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Long post.

TLDR: Buy and transact in Bitcoin

I have a business in Costa Rica which accepts bitcoin. Our greatest challenge is getting people to pay with bitcoin in order to avoid nightmares like this.

A customer tried to buy $3600.00 USD worth of retail goods from us. He wired the funds from his bank 10 days ago. The funds went through JP Morgan Chase as intermediary because he uses HSBC in the UK. CR Central bank alerted the local branch of the state owned bank we bank with and prevented the funds from being deposited into our business account. I went into the bank 3 times over 2 days which involves being patted down, metal detected, and questioned about your business with the bank. Once inside and after waiting for an extended period, the teller told me that the transaction had not made it to CR and the sender needed to provide a form MT103 in order to locate the funds. This form is a SWIFT transaction identifier and exposes the sender and sending bank to fraud and risk it is widely accepted by modern banks that your shouldn't provide this document to anyone. I left and came back several hours later. The sending bank had provided a more modern and safe tracking form (UETR) which showed the funds being held up in CR, this form was rejected by the CR bank and they told me that it was common this time of year for transactions to be very slow at every bank globally. I've been banking for long time and never noticed that it takes longer during December so this was news to me (also completely made up) presumably to cover their mistake of not contacting me to alert me about this issue.

After I returned a third time to the bank, they stated that the funds were sent from a "tax haven" country, the UK, LOL, so they needed 3 months of statements showing the origin of the source of the funds and a letter of good standing from the sender's bank. In addition, they requested a copy of the invoice for the goods we were selling to the customer. I have no issue supplying the invoice, which we are legally required to do anyway, but the rest of this is ridiculous.

Bitcoin fixes every piece of this problem.

How long can this continue?

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Discussion

modulo 1y ago

It will last as long as people are willing to accept goods for #fiat. I suggest anyone using SWIFT wires charge 30% premium for this risk (or leave it to the sender to resolve the issue, not the receiver.) #bitcoin gets a normal, no-risk price

chancellor 1y ago

We do charge a high fee but I don't think I could get away with 30%. We offer 10% off for BTC and 5% off for physical cash.

I'd reject fiat all together if I knew I could cover my overhead with BTC payments only.

Detective Deft Defector 1y ago

For as long as banksters can find soldiers to wage wars on their behalf. Brings to mind the fact that hyperbitcoinization can't happen without the collective demand of military personnel to be paid in Bitcoin.

nout 1y ago

Now, did you know that these type of international transactions (especially SWIFT interbank settlement, but individual too) are done manually by ladies sitting in an office. They run windows laptops where they run another Windows virtualized in VMware and there they run MS-DOS application wrapped in Windows app (Ibis is an example).

Every morning they print the transactions they need to do that day on a stack of papers (around 60 transactions per person per day), then they start writing the transactions manually into the MS-DOS application. They use a lot of shortcuts, but it still takes time and they make mistakes. Depending on a country, but e.g. Spanish banks make up to 30% mistakes that then have to be fixed the next day.

chancellor 1y ago

No I didn't. Is that true? Can I ask how you know this?

nout 1y ago

Yes, I actually wrote couple scripts to automate some of this for one friend. Specifically the virtualized windows are super locked down and get refreshed every day, but I found a way to persists the scripts over the session. Overall I saved half the time for this one person (after one night of coding).

With more time and a smaller team of engineers I'd be able to automate most of it, but this whole system just needs to be burnt.

nout 1y ago

Btw, what business do you run? I need all sorts of stuff in CR 🙂 and I pay with bitcoin as much as I can