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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what the exchange rate looks like when purchasing stuff that's not in USD. If the conversion is the same as that of Bitcoin<->USD, then it would make this card super useful for people who travel a lot.

What I mean is, it'd be cool if the card would do:

    - Bitcoin<->CAD
    - Bitcoin<->EUR
    - Bitcoin<->BHT
    - Bitcoin<->HKD
    - Bitcoin<->AUD

So that we wouldn't need to do:

    - Bitcoin<->USD<->CAD
    - Bitcoin<->USD<->EUR
    - Bitcoin<->USD<->BHT
    - Bitcoin<->USD<->HKD
    - Bitcoin<->USD<->AUD

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I'm curious if this could also be used to help with remittances. I have several friends who emigrated from countries around the world, and they struggle to find an easy way to remit to their parents. Bitcoin seems so close, but it's difficult for their folks to get it converted to local currency. The fees and hurdles they currently deal with are outrageous, and while it looks like the shift card is US only, it seems like there may be an opportunity here.

Yes, there's a big opportunity. But U.S. customer-facing financial companies - especially startups - have been really bad at doing stuff outside the U.S.

Witness the darling Square getting its lunch eaten by iZettle and Paypal (!) even in the UK, to say nothing of rest of Europe, to say nothing of rest of the world.

Everyone and their dog has been trying to solve remittances with technology at least since Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon. Ultimately it's much less a tech problem than a human problem.

Since emigrating this summer, I've transferred about £25k ($40k) using TransferWise and been very pleased with the way the service works. I paid far less in fees than any other service I could find a quote for. I was concerned that being in a small European country with its own currency would mean payments took longer, but this wasn't the case.

They're based in the UK, and properly regulated by both the UK and US.

You get a free transfer using a referral link: https://transferwise.com/u/61f8ad

Or use the non-referral link if you prefer: https://transferwise.com/

Seems to cost ~1% which is better than banks but still $400(!) on $40k. I use Bitcoin to transfer money from USD to THB and get better than spot if I time it right.

This might be the case for people who travel a lot and only hold money in bitcoin and not their native currency, but even then its worse then using USD. There are much better debit cards for travelers which don't charge foreign transaction fees or ATM fees (Schwab Investor Checking for example).

The thing that sucks more is the unexpected and shitty conversion rate you get. I'm not too sure yet what's the best way to go about this, open bank accounts in all those countries and do your currency exchange yourself?

Find a card using the MasterCard or VISA base rate, with no additional fee.

As an example, I was charged CHF20.00 on 5 October, which the card statement says was converted at a rate of 1.4728 to a £13.58 charge on my account¹. XE.com has that day's average rate as 1.4785.

There aren't going to be any other benefits to the card, but that's OK — I have another card for spending in pounds.

The alternative is a pre-paid credit card.

¹ Halifax Clarity.

   - Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->CAD
   - Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->EUR
   - Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->BHT
   - Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->HKD
   - Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->AUD

Hah, Is this a joke or is there actually a doge service that does this?

There is. I mined 30 thousand of them, worth about 10 bucks

Nice idea!

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