> And yet, when I just went to close my Paypal account, I remembered my final use for it was helping out a friend in need who sometimes needed money to cover their bills.
I had a friend in that situation once (sudden emergency), and I used snail mail to send one of those pictures of Benjamin Franklin that are printed by the US Treasury. It worked fine, no internet needed, no crypto, no blockchain, and no scam artist coin exchanges were needed to convert the Ben Franklin back into cash, since it was already cash. It beat Bitcoin in almost every regard, as far as I could tell.
That would be my fallback, yes, but that's also a pretty large risk of theft or loss if you get unlucky. Not to mention the added time involved in sending it thousands of miles by mail.
It takes a couple days to cross the country, and snail mail is pretty safe. 1% loss rate on a Ben Franklin picture would equal a George Washington picture. The transaction fees for the 3 bitcoin transactions (cash to btc, btc transfer, and btc to cash) are probably way more than that. And you can always use money orders, registered mail, overnight express, or whatever.
This is a pretty poor way of transferring value. High likelihood of theft or loss, long transfer time, low maximum legal limits. It may beat Bitcoin as a one-off workaround with no need to scale, but unlikely to beat L2 ERC20 crypto payments over the long term.
The likelihood of theft is reasonably low, certainly less than 1%. I don't know what L2 ERC20 is but normally for larger amounts within the regulated system, you would send a check or money order, or ACH if you were doing this at volume. At higher amounts you'd send a wire transfer. I don't see a role for crypto here.
You’ve described a few mechanisms that are different than sending cash in an envelope: check, money order, ACH, wire transfer.
I guess all of these too could theoretically be replaced with crypto depending on your need and situation. With something like a wire you are placing the transfer in the trust of your bank, which is secure but can take multiple days and can cost more than an ETH transaction.
Most mail arrives fine but mail theft is still a massive problem and rising, it is one reason you are advised not to regularly send cash in the mail.
That link is almost entirely about package theft, not ordinary letters. Even if I accept the figure of 3%, that's equivalent to a $3 insurance premium on sending $100 cash, not too bad. I'd put it at way under 1%. Lots of us still pay our rent and bills every month by mailing checks, same with annual tax returns etc., and losses in the mail are rare even though those sorts of mailings are identifiable as being likely to contain payments. A hand addressed envelope to a random person is less likely a priori.
Domestic wire transfers are almost instant, while international ones can take overnight.
Doing anonymous and untracked payments of significant amounts at scale is sure to tick off regulators. If your ETH transactions are non-anonymous and tracked, it's hard to see any superiority over ACH or wires. It's a solution looking for a problem.
I don't regularly send cash in the mail but I've done it a number of times, with no losses that I know of. A typical reason is that I don't feel like going to the hassle of getting a money order. I feel like sending a personal check is riskier than sending cash, since a stolen check reveals my account number, leading to possibly unbounded loss. I generally do use money orders if I might need proof of payment afterwards, or if the amount is high enough to worry about. I've sent $100 cash on a couple of occasions but more typically it's $10 or $20. Even that is an occasional rather than a frequent thing.
If you are sending cash numerous times in the mail I would say this is a problem and technical solutions that aim to improve on this are beneficial. That said, you and the receiving party may be living in more fortunate conditions. Many people in the world live in apartments, with mail rooms that are not well secured and are frequent targets of package theft.
Domestic wires are slow in many countries, in the order of days, and costly[1]. My ETH transactions are done in 30sec, fees are usually less than a dollar, and they are pseudonymous - primarily only known to my CEX and government. The transaction is traceable while in transit and proof of payment easily found.
To me, it sounds like you are writing off ETH transfers without having actually used them.
Why do you want a CEX and the government to have their hands in your transactipn? Does the recipient also have to deal with a CEX? If yes, that is another hurdle. And why do you keep referring to package theft when the cash is sent in an envelope and not in a package? Packages get stolen because they have stuff inside. Envelopes that look like random personal correspondence is much less attractive. If you have any stats about mail theft that is about envelopes, I'd like to see them, but stats about packages are something different imho.
Fwiw, I live in an apartment, and any letters are delivered to my mailbox, which has a lock. There is not much likelihood of letters getting stolen after delivery. Packages that don't fit in the mailboxes are left on top of the mailbox, and those are much more exposed to getting stolen.
Yeah I'm not speaking for other countries, not all of which have functioning payment systems. ETH (current version) does sound more efficient than BTC.
I had a friend in that situation once (sudden emergency), and I used snail mail to send one of those pictures of Benjamin Franklin that are printed by the US Treasury. It worked fine, no internet needed, no crypto, no blockchain, and no scam artist coin exchanges were needed to convert the Ben Franklin back into cash, since it was already cash. It beat Bitcoin in almost every regard, as far as I could tell.