[centimeter]

As someone who has had to make international payments in the US$20-50k range semi-frequently, Bitcoin is by far the easiest way to do it.

Your story about it being easy and cheap to do via remittances or whatever is pure fiction. Any traditional mechanism is at least two of slow, expensive, and onerous.

[pavlov]

I'm genuinely curious where you're sending money that a wire transfer using IBAN+SWIFT doesn't work but Bitcoin does.

What country has the banking infrastructure to support easy $50k-equivalent withdrawals from a local Bitcoin exchange, but not for receiving wires?

[centimeter]

If you don't want to get screwed on FX, you need to use a brokerage intermediary with entities in both currency domains. Direct international wire usually causes problems. So if I'm sending FX, it looks like

US Bank -> Wire -> IBKR -> Wire -> SG Bank (or whatever)

Usually this takes at least 5-9 business days end-to-end. (Wire delay, withdrawal hold, wire delay on the other end.)

A bitcoin transaction takes a few minutes, and if your counterparty doesn't want Bitcoin, there's probably an exchange with an entity in the destination country, so you only need to wait for the second wire delay.

[pavlov]

It doesn’t make sense that you don’t want to pay FX rates but would happily accept the payment in Bitcoin whose rates fluctuate much worse.

Some banks charge up to 2% for currency conversion, but surely that’s better than the 10-15% lottery involved in Bitcoin? Unless you want to have a gambling aspect to your invoices.

[centimeter]

I am not teetering on the edge of poverty so I would rather increase my volatility a tiny bit and stay EV neutral (or, more realistically, positive, since we’re talking about BTC) than incur a guaranteed substantial EV loss.

My suspicion is that your mental model for comparing volatility and loss is incomplete, given that you didn’t mention anything about the size of the transfer compared to your wealth, or anything else about local risk-aversion/utility convexity.

[pavlov]

So you do want the gambling aspect because you’re not poor and you believe Bitcoin mostly goes up.

That’s fine, but I don’t think it aligns with what most people want from their money transfers.

[centimeter]

I don’t want it, but I’ll tolerate it given the benefits.

[jeltz]

It is not pure fiction. I also send transactions semi-frequently in those ranges and have never had an issue. Sure, I have not sent them to Africa and that might be where the differences in experiences lie.

[centimeter]

I don't work in Africa, but in SE Asia. I have had countless problems getting medium-sized (tens of kUSD) FX transfers to HK,SG,TH,etc. on a reasonable deadline.