Bitcoin Forum

Have you heard the news?

Filipinos Can Now Send Money Back Home Through Rebit http://bit.ly/1zfzYLR

That is kinda cool right? With every remitance service fcking us, I think its time for this to emerge.
Surely this will be a big help for OFW who wants to help their family back home.

Post was viewed 73 times, maybe those 73 were filipinos.

Thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27736.0

Rebit has already been posted.

Isn't coins.ph an already existing platform for this ?
Heard good things about it, and they are now expanding into new countries.

Madami na po pinoy dito

Yup, coins.ph not only do remittance but also exchange and provide online wallet.

I wonder how these 2 compare against each other in terms of fees etc.

Both claim to be free for the end users (apart from fees the third party provider is asking, but bank transfers seem free for example). My guess is both are making their money via the BTC exchange rate. I.e. they display a rate to you, but they are actually able to get a better price from their partners.

OK, I've just checked the "Compare us against other remittance providers" section on Rebit:

https://rebit.ph/compare

They're not charging any service or exchange fees (total fees: zero). Anyone know how do they make money? Is this info misleading?

"How it work" shows this:


So fees (if any) are payable to 3rd party providers. But what's in it for Rebit? Are they getting % of fees (affiliate system)?

Edit: @Newar - thanks for the answer

Coins.ph BUY price is actually $9-$10 more per BTC so I guess that's how they make money

Rebit.ph does really not charge anything since a few weeks. I could come up with multiple reasons:

1) site owners are just rich filipinos trying to buy bitcoins without fees on other exchanges (or/and think price is relatively low ATM)
2) site has some big buyers of bitcoin (OTC) and they charge them
3) site just wants to get popular first, has losses now to become "market leader" in PH to earn more in the future

Either way, it's good for Filipinos and ppl who send money there :) I certainly benefit from using their service :)


Also best to post things related to PH in the PH thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27736.0

But their fees is zero for sending money. However they benefit from the 9-10$ like you said.
They should just charge a small fees instead.

You cannot say they're overcharging $9-$10 for 1 BTC. The buy price, displayed on their website is PHP 10,037 (~$225.85, compared to $222 at BitStamp), sell price is 9,840. So the difference is PHP 197 (~$4.43). If that's all they're charging for the transfer, I'd say it's pretty good deal.

Actually they have an "extra" 1% buy fee too. So currently:

Buy: PHP 10,017 | Sell: PHP 9,821

Stamp: $221.16

Buy: PHP 10,117 = $228.09
Sell: PHP 9,821 = $221.42

So in theory, compared to Stamp you would actually profit when you sell on coins.ph and a 3% "fee" when buying.

Actually Rebit is still slightly better with 9,841. But it does look like coins.ph is really cheap too and still competing with them on sell-price (obviously from time to time they could be cheaper too, depending on price etc.)

$9-10 seems not the case though (unless you compared when price was just going up/down.)

Yes, agreed, definitely a good work done by them to keep the fees almost zero .

Wow Rebit and Palarin. :) Cool!

One more explanation by Bitspark (offers same service as rebit and coins.ph) https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2vacxz/the_huge_smiles_on_these_migrant_workers_faces/cogl1pl

What about Palarin?

Don't know about them, you'll have to google yourself. I suspect it's very similar to the other three.

Yeah.. Same as Palarin
http://bitforum.info/t/palarin-a-philippine-based-coinbase-like-bitcoin-exchange/245/1

If the company could follow through and maintain the feature, that will surely be a helpful tool for OFW.