[mahyarm]

It's also useful for cheaper & faster cross border remittances for the common person. For the common person paypal's %3+ currency exchange fees is more expensive than the equivalent %0.5-%1 in fees you get from a 2 bitcoin exchanges. And it's far faster since everything moves at the speed of local deposits & withdraws.

[woogiewonka]

Transferwise is pretty friendly and uses real exchange rate + reasonable fees Usually around 1% or less. With Bitcoin, I can send the same transfer for 0.03% - which puts Transferwise to shame and makes PayPal look like an absurd joke. Granted there's much more involved with current volatility of bitcoin but once that gets more stable all of the other options will be a total joke. People who cant't understand the future of bitcoin as remittence are in for a rude awakening.

[patryn20]

This is based on the assumption that bitcoin will stabilize.

I think bitcoin is a flawed first mover. The winner (and future stable cryptocurrency) likely hasn't been invented yet.

But I imagine it's mathematic properties will allows for a sustainable transaction rate (i.e.: thousands per second), short (as in sub 2-3 second) final confirmation times, and the ability to execute Ethereum like smart contracts without major security flaws and naive language implementation choices.

[pg314]

You assume that current remittance providers can't lower their fees. That seems dubious.

[patryn20]

If you had traded BTC cross border at the wrong time last week, you could have lost 5-15% in value based on the prevailing market price during the time it took the transfer to settle and the coins to move onto an exchange and sell.

BTC is in practice a speculative security. Not a currency.

[patryn20]

Now if your goal was simply to circumvent overseas capital transfer limits and legal limitations, that fee might be "worth it."