Just checked it out, sending $5 costs at least 13% (they receive $4.33) and doesn't transfer until tomorrow. Some currencies cost far more. Sending $5 to my friend in Brazil would cost a whopping 28% (they receive $3.54). Some currencies don't allow you to send $5, but have minimums that are higher.

Sending $5 of litecoin costs me about .75% (they receive $4.96) and takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes.

And although I haven't tried the service, I'm sure they block payments to people and organizations frowned upon by the banking system and the US government. Would my payment to Wikileaks go through? Or the Julian Assange defense fund? I find it highly unlikely.

Finally, individuals like myself who in the past played online poker are blocked from using transfer services like Moneygram and Western Union for engaging in blacklisted behavior. Why would I struggle to enter the walled garden when it is cheaper, faster and easier to use crypto?

>FWIW, I know many people working abroad (from expats to domestic helpers), and none of them use crypto for remittances, as far as I know.

I know dozens of people who work here in New York who use crypto for remittances. In fact, although I don't use it, there is a nearby laundromat with a bitcoin machine that is almost entirely frequented by migrants from South and Central America. Search for "bitcoin machine" in the NY metro area and you will find a huge number of them are located in landromats and bodegas frequented by immigrants who use these machines to send and receive funds.

I have money. How can I get some crypto? From a middleman. Need to pay fees. Then I send it to someone. Transaction fees. The receiver wants to buy groceries or pay kid's school fees, so they need to convert the crypto to money. Again fees.

So lots of middlemen and fees are involved. And most of the time, One would need to provide full KYC and need to have a bank account to convert to/from crypto.

Tell me more about how it is better, cheaper and faster than regular banking system.

What are these extra steps you're talking about? If I wire money to you as my escrow agent it will probably get to you next business day. You then verify whatever and send the escrow to the seller that will take another business day. Where are the weeks coming from?

>And fees. $40 on a $1000 wire is %4. $1000 is a small amount of money to wire.

Get a different bank if you're paying $40 for domestic transfers. Hell even if you're getting charged that much for international transfers.

>Here we are talking about turn around times in under an hour, and fees under %1, even for small transactions.

Except we aren't talking about comparable things since the end result is generally local currency not bitcoin you have to add in the steps and fees to convert it as well.

How are you going to do ANY crypto transaction without a middleman? Will you wait months and burn insane amount of electricity to finally mine the block yourself? Of will you submit your transaction somewhere and pay the fee?

I have free next-day transfers, pay $1,2 for instant transfer up to $1200 - and those are bank transfers, with all the security of it, not some shady apps. This is in highly regulated market. What are commissions on bitcoin transfers again?

Are you trolling or what?

If I send 100 euros to Brazil it will cost me 101.6 euros.

I pay the fee.

The recipient gets the 100.

If the recipient pays the fee, they get the 98.4% of it.

If I send 1,000 euros, it will cost 9.5 euros to send. The recipient get > 99%

how much does it cost to move money over web3 wallets?

because it is not free..

they can be free if you move them from a coinbase wallet to another coinbase wallet (for example)

If I have to chose, I prefer centralized banks over centralized coinbase.

> Much like Bill Gates could not really explain the advantage of the internet to a privileged person in 1990's America?

Bill Gates in the 90s wanted to sell MSN not internet.

You got your facts completely wrong.

And you can't still explain the advantages.

Except "it's hidden from governments, it cuts the middle man, I don't pay taxes over it"

like if maintaining the network was free.

Go hide your money and avoid your taxes if you like, but people don't want that.

They want safe tools, not useless, mob oriented, expensive scams.

If you really believe that people would prefer an insecure web3 wallet that has no safety and offer no guarantees, over a system like SEPA, you're delusional or a criminal.

> What if the recipient in Brazil wants to have the money to buy something back in any other part of the world?

Drug cartels do it all the time and they pay up to 40% in fees.

If that's your business, understand that it's a costly one.

If your only argument is "international, probably illegal, traffic of goods is gonna be easier" well, it's a very poor argument.

Imagine now that we are sanctioning Russia for invading Ukraine what would happen if everybody could freely make business with Russia unpunished.

Do you really think it would be a better World?

That is plain, utterly, provably wrong. You have no idea of what kind of fees a bank will charge to exchange a wire of tens of thousands of dollars.

> it would make absolutely no sense to use crypto if you followed the rules.

Some of the rules are very specific at about the source and means of the funds. E.g, some taxes in Brazil are applied only for purchases done through credit cards. Others apply for financial operations between different banks. It is not illegal (and much less immoral) to know about the loopholes that allows you to avoid paying the exorbitant fees.

You nailed it here without noticing it: you just use the right bank(s) in the right countries, and then just shuffle and move money around.

I'm pretty sure there are organizations dedicated to set up these operations.

It costs between $70 and $90 to send $1AUD from Australia to Iceland. Bitcoin transaction fees have _never_ been that high, and they're currently somewhere around $1AUD.

$50-$70 of that fee is taken out of the transaction instead of charged seperately, which means it may be impossible to pay a bill accurately via SWIFT.

I tried to pay for a tent via SWIFT from Iceland to the USA recently. Because the US bank used a customer support system that required you to log in via a wells fargo account that I didn't have, I was unable to ask whether they charged fees to receive swift transactions. I added $15 extra to the SWIFT payment as a hedge against any extra fees from wells fargo. I guess that was enough, because the merchant sent me the tent.

