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Comment by kiloreux | Hacker News Reader

I live in Algeria, and we can't use credit cards here, my bank account doesn't support debit cards transfer and if I veer receive 10$ from outside the country, then I'm in for 1 day of questioning the resources for those money, This is a great use case for my country and great initiative from Stripe, Thank you.

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I'm from Tunisia, a country with heavy currency controls, where it is actually impossible to send money out of the country. Of course, if you're a foreign company etc. you can, but not for regular citizens.

So what does that mean? No credit cards online, no bank transfers, no PayPal, and so on. I hope this service can somehow help aspiring local entrepreneurs.

How would you receive the money from the US bank account then?

The only way I can think of is Western Union. But the fees are ridiculously high. Even then, the sender is the receiver. I'm not sure how that would work.

>Even then, the sender is the receiver. I'm not sure how that would work.

Used WU before to send money to myself when my debit card chip was broken and it would've taken too long for an replacement to ship. No issues at all.

(Cost was even lower than what my bank would've charged for an express replacement card, but of course quite high.)

Would they need to, they could perhaps [mostly] purchase capital items by transfer of funds directly from the USA bank to the seller?

Or using a credit card issued by their US bank?

My guess is only once the balance gets big enough to justify a day lost to bureaucracy.

Great to hear! Can't wait to see what you end up building :-)

I'd be interested to hear how this works out for you too! I live in New York, but my father's family is in Bejaia and a lot of them have similar problems.

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