Re: BTC working well, Western Union angry
You don’t understand foreign remittances at all. Your 8-12% for money transfer service is BS. First off, the actual average number is 7%, but it’s what thar covers you need to understand
https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/remittances-matter.html
If I want to transfer £1000 Sterling from U.K. to India, I go to Wise, and can transfer that bank account to bank account for £6.50 = 0.65%. This is similar to BTC 0.3% each to sell and buy. Yes, I know the BTC remittance itself could just be a transfer of password. But the remitter gets paid by their employer in £, buys BTC, then the receiver sells the BTC on their end, as shopkeepers don’t want to be paid in BTC. So why 7%? Average transfer value isn’t £1000 like your “investments”, it’s $200. Same £6.50 fixed transaction fee on $200 is over 3%. BTC fixed transaction fees are similar.
Second, the *actual* 7% includes currency exchange fees. You can’t be very surprised at paying 3% currency exchange, as a retail customer. The % varies depending on where it’s going. Ultimately, the transmitting bank has to trust the receiving *central bank* to honour any commitments at all. For example, PayPal doesn’t cover Pakistan. Prior to adoption of BTC, Salvador didn’t actually have its own currency, it used the US dollar, which it felt was demeaning and an expression of US imperialism. Salvador’s problem is that they can’t really have their own currency because it free-floats to zero as nobody trusts it internationally. In reality, so will BTC, but for Salvador, that’s actually no worse than the alternative of Salvador currency which at one point was the colon. If Salvador were prepared to accept the humiliation of not owning their own currency (are you listening eurozone!), they could still have 3% remittance costs from their USA diaspora in dollars like they used to.
Thirdly, those 8-12% numbers are mostly historic. They covered the scenario which used to be the norm, and BTC doesn’t fulfil that scenario either. Remittances used to be: neither sender nor receiver has any bank account, or adminstrative/recorded presence at all. Sender rocks up with a cheque made out from their employer, and wants to send it to their family overseas who will withdraw it in cash. The money transfer fee includes a massive allowance for the obvious risk on both sides. None of that happens any more, it’s too easy to have a bank account.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
