Bitcoin Forum

Just a reminder.

From my European bank account, I can make a SEPA transfer to any other European bank account for free. No fee. Nothing to pay. It normally takes one and a half business day so BTC is faster, way faster, but that's not always the case because of the congestion. That used to be exceptional but it's getting the norm. The only way out is a higher fee, which makes BTC less appealing.

Sure, BTC remains the best option for extra-European transfers, and BTC still has the advantage of privacy by being difficult to link to one individual, but all miners and developers shall never forget there's competition out there. Banks, Paypal, Skrill... If BTC wants to be the best, it really needs to be the best.

I don't think it was ever focused on replacing the dollar. It's meant to be an alternative to government currency. And it absolutely remains a solid alternative to government controlled fiat currency. A solid alternative to government and corporate collusion. The best example is the reduction in trade volume on the three large Chinese exchanges when they colluded to raise transaction fees. That act is the very proof that bitcoin stands and succeeds as an alternative to the dollar and all other government-controlled currency.

using bitcoin is not all about the fees!
although it used to be a very nice perk of using bitcoin, but there are still so many other perks such as being your own bank, the privacy and security, and also being able to buy stuff online without giving away all your information like when you use a bank.

p.s. we have free bank transfer here too, it is similar to SEPA but with a different name and it takes up to 2 hours for free.

Not every country is Europe. Not every european country is in SEPA zone
You don't how long it will last, with Trump and Brexit and the Muslim invasions the Euro zone may be in future danger.
Banks usually charge fees for services and maintenance of the account, so overall cost probably is higher
You still have no control over your money, it can be taken or frozen or anything.
Open bank accounts is harder than set up a bitcoin address and not everyone can open bank accounts

I totally agree with it that to be on the top of the competition bitcoin must be the best. And the only way to be the best is for all miners to get a consensus of increasing the blocksize from 1mb to 8mb or more. If it will not be settled then sooner or later even if the price of bitcoin is high many will leave bitcoin due to slow confirmations and it is the start of bitcoins movement towards its end.

if you complaining about fees just imagine third world countries where the hourly wage is very very small, but still with the fees bitcoin is the best alternative for those people who don't have access to good banks/monetary system.

Where to begin ... sticking with a chronological order ...


Interesting! Which Bank? Living in the middle of this mess myself, center of Europe I would like to inquire.


True! Some of the more agressive evangelists are citing this stance, but so far never any currency has replaced another to a far extend. Not even in a failed government scenario where the local currency reached an exchange rate next to beeing utterly worthless.


True again. If I gotta trust mah moneh to a third party first, for them to transfer it to another trusted fourth party that might or might not hand it over to the recipient ... there we got down to the core of peer to peer currency concepts.


So we are in the middle of a Blockchain resizing debate  :-\ There is some growing urgend need inside my mind trying to dodge those, just sitting out the matter. Honestly I do not know why we cannot just have bigger blocks right now, as in immediately. We get bigger storage everywhere on a daily basis.

Just based upon fee, the goodness of the banking along with bitcoin cannot be compared. Bitcoin is an evolution in the technology advancement which has evolved as a payment gateway and soon after this got used in transaction purpose which got the attention of users to make bitcoin the potential alternative to banking and become the best.

Agreed. They even can co-exist with each other. But if bitcoin is
use as an alternative government currency and be embrace globally,
fee's should be minimal to an extend.

As I have said before, bitcoin is used for micro-transactions,
but if there's a huge backlog of transactions and the only
way is to increase the fee's so that your transaction will
be "prioritize, then how can you do online business with that?

its good if you can make a transfer for free but how about if you want to make transfer into other country in outside of europe? i don't think its still free because there will be any fee that you should pay and bitcoin is different than any of fiat in the world and bitcoin is giving more benefit than fiat that fiat can not do especially if this is related with fee that we should pay.

you are comparing a finished tool against a non-finished one, bitcoin still don' scale properly, when they activate segwit or hard fork to 2mb or whatever they want to do to address the scalability bitcoin will have proper fee

if you compare it to fiat and the time they need you can actually pay 10k satoshi and be very lucky that it will confirm in one dday, like sepa(actually sepa can take 3 days some time...) so 0.1 cent against free not a big deal for me

Good for you but that is not the only benefit bitcoin give to us, the posibility of being your own bank, our funds cannot be frozen, confiscated or getting a haircut, that is another advantage, prepare for those haircuts, they are coming guys.

Well on one hand yes Bitcoin assets can't be frozen, but dayum the price volatility, especially with the current Chinese government scares. I mean which price spike other than halving was not created by people with a destabilizing currency buying in (cyprus, greece, india,etc.)? IMO that's one aspect of btc that other currencies can't compete with.

