4 ms·
The send money to my relatives in South America without having to pay exorbitant transfer fees still seems pretty plausible to me.
by daveevad 4y ago
The send money to my relatives in South America without having to pay exorbitant transfer fees still seems pretty plausible to me.
- endisneigh 4y agoHow much does it cost to send $1000 USD to South America using BTC and have them convert it to say, real, e.g. $1000USD to real via BTC vs other fiat methods. Using Wise you'd pay $15USD. Curious to know how much USD you'd pay with Bitcoin.
- andrewflnr 4y agoThe more relevant question is what it cost before people started using Bitcoin for that purpose. I think Bitcoin lit a fire under the major financial providers to be more efficient.
- SXX 4y agoIf you sent your USD to Argentine for insance you'll have to use official central bank exchange rate if you used Wise. With crypto you can actually convert your money using real world exchange rate which is very diffrent from official one. Official exchange rate: 1 USD = 162 Peso Real world one: 1 USD = 300 Peso
- endisneigh 4y agodoesn't answer the question
- seunosewa 4y agoYou'll lose half of the value of your money if you send it the normal way. Crypto fees are unlikely be as high as 50%.
- endisneigh 4y agoThis is not true, like I said, Wise will take $15USD for a $1000 transaction.
- SXX 4y agoAnswering your question. As far as I know you'll pay up to $2 for each Bitcoin transaction and you need two of them: when exchanging USD to BTC and when transfering your BTC to exchange. There of course might be price fluctuations, but this is exactly the reason why stablecoins are used and not BTC / ETH.
- endisneigh 4y agothat's not really an answer either. choose your exchange of choice. with coinbase it seems to be much more than $15USD. I don't see the value.
- kragen 4y agoThe situation differs a lot country by country. From you mention of the real, I assume you're talking about Brazil. I don't know anything about the current situation in Brazil, so I'll talk about Argentina and Venezuela instead. Maybe in Brazil you can just use the banking system and not have to worry about Bitcoin. TransferWise doesn't work here in Argentina. They have no locations, so you have to use an ATM, which gives you less than half of the money because it only gives out monopoly-money pesos, using the falsified "official" exchange rate. Western Union does cost about US$15, and uses the real exchange rate instead of the official one, but no Western Union location has US$1000 on hand. (The minimum wage, which is what most employees get paid, just got raised to $50000 a month in Argentine monopoly money, which is US$160.) You might be able to do it with five transactions of US$200. So figure somewhere around US$75, or more if you include the potential that WU employees will rob your house or attract attention from the tax authorities. Bitcoin transaction fees are commonly under US$1, especially if you don't need the transaction to go through in the next half-hour, but if you want to convert the Bitcoin into local monopoly money by going to a money changer, you can expect to pay about a 1%-2% spread. So probably about US$20. If you can do a peer-to-peer transaction instead of going to a money changer, you don't have to pay the spread. In Venezuela I don't think WU, TransferWise, or the banking system is an option, so it's not really a question of how much it costs without Bitcoin but what your chances of success are at all.
- haskellandchill 4y agoI send a fair amount to my gf in Venezuela. Bitcoin doesn’t help, the operator there prefers USD through Zelle and charges 10%, black market.
- knorker 4y agoWhat are the source of the fees? Legal compliance? IOW are your savings due to breaking, or loopholing laws?
- TMWNN 4y agoI was surprised last year to find that an intra-Coinbase BTC transfer was the cheapest way to send about $2,000 to Canada.