your FTX account, then you would request a wire transfer from FTX to your US bank, and you would pay less than a penny in fees for the first step and $0 for the second step. Then you would physically go to your bank or ATM, which probably costs like $50 worth of your time or something, and get the cash.
Edit again: The reverse process, I don't know much about it because I don't generally keep all my funds in physical dollars, but I think it also costs $0. It certainly could cost more depending on the details of banking and crypto exchange regulation in the countries involved though. For example, FSA-regulated crypto exchanges in Japan do not accept USDC deposits, and the one I am registered at but have not used yet will charge me 250 JPY for a domestic wire withdrawal.
Do you buy anything in actual blockchain currency? Say, tomatoes?
What happens in the next crypto crash, with exchange risk being huge, and then you can't buy tomatoes because they're denominated in a stable currency not linked to your crypto?
I buy tomatoes with Japanese yen. Obtaining that Japanese yen is a cumbersome and expensive process which I mentioned elsewhere in this comments section[0]. I am the CEO of an automated trading firm, which involves paying for various professional services, usually by wire transfer, which is also cumbersome and expensive. When possible, I pay for things and accept payments in actual blockchain currency, because it is dramatically cheaper and more convenient, but this is admittedly not the norm.
In the event of a decline in the market price of cryptocurrencies, I sort of expect USDC to still be worth about 1 dollar.
I don't think it's unreasonable to describe myself as a backend engineer if I have 10 years of experience in that role and write backend code at my current job. Do you?
Lol Term Capital Management is a mutual fund registered in the Cayman Islands. Apparently you can email them if you'd like to hear more, probably because it is illegal for this type of fund to advertise to potential clients.
Sure, then you get a wire from FTX and you pay $0 and you don't bother going to an ATM.
Some people would like to tell you "It's a temporary bug that you can pay for stuff with database entries at your bank or at PayPal but not database entries on this particular slow distributed database," but I don't have to tell you that to get the sum of the fees to be less than a penny here.
Actual money from sender to receiver was covered in my original post - receiving SPL USDC is receiving actual money. But see below for what to do the fantasy world in which is it not.
If you deposit to FTX via ACH that costs $0. If you send yourself SPL USDC from FTX that costs $0. If you send someone else SPL USDC that costs less than half a penny. If that person sends SPL USDC to FTX that costs less than half a penny. If that person withdraws USD from FTX via wire transfer that costs $0. The sum of these figures is less than a penny. As I've written upthread, this might not work out exactly the same way depending on your choice of exchange, country, and bank.
The argument was, cryptocurrency is good for remittances. Remittance is mostly used to send money to people who actually need to use it to buy things. You need to get that money into a form that is actually usable.
Maybe not less than a penny, but $0.20–0.35 on the cheapest Ethereum L2 rollups [1]. That'll drop by almost an order of magnitude more in the short-term if/when the calldata gas fee reduction EIP passes (could be medium-term if it doesn't get implemented before the merge).
Long-term, it should drop to fractions of a cent once sharding is implemented. But, that's years away and hardly relevant.
What steps did I skip? Some exchanges already allow withdrawals to L2s, and Coinbase is working on it. Once social recovery wallets like Argent start to onboard users directly to L2 (zkSync), L1 might as well not exist for the regular Joe since it's completely abstracted away.
The situation for current L1 users is obviously different, but those people probably aren't the most fee-sensitive users anyway, since sending money with $5+ fees is hardly viable for so-called everyday use.
The user you're replying to would like you to include depositing and withdrawing money at crypto exchanges, because they believe database entries at banks and PayPal are money and database entries at crypto exchanges are not.
I don't understand. Is the trick in your question the fact that you're inevitably paid in fiat and you have to buy crypto, thus proving that crypto is useless as a currency?
The topic is remittances, and the claim is that cryptocurrencies are good at them.
Remittances are when a person in one country sends money to another person in a different country. Usually, the first person works to earn wages, and sends them back home to their family, who use them to pay for living expenses.
To do this, you need to go from money in hand to money in hand. Anything else is useless. Again, the claim is that cryptocurrency is good at this. If you want to claim that it is, you have to actually show how to do that exact thing.
The original claim I am responding to is "International remittances in seconds for less than a penny".
That, in any reasonable reading, would mean that the sum of all feels required to do "international remittance" would be less than a penny. This is clearly not true.
The claim that one small part of the fees is actually less than a penny is not really relevant to this.
Absolutely not, in any way.
If you want to claim this works, you will need to actually show what exact steps to take, and what fees that will cost, to transfer money into my hand.
Because there are a LOT of fees in that process.