I totally agree with you, the landscape surrounding the initial idea of what BTC should is changing. Now most people see BTC as an asset and not money, also greed and cabal (miners) are manipulating the transaction fee and it is getting higher and higher even when BTC price increases.

this aspect is both a downside and an upside for bitcoin if you ask me.
it is a downside because volatility always means less average Joes can come in and treat bitcoin as a currency like any other currencies out there to buy stuff.
but at the same time since bitcoin has been an investment too, the volatility can be a good thing for the day traders to make money and the more volatile it gets the more profit they can make.

Agreed with op that Europe bank transfers are free but that's Fiat money we are talking about and Bitcoin is a crypto currency. Paypal is going to take a big hit as it has stopped payments to entire ptc industry even the reputed clicksense and neobux were not spared. I had a horrible experience and trauma of loosing all my funds, so even if I need to wait I will choose Bitcoin any day. Now you say banks offer free transfer but do they give price rise like Bitcoin does no right. Bitcoin is really good and one should stick to it irrespective of the delays which I am sure will processed out someday.

first of all, thats not true for all europe, second of all as you stated there are so manny advantages for bitcoin that banks just can provide like the privacy and individuality

Oh, yes. This topic is just a wake-up call. I understand BTC's still in the works, but the scalability problem is taking way too long to fix, and segwit doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Rate of adoption has stalled, so I don't know what's next but ever rising fees do not look like a smart solution.

Something better must be done.

You have mixed some things here, Europe and EU are two different things but have many things in common.

SEPA transfers are limited only to EU countries and not for other countries that are already in Europe, if it is free then lucky you even though it take 1 day and a half.

Of course that bitcoin is faster but it can be slower if there is an blockchain attack or a stress test or if the fees are too low.

There are a  lot of reasons why people choose bitcoin over fiat, some people prefer to so transaction without entering the ID detail where it can be tracked and maybe can be used for criminal activity, when sending money using bitcoin in different country, we don't need to convert it to fiat and calculate the rate anymore, but I do agree bitcoin need to keep on doing the best so people attracted to used it for transaction

A SEPA transfer is trackable. I do not want the police to knock on my door 10 years after I did a transaction of a few thousand dollars worth to some tax-free Island. Bitcoin is not and just this is enough.

Don't underestimate the risk of a central bank failure, many people are holding bitcoin because of economic dislocations.

In my country it depends on banks, there are banks that charge commissions on Sepa transfers to other banks ( and free Sepa transfer to another account of the same bank), and banks that have always free Sepa transfers.

You know you one of the lucky people out there.... right? In many other countries, banks and remittance services are ripping people off with

outrageous fees.  >:( As you said, under normal circumstances.. Bitcoin is definitely a better option, but GREED has taken over now, and people

are milking the current situation for higher fees and to make a bigger profit. In the end... this will turn people against this technology as a

alternative to other technologies. They are just not seeing it now, because they are blinded by their own GREED.  >:(

Well, don't suppose that if Europe has no fee transactions, the rest of the world will be the same. Some countries, including mine, is causing a lot of annoyance for the people because of unreasonably high fees for transferring money. So to us, bitcoin is still an important alternative currency and it plays a huge role in international transactions. And that bitcoin is the best doesn't mean that it has no flaw. And things don't come for free, everything has its price.

I don't really care, they can be instant and easy to complete but I don't care as soon as I can be questioned at any time about the money I send or receive. Nobody asks me where does the money go to or come from when it comes to Bitcoin, but if I sent $100k through a bank I would have to declare it not to have problems later.

Bitcoin transactions cannot be tracked, that does not mean that this feature is only liked by criminals. Even normal person like me  like this fact. As you know if government knows about your transactions they will ask you proof of where this money came from and did you pay taxes on it etc. Most of people use bitcoins only to avoid taxes.

Digital payments are the need of this era and every country should focus on promoting and inculcating the habit of digital payments. I am from India and I am happy to tell that the Indian government is giving away  3400 million rupees in form of rewards for those who are using digital payments such as debit card, net banking etc. 7,000 Weekly rewards and much more.

It is also beneficial for the bitcoin as our cryptocurrency is based on 100% digital technology so I am sure in next few years, we will have strong bitcoin userbase.

I agree and am preaching almost the same lately. Even a year ago Bitcoin was all about how quick and cheap the transfers are and how this will cause mass adoption an the fall of the banks. Today banks offer also quick and cheap/free possibilities of money transfer. Not all the time, but most of us have no need to send money to a foreign country all the time.
Yes, you still control your Bitcoins and nobody can take them away. But many people are perfectly fine to not be the ones in charge of their money. Personally i can not understand this, but to some being your own bank seems to be a burden. Just look how many look for a bank or hardware wallet for safe keeping their keys.
And what about privacy? Exchange adopt more and more the KYC standards and it is getting harder to stay anonymous/pseudonymous.
Offline merchants are still not adopting Bitcoin at a scale we were dreaming about and i do not see it change quickly. Which is maybe even good, considering, that Bitcoin has some troubles with the amount of transactions it can handle.
So what is really left of all these promises? The price is still rising like crazy, but if you consider the circumstances i wonder why. I just wonder what happens if this also changes.

