Bitcoin Forum

i saw a topic the other day (not here) asking about a way to send money from another country to where i live.

the easiest, most secure and cheapest way possible.
the amount was about 20,000 £

so naturally as a bitcoin user the first thing that came to my mind was bitcoin.
it is the easiest, it is super fast, and it is 100% safe if you follow a couple of safety measures, and it is super cheap!

but i didn't suggest it because of one problem:
i already have bitcoin so if i want to send money i just go to my wallet and click send :)
but for someone new, he has to go to an exchange sign up, deposit (pay fees), buy (pay fees) then send and the other person on the other end has to do the same or find someone to sell bitcoin p2p and that usually is under market price.

i guess my question is, is bitcoin really a good option here and what can be done to make this process easier and better ("in general" not just in this particular case)?

...

Sniper44

I suppose it all depends on the conditions, as you yourself just wrote.  If your receiving counterparty overseas has a BTC address/wallet, then you're all set, just send him 20,000 £ of Bitcoin.  If you are just "sending it to yourself" (about to travel there for example), you are good to go as well as long as you bring your hardware wallet or have an online-wallet (latter is tad dangerous though wigh large BTC amounts).

If your receiving counterparty has NO wallet and/or NO way to convert the BTC into his local currency, well maybe not.  Unless he can himself travel or get cash via localbitcoins.

Hope that helps, if I have not covered your situation, feel free to add details.

i am mostly looking for ways for people who are not familiar with bitcoin or do not own any to do this and make it as cheap as possible, so it can become a more viable option.

All depends on the country you are sending your £20,000 worth of Bitcoin to. I believe there are so many countries that has local bitcoin exchanger which can help you convert your bitcoin to the currency you want. To me it is easier and faster to send money through bitcoin, and at the same time bitcoin allows you as individual to send a large amount as possible. But make sure you copy the address of the recipient correctly so as to avoid lost of money.

I get what you mean. And yes, if a person is to send bitcoin he does have to do those processes. It may be quite tedious, but he only has to go through those processes once (registration, etc), since I think coinbase is pretty much newbie-friendly already. People might scratch their heads right now when talking about bitcoin, but lets hope that in the future that bitcoin gets well known (as well known as PayPal, Visa, etc).

Are you asking only transfer or also currency conversion?
In other words is your question:
A) what's the cheapest/fastest/most secure/simple method of sending £20k abroad?  Or
B) what currency (including BTC) is the cheapest/fastest/most secure/simple for international transfers?
These are two separate questions.
If you introduce FX conversion in the mix, it introduces complexity, risk, and cost, so it's best avoided, unless you really have to, for example you have GBP and the recipient needs USD. In that case you should stick to the bare minimum of FX conversions (i.e. only 1), and find the cheapest FX conversion service.

my question is a combination of these two questions.
think of it as having someone abroad (like your son in a university in another country) wanting to send him money but do it via bitcoin.
is there a way to reduce the costs and make this as efficient as possible?

What costs are you trying to prevent or reduce? transaction fees are like $4 tops. I think that's cheap enough to send £20k. The only downside of this is you need to teach him how to sell the bitcoins via the GDAX, since I think that's the exchange that Coinbase uses.

You can look at some of the bitcoin debit cards, like Bitpay and Xapo....There are also other platforms out there that are providing international debit cards....shop around....there are several start up projects on the ethereum network that look promising too.  So, there are options available; if you do the research, you will find them.

In the age of digital currency it's no different than transferring money next door. If the government wants to have some issue with it they're going to have some issue with it no matter what you do. Make sure that you're conducting honest business, conducted an honest manner, and you will have no problem.

You have not clarified what is this 20000 money for? Is it for a legal service you provide or have you received a mail saying you won money give us the address? If it's not legal saying you cannot show it in your tax filings then opt for Bitcoins, he can easily buy it from the members of this forum, so say he lives in x country you in y, he comes here finds a reputed member of x country buys coins and puts addresses as yours, then he can find a way to pay his country member through Fiat or bank, as simple as it gets.

Bank transfer, no doubt about that. BTC is only great between people who are BTC users.
If the recipient has never owned a single BTC, and doesn't have a wallet for cryptos, you would give him more of a problem than money.

Or both transferring countries must have bitcoin exchanger.
https://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currencies/
https://localbitcoins.com/
https://wmx.wmtransfer.com/Home/Description#

No. The two FX convesions of fiat>BTC>fiat will cost more than the cost of the international wire (not to mention introduce risk).

Yes, really.
Services such as transferwise or currencyfair or the revolut app charge next to nothing for the wire transfer.