If you think that the SWIFT system is better than bitcoin you haven't used SWIFT much.

But, you dont need a bank account to send cash as is. You can use a system like western union, or just put cash in the mail.

Western union has high fees, sure, but the money it sends also doesnt lose 10% of its value in half an hour. Exchanging to and from crypto isnt free either, and is required, since approximately 0% of people get paid in crypto, and 0% of goods and services are bought in crypto.

Sending cash in the mail might get lost, stolen or seized, but the same can be said of crypto. Or, you can send something safer like a postal money order which has minimal fees ($1.25 up to $500, $1.75 $500 to $1000).

Let me tell you my experience with trying to remit money to my family with crypto. I really tried to give it a fair shot, because finding a cheaper way to shift money around would be really nice.

I wanted to do it via stablecoins, because I have no interest in playing the speculation game with BTC/ETH prices. So the path should be:

* I transfer money to Coinbase, and buy some USDC

* I transfer said USDC from my coinbase wallet to another exchange's wallet

* I sell USDC on said exchange for MYR

* I transfer said MYR to my bank account

* Money goes from my MYR account to my family's

Simple enough, in theory. But, the Malaysian government has granted four institutions a license to trade cryptocurrency, and three of them only trade BTC and ETH, and the last ist BTC/ETH plus litecoin, bitcoin cash, and a bunch of other ones I've never heard of.

So here I'm stuck. It sure looks like the primary audience is speculators and not people like me who actually do want to transfer money cross-border.

But is it actually cheaper though, if I chose to use ETH/BTC? Well, the target to beat is transferwise's 61 basis points (used to be 45) (I'm also a liquidity taker, since I'm not interested in playing with price movements): first is 200 bps, second is 50+10bps, third is a startup that doesn't even list fees on their website, fourth is 50 bps.

But wait, since I'm not using stablecoins anymore I have to also pay liquidity fees on the USD side. Coinbase charges 60bps, bringing the total up to 110 bps, 50 more transferwise. I'm assuming the other exchanges are around that price, but unless they're under 10bps it's not cheaper than using transferwise.

So it's really not looking so good. It's not cheaper, it's not simpler, and it involves just as many KYC checks (required in both countries, and very strict ones on the Malaysian side).

This is patently false. My bank, Fidelity, lets me send domestic wires (which are virtually instantaneous) for free. (Fedwires actually cost most customers virtually nothing.) International wires aren't that much more expensive, with the majority of the cost for small transactions being antifraud. In that respect, every cryptocurrency is orders of magnitude more expensive than the status quo.

It's free for you, but not for the bank (work & time) and nether for a merchant (fees)

Also you are likely talking about Defi or NFTs on ETH which got ridiculous expensive. However that's contracts driving up the fee. Money sending fees rarely got above normal international banking fee prices and are usually WAY below.

Nobody? Some stranger from above knows that you're B!

Two things go wrong:

- credit transactions are reversible and bitcoin isn't, so the middle party gets stiffed by fraud

- you have to have a merchant account to take credit payments, and the networks will blacklist you if you do things like this

Yeah, cooperative/reversible financial fund transfer systems that interoperate with bitcoin are at enormous risk during these transactions, so they charge large fees and create red tape to avoid/mitigate fraud. It's probably been bitcoin's biggest stumbling point since forever. I don't think that it's a disaster though.

> The Bitpay invoice has a 15 minute timer. So I wait and wait ... last few minutes on that timer so I start to get a bit nervous.

This problem could've actually been one to blame on bitcoin. It might be due to bitcoin's low transaction throughput. I haven't followed the blocksize debate but IIRC there have been lots of talk about slow transactions.

It's unlikely: the crypto world is savage enough that fools and their money are quickly parted. Most of the transfers to the address could easily be the scammers sending themselves money to make it look more legit.

Have you heard of options like TransferWise or OFX? They offer immediate transfers, lower transaction fees than ETH or BTC, etc. Using crypto in this manner is wholly unnecessary.

> I can take this money and start earning interest higher than any bank will give me within a few minutes

Earning interest? Are you talking about "HODLing"? ETH has dropped by nearly 90% since its peak less than 2 years ago. There's massive risk in holding ETH/BTC. You don't get to cherry-pick dates and claim that it's better than holding in a bank—it's not. BTC/ETH are 0-sum games, so on average nobody earns a dime of interest.

That is absolute extortion. I sent ~0.05 BTC in May and the transaction fee was 0.067%. Eyeballing the transaction screenshot she sent, she wasn't getting hammered on the exchange rate to pesos either (via coins.ph). There was some KYC involved (sender name/address required to release the funds on her end) that slowed us down a little. It wasn't a requirement several years ago. I bet we could have fed the form fake info but didn't want to risk the funds being frozen, she needed cash in hand in less than 24hrs to purchase new inventory.

This was exactly my point. With pervasive crypto end users can assume this to a greater degree, whether you believe that appropriate or not.

Visa e.g. requires specialist terminal equipment, complicated issuer and acquirer and banking relationships and is heavily dependent on legal enforcement wherever you use it. Try using mastercard or visa in a third world country.

For “actual” money transfer, compare with western union where toure talking about ~10% fee.

> ... nothing that’s actually true

Oh you’re a rude one. But I’m sure to somebody you’re very special. Good boy.