I have lived here for 6 years. We have a large expat community here who regularly shares information on the best way to send money. I have spent many hours rese

I have lived here for 6 years. We have a large expat community here who regularly shares information on the best way to send money. I have spent many hours researching options to move money and I regularly spend time updating myself on latest options. I don't think I need to get into my personal money habits here. If you haven't been an expat, then you probably don't know all the funky quirks of moving money here. Let's just put it this way. The Philippines is one of the most active countries in the world for receiving remittances and Western Union is huge here. Can you imagine that Bitcoin could be cheaper than Western Union? There are certain cases where you can get pretty cheap if you live in certain areas and your recipient lives in certain areas. For example, in L.A. there is a large Filipino community and remittance services in the Philippines have setup offices there, but these aren't services you can access over the internet. You have to live there. You brought up a good point about conversion rates though. I will have to see what the conversion rates actually come out to. It's different because you aren't converting a currency. You are cutting out some of the processes that converting one currency to another goes through. But I may still lose some money in the conversion though. I would get hit with the Coinbase fee, but apparently Circle is looking to do conversions for free. So, that might be even cheaper whenever they hook me up with an invite.