Bitcoin is more attractive then, this problem has discussed like 1000 times and never tipped, no act, no solution but remain argued.
Higher fees isn't problem as long as not exceed $1 USD, but block size which ended thousands of unconfirmed transaction that matter.
We're no longer enjoy fastest money transaction over the world but we have to wait for hours, maybe days just for confirmed transaction.
It is not about the fees, but how devs team and miners agreed to make bitcoin to be the best.

this is what is going to happen if the fee war continues on. transactions become more and more expensive and this will start making the currency side of bitcoin fade away and eventually disappear, making bitcoin just a luxury investment and nothing more. because people are not going to give up fiat to use something they don't understand to also pay more fees.

Can you still transfer $200M with zero fee? do you not know banks only transfer the credits and not liquid money? with bitcoin you can pay $1 to transact millions of dollars in less than 10 minutes.
Problem regarding block size if increases then miners would have consume much more electricity to mine blocks while spam transactions are included in blocks without any BTC actually moving around and the solution to avoid that is paying some high fees that is less than a dollar.

I rather pay some cents for a transaction to be able to send money all over the world without being tracked
and without waiting 2-3 days until the money arrives.. and in addition to that you dont even control your money..
The Pro's of Bitcoin are not the low transaction fees (even tho they are pretty low.. )
If its about Transaction fees.. and fast payments.. you could use PayPal... but thats well.. a horrible idea (at least in my opinion)

I can definitely see some of the logic behind a lot of the comments on how mediums such as Paypal or WU or whatever aren't necessarily good and a lot of the time, it's true, they aren't beneficial and they charge far more for their services than they should. I personally prioritize Bitcoin over other forms of wealth transfer, and it works fine for me.

Idk, a 10 cent fee or free really doesn't matter to me. I'm not using bitcoins to spend them, I'm using them as a store of wealth. So it has zero affect on me. Wood see shit your currency that's constantly worth less each year gives you free transfers. Sounds like a shitcoin to me lol!

It's in the makings. Until then one can just try to accomplish a Zerofees transfer. Two days later such a transfer has either been beating SEPA transfer times, or you need to do a bitcoin-cli abandontransaction $TXID and send again.
As often as it either works or you are growingly willing to add fees. My bank does that on SEPAs anyways, it's just that on the long term when 1 BTC == 10k EUR the current fee structur will loose ground against almost every payment method available out there.
Bitcoin still has to compete with others, this wount change for upcoming years.

Money is what money does. I want a SEPA account! Why bother with bitcoin just to get fast and cheap transactions? There's a better alternative for that. Artificially capping size of blocks limits the usefulness of the network. Bitcoin is not worth $100 in its current implementation, imho.

You are forgetting something, no body asked you to use bitcoin and no body wants your money to give the currency the value that it has currently. you can use your SEPA good for you, can you tell me if there is a safe place more than banks to store fiat?
Even when you are depending on banks to keep your money safe you are still a target for bad guys.
No one forcing us to use BTC and no one can touch our coins, we chose to use it and we are still free to use other systems as well. the point for bitcoin usefulness is in it's decentralization.

Really? Bank transfers are free and unlimited in Europe? Is it only on a specified country or it is in the whole Europe? This is my first time hearing it. But for me, it is much better to invest your money rather than to put it in banks. There are lots of things to consider such as inflation rate and withholding taxes because instead of gains, you will have loss if you put your money in the banks.

It's still pending which wounderfull bank institution offers free money transfers. One can only hope it isn't the infamous Monte dei Paschi.
Next to some tax problematic and inflation rates there are the first negative interest rates appearing "in Europe" at least south germany, only some private small bank that mostly got rich customers who don't mind that much on a negative percent. The Joe Average depositor would freak out about something like that.

it is not just Europe. there are many other countries too, in the middle east for example. the Islamic banking is pretty good too. there are no fees for majority of methods for transferring money, and they are fast and safe sometimes as fast as 1 hour to 1 day.
and it is not the question for investment, it is the argument about how can bitcoin function as a currency when using fiat can be cheaper while bitcoin fees are growing.

the problem with bitcoin is that everyone need to agree, you can't dictate alone, if you think about it's not so different than a council in the politic and any government out there, so much about decentralization...


i use deutesche bank and it is free on everything not only for sepa, but deposit, withdrawals, atm etc...

Some more details for non Europeans.