I don't think the stress is that much because the process is that high if he wants to go through exchange sites as from what you portrayed but in a place where I stay, its not that difficult to do, all that is needed is to just get reputable individuals to pay the money in the originating country bank account and get the equivalent in the local country but when it comes to bitcoin, all that is needed is also to buy from individuals then convert in the country to fiat

YES!

Of course owning bitcoin presents a few barriers to entry but those barriers have gotten significantly easier over time, it's quite easy to buy Bitcoin now. The trick is to open a wallet and become verified with the exchange first so that when you really need to exchange money you can do so quickly.

What currencies are you planning to transfer from? If it's USD or EUR or GBP you could get Wirex, which is a bitcoin debit card option.

Finally, everyone should own some Bitcoin...it's literally the only currency available today that doesn't lose it's value each day due to deflation of purchasing power.

Well when you involved word 'exchange' you certainly comes out of the fancy world of Bitcoins and enters the reality of government and regulations. It is pretty obvious you need to follow all regulations as imposed by exchange including KYC, fees, verification and all.
But I still feel Bitcoin transactions are still much easier than bank wires or other payment processors.

You say yes but did you think how the recipient will cash that bitcoin amount out so that he can get money? Bitcoin is a flexible transfer asset between bitcoin users but real world money is not included there?

I was in this shoe few months back and it wasnt really that hard. Though it wasn't as much as that but it was still a huge amount i had to pay my international vendor and that was my first time I used bitcoin. He was even the one who suggested when I told him about the international transaction limitations in my country. I made use of remitano, a P2P exchange which surprisingly it was a easy peasy transaction to his wallet. I think this shouldn't really be a problem generally. There is always a protocol to every international transaction someone wants to do anyway. If I am a newbie with PayPal,  I'd still have to register an account, link my card and all that. It is even easier with bitcoin as far as I am concerned. There is always a first time to everything and after that first time, it becomes so easy.

It is somehow true that bitcoin only works best between bitcoin users, but as I experienced there is a chance that it can be better using bitcoin to transfer money overseas, like in our country, if you use the wallet that features a withdrawal of bitcoin without any fee transfering money from other country is a good choice then as you or the person you're about to send can withdraw it instantly after sending some bitcoin, so still bitcoin can somehow be better regarding fiat, but it only happens in some cases so there is no assurance though.

Making a wallet is easy anyway. Transaction fees are higher now as some people complain but I suppose it's still tolerable for sending money abroad, considering all the fees for traditional transfers. I think most of the problem would be on the cashing-out side. Exchanges can have quite a high spread so if the sender bought bitcoins solely for sending them, the receiver would be getting way less when he/she cash out (assuming he won't hold on to it a bit). Not to mention the fees when cashing in/out.

Using bitcoin for transferring money is extremely fast and really cheap but the problem is if someone wants to transfer funds but he doesn't have bitcoins it can be expense because i have noticed to buy bitcoins normally a fees of upto 15% is charged but if someone slready has bitcoin transferring funds overseas is surely cheap

bitcoin make transferring money simple, but how to convert it from btc to cash, it is based on destination country receiver.
if there were many exchanges on country receiver it doesn't matter to convert it to some of them, with splitting the amount to withdraw in 5,000£/each.
exhanges need your id to upload, it doesn't matter for me as long it is clean business money, there is not to worried at all

Generally speaking, I feel like it is expensive but still competitive and also depends on the country you live in. Looking at the accessibility +fees to trader+ selling btc. the fees from fx would come out to be similar. The advantage here is that you know for sure that the money has been transferrer to the account(within secs) but I'm not sure when you wire money to someone if it is that quick and reliable.

When it comes to sending huge amount of money,bitcoin is the best option you got because it is the cheapest way to send large amounts of money,since he is new to bitcoin ,what he has to do is to sign up with an exchange and verify his details according to the KYC procedure and then he can cash it out.

Transferring the bitcoin is no problem. The problem presents itself when trying to exchange the bitcoin to the native currency in the region where tender is required.  It's easy to transfer bitcoin from point 'A' to point 'B' but it's not so easy to exchange the bitcoin for a currency that will allow a real world transaction to be conducted.  However, there are debit cards that are syched to a bitcoin wallet that do the conversions automatically....so, there are solutions.

If you're going for a time specific thing and you can't count on the exchanges to come through very quickly, then Bitcoin wouldn't be the best option here and it'd be in the best interest of the person who's sending money to simply avoid it. If it isn't time specific and you'd like to save money, then go through some of the loops that come with Bitcoin and you won't be setting yourself back as much money as a place like WU (Western Union) would be as they charge INSANE amounts of fees.


If the government wants in, they'll key themselves in with some sort of law to force the exchanges -- they just don't see Bitcoin as that much of a threat yet, but it will happen at some point.