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I have a sincere question about .

Why does it cost money to transfer money?

Someone sent me about US$50 worth of ETH. In order to transfer it from one of my wallets to another, I had to pay a gas fee of a few ¢.

Why is this a good thing?

Last week I transfered literally thousands of £ between my bank accounts and I didn't pay anything.

(I'm interested in genuine answers. Please don't bother replying if you're a sceptic. I actually want answers, not snark.)

@Edent so, between your own bank accounts at the same bank? Or to a different bank?

Payment processors like Visa or SWIFT usually take a cut of transfers. It's not that unusual that Ethereum does too -- just in a more decentralized way.

Terence Eden

@evan
Different banks. In the UK, interbank transfers are free and instant.

@Edent nice! We have something similar in Canada, up to a particular limit; I think a few thousand CDN$

@Edent @evan I think this is a peculiarity of the market forces in UK consumer banking, if you have a business account there seem to be fees for pretty much any transaction

@jimh @evan
Eh? I have a business account in the UK. It is completely free. Cash, credit, direct debits, transfers. I don't pay anything.
There are lots of business accounts like that.

@Edent @evan lucky you, we had difficulty opening a business account for a recent venture and didn't have many options. "Free" business accounts are out there, but not with the universality of consumer accounts

@jimh @evan
Starling, Tide, Wise, and a bunch of others all offered me a free account. I think even Metro does if you need a physical branch.

I'm not saying they're as common as consumer ones, but even the big players offer *some* form of "free for XX months" accounts.

@Edent tide isn't free even at a basic level - I have one and don't pay much for transactions, but it's 20p per transfer or something, and there's various things you just can't do until you pay a monthly fee.

I'm on the lookout for another account right now and most basic free ones do still have fees in certain areas. They are all v cheap but there are fees in various places.

@jimh @Edent @evan My UK business bank doesn’t charge fees for transactions in GBP, only for currency conversion

@Edent @evan isn't the truth that bank transfers *do* cost money, but banks choose to swallow the cost instead of passing it on to the customer (and of course, costs don't magically go away, so you're paying for it in some other way such as reduced interest rates, etc.)?

@Edent they are not free to the bank itself though! (I would like to point that I am not pro cryptocurrency at all here), but UK banking tends to just swallow the cost because it is accepted that they will, other countries don't operate under this assumption.

I assume because a transfer consumes resources on the chain you'd want to have some ability to make people pay for that permanent storage of data

@benjojo thanks, that's interesting. I do wonder how much of the cost is passed on to me.
I have a savings account paying a pretty decent interest rate - and transfers in and out are free.
So it *feels* kind of hard to accept that I'm paying for it in any meaningful way.

I guess at the scale the banks operate at, transaction costs must be micro-pennies each?

@Edent @benjojo FPS has an incredibly low transaction fee. The total cost of ownership when you include all the infrastructure too, not sure.
But if you don't support FPS as a financial institution in the UK then that's rather limiting anyway...