[pyrryh]

This is the case where the worse UX is just a better security in disguise (note: "better", not "perfect"; see multiple US reports on trying to investigate the terrorist funding through hawala). No electronic transactions cuts a lot of SIGINT (though not all, people carry their phones with them, call each other, satellites make images, etc.) and sometimes HUMINT is more difficult in countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan.

[Kinrany]

Security can be improved later, the same way Monero came out after Bitcoin. Having the option to transact without intermediaries and locally is enough of an improvement, the same way Bitcoin is Pareto-optimal when compared to SWIFT.

[pyrryh]

Hawala has kinda been out there for a long time, and I'm not sure that there is a space for incremental improvement since, as I already mentioned, its main security properties lie in hawala being out of modern fully electronic systems. This is the case when we are talking about the general mechanism, of course; a group of 2, 5, 10, N people | N < some abstract big number where we can't tailor solutions easily and need to scale, there some customization may surely be devised as an improvement.