Topic: The beginning of the end of traditional payment processors? - page 2. (Read 617 times)

El Salvador became the first country where bitcoin was accepted as a means of payment. How has this affected centralized payment systems and what will be the trend in the future as more countries follow the path of El Salvador?

I recently came across an article https://www.kevinrooke.blog/el-salvador-and-bitcoin-two-weeks-in/. It talked about how bitcoin adoption proceeds in El Salvador, and there I discovered interesting facts.

Thanks to El Salvador, the Lightning Network received a powerful impetus in development. This happened thanks to the popularization of the Chivo wallet and the incentives that the government of El Salvador guaranteed when it was installed. In total, the Lightning Network gained about 2 million new users:

Many users began to actively use bitcoin payments and money transfer using the Chivo wallet and support for the Lightning Network. Consequently, the Salvadorans increasingly began to use bitcoin services instead of the usual banking or payment processors:


The use of the Lightning Network has exploded, creating a powerful network effect with the infusion of several million new users into the ecosystem. People see the benefits and potential of fast, low-cost transfers and are choosing to use the Lightning Network over the usual centralized transfer methods. This is evidenced by the official data of the stock market.

As we can see, since July (when El Salvador's plans to accept bitcoin were announced), Western Union and MoneyGram began to fall, and continue their downward trend. While bitcoin is growing and gaining strength.

The era of traditional money transfers is coming to an end and this business, if it does not disappear completely, will significantly reduce its influence in the world. Other countries will follow in the wake of El Salvador, and millions of new users will join the ecosystem. What do you think about this?

I think the shift to a cryptocurrency-based payment is still far from a global-scale implementation.

Given the fact that majority of the countries are either third-world or underdeveloped, such implementation would heavily prejudice these countries due to forcing them into a position where payment method would require some sort of technology. Though I can see that the future transactions would heavily depend on the technology behind BTC (blockchain), fiat would still dominate.

The era of traditional money transfers is coming to an end and this business, if it does not disappear completely, will significantly reduce its influence in the world. Other countries will follow in the wake of El Salvador, and millions of new users will join the ecosystem. What do you think about this?

I don't think this will be the end of traditional payment processors. Fiat is still "King" when it comes to making payments on a daily basis. Crypto is volatile, and at times, expensive to use, making it unsuitable as a currency you can use for day-to-day payments. Some may say that Bitcoin's Lightning Network could rival traditional payment processors, but you'd still have to deal with volatility issues. The day when crypto becomes stable, blazing-fast, and cheap to use, will be the day when traditional payment processors will come to an end.

At least, El Salvador's move has benefitted Bitcoin's mainstream adoption. It'll be up to other countries to do the same in order to challenge the very existence of payment processors like PayPal, Western Union, and MoneyGram. Just my thoughts

El Salvador became the first country where bitcoin was accepted as a means of payment. How has this affected centralized payment systems and what will be the trend in the future as more countries follow the path of El Salvador?

I recently came across an article https://www.kevinrooke.blog/el-salvador-and-bitcoin-two-weeks-in/. It talked about how bitcoin adoption proceeds in El Salvador, and there I discovered interesting facts.

Thanks to El Salvador, the Lightning Network received a powerful impetus in development. This happened thanks to the popularization of the Chivo wallet and the incentives that the government of El Salvador guaranteed when it was installed. In total, the Lightning Network gained about 2 million new users:

...

Many users began to actively use bitcoin payments and money transfer using the Chivo wallet and support for the Lightning Network. Consequently, the Salvadorans increasingly began to use bitcoin services instead of the usual banking or payment processors:


The use of the Lightning Network has exploded, creating a powerful network effect with the infusion of several million new users into the ecosystem. People see the benefits and potential of fast, low-cost transfers and are choosing to use the Lightning Network over the usual centralized transfer methods. This is evidenced by the official data of the stock market.

...

As we can see, since July (when El Salvador's plans to accept bitcoin were announced), Western Union and MoneyGram began to fall, and continue their downward trend. While bitcoin is growing and gaining strength.

The era of traditional money transfers is coming to an end and this business, if it does not disappear completely, will significantly reduce its influence in the world. Other countries will follow in the wake of El Salvador, and millions of new users will join the ecosystem. What do you think about this?

