Most Bitcoin evangelists know that one of the leading crypto’s advantages is its ease of use and lack of restrictions when making a transfer.
Earlier today, a user sent a gigantic $165 million bitcoin transfer in a single transaction. The fee for the transaction was 0.00006520BTC, or about $1.20.
Decentralization protects the network from being ruled and abused by a single party, but the ability to transfer large sums quickly and cheaply is perhaps one of its more important use cases.
Bitcoin Compared to Other Value Transfer Platforms
Although Bitcoin is quickly becoming a dominant global asset, there are other platforms that transact significantly more value. But how do the fee structures compare?
On a retail level, if you want to send money to someone, you may be charged a flat or proportional fee (or both) to send money to another user.
For example, if you want to send money over PayPal, it will usually charge end users a 3.5% fee on the value being transferred. If that rule were applied to the above bitcoin transfer, this user would have spent $5.7 million in fees.
On another platform, such as MoneyGram, a popular retail international remittance platform, users are charged a $5-$20 fee depending on how quickly they would like to receive their money. If you choose the $5 fee, it could take 3-5 business days to transfer your money.
Even though some complain that bitcoin transactions are not instantaneous like cash or credit cards, they can still be completed in a matter of minutes if the network isn’t busy.
Portability of Assets
Nobody knows who this mystery user is or where they are sending the money to, but moving value across borders is easy with bitcoin.
One of the biggest downsides of physical assets is a lack of portability. If someone has $165 million and needs to move it to another country, doing so physically would likely be quite a burden.
Moving through border control with $165 million in cash, precious metals, or other hard assets would most likely get you flagged and possibly get your wealth confiscated.
Other assets, like real estate, are obviously not portable at all. If an emergency arises and real estate needs to be liquidated, it usually can’t be done so quickly. If it were, a substantial amount would then likely be lost in the transaction.
Bitcoin is the antithesis of these assets, with an ability to carry trillions of dollars worth of value on wallets the size of a flashdrive.
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