SEPA transfers are between countries from the UE (UK included) and Switzerland. I'm sure all large banks offer free transfers for individuals, when ordered online. There's only a fee if you make a transfer at the counter. I know I have to keep a minimum balance and that I must have a regular income, but requirements are low. Just below minimum wage I believe.

Also, the bank makes safety checks. I remember a substantial transfer to Spain (where I'm not living), and my bank called me to check it was really me who issued it. That could be a reason to favor BTC.

No man, situation isn't like countryfree said because I live in europe and I have to pay fees plus I have transactions limited. For example I can to pay without fee in my own currency in local banks but when I send money in usd, fee is 20$ on every transaction. Maybe he says true but it will be only in his/her country.

Why do you see the phone call to check if it was you as a point for Bitcoin? Most would consider this as a welcome safety feature that could prevent that someone transfers this without your authorization. There is no such feature in Bitcoin. Some wallets offer 2 factor authorization, which comes close. I am sure one can easily trick the banks double check, but they try. Or do you see this as privacy issue?
One more question. What about coast if you have a business account?

the bank transfer may be free ,but there are hidden costs included
most likely in a form of your taxes,also atm fees,account service fees and many other ways for you to pay for
one thing you have to realise-banks never ever operate without ripping you off,it is what they are made for
and a couple of years ago there was no debate about bitcoin vs bank transfer,which is best?
so  bitcoin adoption is moving into right direction

what hidden fees?!
all you mentioned were clear as day fees with nothing hidden. besides where i live using an ATM doesn't have any fees if you withdraw or pay your bills with the ATM machine for example paying your electric bill with the ATM machine.
the only fee there is in an ATM is when you transfer money from one account to another and that is a  fixed fee which is worth about 10 cents only.

while bitcoin has fiat and banks beat when it comes to international transfer and being your own bank it has nothing to say when it comes to day to day use and the increasing fees for the time being specially since there are not many places to spend it in/

Lucky you then. Guess it's part of their economic integration. Not sure how long it will last considering how the far-right is starting to gain power there. If I were your in situation I'd definitely use that service even if it takes a day to transfer money. Still can't beat bitcoin when sending money abroad to countries without such arrangements.


They should. Fraudsters are becoming more and more sophisticated. I wouldn't mind the bank calling me to confirm such transfers. Bitcoin might be best to ensure privacy when sending money to another address but if it does happen to be fraudulent and it got through whatever authentication is required, you won't get your money back.

luckily you are living on a good country which has a service like that if only all banks in each country can provide services like that then the world would become a better place to live. However I dont think that it has no hidden charges because banks earn profit by putting fees on their services like withdrawing fee on ATM's and such.

They are not calling it "fees" but for running an account at their institution you get billed quarterly. If you are attaching BTCs like fifty cent on a Bitcoin transfer than divide your quarterly billing by 0.50 and you will recognize the difference between free and really free.
Storing cash somewhere inside a cardboard box comes for really free, no running costs. Storing BTCs same. Handing over cash, free again (just limited distances possible). Oh by the way Bitcoin at the moment cannot jump over that hurdle of local payments requiring fees the billing cannot be adjusted according to distance. Geolocating IP adresses using the distance inside a peer 2 peer setup just ... technically impossible.

@shield132
Read my words. European SEPA transfers aren't supposed to be in US$. There are also differences between banks for the poor, and banks for the rich. In the latter, there is no limit to the money you can withdraw or transfer. My suggestion is not to have a bank account in the country you live, that's what I've been doing for years.


Yes, I was thinking about privacy, as there's no double check with BTC. So some people may not like it.
Regarding business accounts, they're all different with fees for everything. I guess that's how banks make the most of their income. They're cheap to individuals but expensive for businesses.

I have to pay 50 cents when transferring to another bank, you have free transfer to any bank in SEPA zone?

Which country is your bank?

SEPA bank wire transfers work very well for family expenses: bills and such. It truly sucks, as someone else mentioned, when you want to do something "different". There's a lot of pattern recognition for AML going on. I got blocked once(for my own safety even though my account has never been compromised) for transffering an unusual amount on a monthly basis.

TL;TR if you keep it clean, you do the good citizen no problems. The moment you want to actually use YOUR money than you need permission.

BTC does not care about that ;)

*what do I mean with different? Charging a prepaid card to avoid charges and withdrawal fees abroad!!!

Bitcoin is a technological response to the problem of currencies being kidnapped by the governments of the world, in my opinion the only solution for the scalability problem is a solution that comes either form the developers of bitcoin or from someone else.

The solution (Segwit) has already been presented by the developers, but pools somehow don't find it enough to agree with. Problem with alternatives is that it would be a disaster for Bitcoin if alternatives happen to take over. It basically means that at any time a group can form and potentially disrupt everything and force through their own vision. That's why it's more important than ever to support Segwit.