And that's just in my neck of the woods, I'm sure I'm forgetting more.
it is like asking “Why Does PayPal Exist When We Have iBAN?” obviously some subset of the globe finds it more useful than iBAN transfers for their needs (like setting up an online shop).
God that whole process sounds painful.
In the Uk we would just transfer the money across with a bank transfer as all banks support instant transfers which have no fees (including between banks).
the point is not to be a system that beats a single service for sending GBP from A to B in the UK. the point is a system that has a variety of uses and applications accessible by anybody, regardless of which country the user resides in.
even in countries with good banking like UK, many e-commerce companies will still choose Stripe VISA and PayPal to reach customers outside the UK and integrate a payment processor API. an online shop could offer crypto as a payment mechanism if they wanted to avoid using these companies and if it met their needs.
... so suggest that they use crypto, which for many, comes with an onerous fee too, to be timely. Your "buy from the shop" example better not be urgent, otherwise you're paying gas for someone to verify it, or it sits in the queue.
The UK example just shows that a decentralised blockchain approach isn’t required to meet the use case you are describing - in fact it’s worse for the described use case in almost every metric.
Having a different, worse alternative isn’t exactly something to shout about.
