3 ms·
I live in a third world country and nobody uses crypto to send money. The existing remittance system works fine. Crypto's claim in this area is that could be c
by freddie_mercury 2y ago
I live in a third world country and nobody uses crypto to send money. The existing remittance system works fine.
Crypto's claim in this area is that could be cheaper than remittances in the traditional banking system. But remittance fees using traditional banking are already only 1.5% so we're not talking about saving massive amounts of money in most circumstances.
Which is probably why virtually nobody has switched to it for remittances.
- freedomben 2y agoIndeed, the fees involved in sending in the vast majority of crypto, certainly Bitcoin and ethereum, are complete non-starters for this use case. In my opinion, it's a shame, because this is something that crypto could do extremely well. But here we are. I do believe that it will be solved at some point, as long as regulation doesn't make that impossible. It is making it much more difficult for new coins to get started. Obviously that is needed to some extent because we saw all the shit coins over the last several years that ripped people off, but finding a happy medium is essential and challenging.
- freddie_mercury 2y agoYeah, the last time I looked I would pay the equivalent of 1% to buy USDT (i.e. they are selling for 1% higher than the current spot price) and then another 1-1.3% to sell it and get fiat back out. So 2-2.5% roundtrip versus 1.5% for a regular remittance. So crypto is actually more expensive that the traditional banking system on top of just being weirder. Like, you have to use Binance's P2P in my country which is just way more complicated than the traditional remittance system of "give us their bank account details".