I think it is the opposite, El Salvador will be used as a point of reference to see how other countries decide to interact with bitcoin from now on, if the results of the experiment we are seeing at El Salvador are successful then I would not be surprised if we see some countries accelerating the process of making bitcoin legal tender or at least give to it a regulatory framework which is friendly to the industry as they will not like the idea of El Salvador monopolizing that source of income.

El-Salvador is just a tiny bit of the whole world and the result there can not be use as a reference point here, it is a great news that El Salvador have embrace the use of btc as a legal means of payment but there are millions of people in different part of the world who are using the traditional payment system, majority are unaware of crypto, I think there is still a long way before we can say this.

But at the same time, it's understandable the numbers are low, who would use bitcoin to buy stuff in a bull run? It's damn normal, even I would do the same.
The poeple who don't care about BTC have long sold their 30$, the rest are keeping them or if they buy on top of that hold that also, so I assume that just as in other countries the percentage factual daily-weekly user would be around 1% of the ones holding coins.

The era of traditional money transfers is coming to an end and this business, if it does not disappear completely, will significantly reduce its influence in the world. Other countries will follow in the wake of El Salvador, and millions of new users will join the ecosystem. What do you think about this?

El Salvador has 6.5 million people, so they all have to have phones, install Chivo and do a bit below 100 transactions every day to reach that number  🤡🤡🤡
With every day Nayib Bukele looks more and more like an incompetent populist. I have a feeling that in the end it will only bring bad rep for Bitcoin.

One month since launch, 12% of consumers have used the cryptocurrency, the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development reported.
But the foundation, which polled 233 companies across different sectors, found that the overall use was still low, with 93% of companies reporting no bitcoin payments.

This only tells the story of one country, and I'm pretty sure other countries with a pretty stable banking system and money remittance services would like to keep things how it is for quite some time. But what's happening in El Salvador might be a catalyst of what's to come in the future. Perhaps banks and money remittance services would adopt a similar structure to crypto, but them as an entity would still surely remain solid as they are right now. They'd need to adapt to the changes, and if copying how bitcoin and crypto does it is the only way to do it, they'd do so in a heartbeat.

Isn't Chivo giving away $30 to anyone who registers? Of course a lot of people in a poor nation would want to claim free money. The article claims that millions of users were added to Lightning Network, while in reality millions of people just installed an app. Not a fact that they will use it in their daily lives. A lot of people will uninstall it once they claim the free $30 or will use it a few times per year. It's completely unrealistic to think that millions of people who a few weeks ago didn't care about Bitcoin are not "Bitcoin users" who conduct their purchases through LN.

Without quoting the whole OP, I think traditional money transfer businesses like Western Union and Moneygram are on the decline, but also they were on the decline prior to bitcoin.  They're being disrupted by other centralized payment processors like PayPal, Square, Venmo, etc.  The old wire transfer services were prime for disruption because they were expensive compared to alternatives.  But other centralized payment processors are fast and cheap and easier to use than bitcoin, so I don't anticipate them being disrupted by bitcoin.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are of interest to people when inflation absorbs their economies that is a good sign for businesses to start including cryptocurrencies as a means of payments. I could perceive it when I shared with the owner of a business that I bought her construction materials to repair my roof. The owner of the business approached me and asked me to teach her how to use cryptocurrencies. I have not taught her yet because I have had very little time to dedicate to her but I will, but in addition to time I was stopped by the knowledge that the owner of the business is a usurer.

Probably he doesn't know the answer himself.
Either way, even if a transaction would take 10 seconds so it would be 65,437 every 10 seconds it would mean 500 million transactions per day, which is just...common!

Not that I would trust any number coming from the 100MW/shaft guy anyhow.

That image says 14k transactions per day via ATM, but in the top right corner it says 65k transactions per second in dashboard, what does that mean? Is this like maximum theoretical capacity or something?

“Transacciones por segundo” doesn’t mean that we have 65,437 new transactions every sec, but that the system is processing an average of 65,437 transactions every sec.
Remember a single transaction takes several secs.