[modeless]

If a receiver of bitcoins sells them for dollars right away, that isn't necessarily money laundering or tax avoidance. I don't know if you've tried to transfer money overseas lately, but banks tend to make it difficult and expensive. An international wire transfer is not a trivial thing to set up; in many cases it still involves faxes.

If bitcoin succeeds only as a payment network, where users convert from and to dollars at both ends, it can still provide a very valuable and legal service.

[sjtgraham]

International transfers are not intrinsically difficult or expensive, the real cost is in pennies. The reason why cross border payments are priced like they are is due to the lack of incentive, either economic or regulatory. BTC is a massive economic incentive for banks to charge more in line with the their true costs. Even if BTC fails as a currency itself, its greatest success might be catalysing innovation on prices and products at the incumbents.

[rsingel]

Well, there's a lot of paperwork and time involved. Most U.S. banks raised their international wire fees to ~$60 at the end of October to comply with more regulations.

[CamperBob2]

Or discontinued support for outgoing international wires altogether, as my Chase account did.

That freaked me out, but unfortunately it didn't freak me out enough to make me buy a bunch of Bitcoins.

[crystaln]

Have you ever had to deal with a large number of international transactions?

They are - in fact - difficult and expensive.