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by chx 3310 days ago
What is missing from this picture is that whoever wants to send you bitcoins needs to get them. This is still a huge barrier especially with having no idea what your bitcoins are actually worth and also it's a given that your wallet will be stolen sooner or later so you want to buy only a little at a time but that has overhead so...

As for transferring money, Transferwise is leagues ahead in usability when you consider that the sender has some sort of currency and the receiver wants currency (and bitcoin is not a currency, no matter how hard these Ayn Rand types insist, not without a nation state backing it). All you need is a name and an account number and the UI is super friendly and the transfer is cheap.
1 comments
aianus 3310 days ago
Transferwise is stupidly expensive. Costs about $140 in fees to transfer $10k from US to Canada vs. ~$0 for BTC depending on how sophisticated you are in timing the trade.
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chx 3309 days ago
How much does it cost to buy and sell those BTC? And are you saying transaction fees are zero?
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aianus 3309 days ago
No, I'm saying the market is illiquid enough (or it was a year ago when I was doing this) to write a bot and wait for the price difference across the US exchange and CA exchange to cancel out the 0.5% round trip trading fees.

Which, by the way, are already much cheaper than transferwise at 1.4%.

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chx 3308 days ago
I can't understand what you are talking about. I am in Canada, sending EUR to my brother in Austria. With Transferwise this takes as much as entering the amount, my ebank username and password and it's done.

With bitcoin, hell, I dunno. https://www.quadrigacx.com/account-funding-withdrawal this wants me to do a bank wire to avoid fees which I can't do online, it's one of my major complaints how the simple transfers in Europe are missing in Canada but I digress. If I use interac online, ding, 1.5%. Then I get bitcoins which I need to store securely, send them and it seems https://cex.io/fee-schedule#/tab/trade there are fee schedules expressed in a language I sure never heard of and then my brother also needs to find an exchange to get EUR out of. Seems hell of a bother to me to save a little money. I am not sending 10K, good for you if you do, I am sending 1000 EUR a time or so, we are talking of saving a few EUR. No way.

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