Bitcoin works great at small scale where you have a company on the receiving side willing to buy up the excess incoming volume at par with international costs.

Bitcoin works great at small scale where you have a company on the receiving side willing to buy up the excess incoming volume at par with international costs. If a lot of people started doing it though there would be a lot more local sell pressure and the prices people could get in that country would drop and raise the overall cost of the transaction. Bitcoin can be good for remittances but if it becomes popular in a region it will out price itself for that and other reasons. Also almost all bitcoin services I've seen so far have saved money two ways. 1. They have offloaded the last mile cost on another service(a banks ATM network, or corner store, etc). If it becomes popular those services are going to start wanting their cut much they same as WU would pay them. 2. They ignore KYC. Again if they get popular the banking industry will definitely apply pressure to get them to start following this which will again increase costs.