Bitcoin Forum

Pretty funny...

http://bitcoin-trader.blogspot.com/2011/10/send-money-overseas.html (http://bitcoin-trader.blogspot.com/2011/10/send-money-overseas.html)

Think how many of those transfers are occurring every second around the world.

Quick, scout out their customer base.   Market toward them.  They need help.

http://chan0512.hubpages.com/hub/My-Royal-Bank-of-Canada-RBC-Online-Banking-Account-Review Someone smarter than me should contact this person to do a Bitcoin review.  Seriously.  Just make sure your approach is not spammy.

http://canadianmoneyforum.com/showthread.php?t=3188

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/most-economical-way-wire-money-926711/

I've had to send money Canada -> Thailand a few times and used MoneyGram.
That's cheaper than WU, but both are costly - both in the $15-20 range or more.
Strangely MG is about half the price in US vs. Canada.

Unfortunately right now BitCoin is only useful for this in a few situations. When you are able to withdraw money in a foreign country with BitCoin then it works, otherwise it's not helpful. For me I would end up withdrawing via MtGox to Dwolla to my US bank, and then via ATM anyway ($7 fee). It's just too complicated for most users.

What BitCoin really needs for this to be as good as WU/MoneyGram is a wide range of agents in various places worldwide who can give you cash for BitCoin on the spot. You may be able to find someone sometimes in some places but it's very hit-n-miss right now.

So, for now, these other services are more costly but also more useful.

But there are millions of people who often send money home internationally and it would be awesome if they could use BitCoin - a substantial trade often by people who would rather not use a bank anyway.

I am an RBC customer. I expect my wire transfer to Tradehill to cost $45 CAD.

I don't use their online banking because they require you to use an antivirus on your computer if one is available for your OS. Domestic Money orders at RBC cost $7.50, forget how much international money orders cost, but it is probably comparable to the price quoted.

I am looking forward to using bitcoin for online banking. I still have not set up my computer with full-drive encryption, and off-site, verified backups yet.

I also have to look into how much legal backing the the FINTRAC guidelines for a Money Service business (http://www.fintrac-canafe.gc.ca/msb-esm/intro-eng.asp) have. They claim that "Money services businesses include alternative money remittance systems (such as Hawala, Hundi or Chitti), (Bitcoin)," but they may be relying on voluntary disclosure rules for that. If just relaying transactions makes you a MSB, the guidelines are impossible to follow. The guidelines are merely unreasonable to follow if only actual exchanges need to be recorded.

An encrypted wallet and occasional off-site backups should suffice, no?

I decided full-drive encryption, at least for my portable computer, is important in case of loss. I don't want to worry about transient remenants of the plain-text wallet being stored on the drive. The SSD I have been looking at getting also clears data that looks like deleted files in an NTFS/FAT32. Encryption will make the data look more random and hopefully protect it from drive tampering.

The backups need to be verified because restore time is not the time to find out your back-up strategy failed. In fact, when I tested Dump/Restore using DVD+R disks on my fileserver, data near the end of the disk was lost. I have yet to figure out why. DVR+R disks/drives are supposed to support lossless linking in the even of a buffer underrun.

PS: I wasn't competely truthful earlier: I also don't use online banking because I don't trust my computer to keep proper records (not being backed up and all). Bitcoin raises the stakes and forces competence.