Often, people remark, "#Bitcoin# takes 10 minutes to arrive, while my @Venmo is instant, and free." I'd offer a perhaps unpopular perspective: comparing Bitcoin's 10-minute settlement time to Venmo or your bank isn't quite fair. In the realm of "Global" transfer settlements, a more fitting comparison would be Bitcoin versus SWIFT, which typically takes about "1-4" working days. Here, Bitcoin's 10-minute settlement shines, being 144x faster. On the matter of end-to-end transaction costs, conventional methods like SWIFT often surpass $10, whereas Bitcoin averages around $1~2, making Bitcoin 5x more cost- effective. Any solution boasting speedier transactions than SWIFT/ACH or your country's cross- bank network essentially operates on a "Layer 2" (L2) framework. Such comparisons should be drawn with L2 chains, like Bitcoin's Lightning Network or Ethereum and its L2 networks, to provide a more apples-to-apples analysis. And that's not to take into consideration of the permissionless fact of Bitcoin: to join SWIFT as a bank or join Bank as an individual client, I don't know how long it takes. At least to open an account in a bank today, it takes at least several hours, or sometimes it require you have a gov issued ID which takes days.

So apparently the Bitcoin Whitepaper is hidden on every macOS (since like 2018) to find it, go to terminal and enter: open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf (i know this sounds like a scam, i swear it's not though lol -- you can verify this in a bunch of other places) btw if for SOME reason you've never actually read the Bitcoin Whitepaper.. this is as good an excuse as any 🫡