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.
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%.
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.