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Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

Remittances are horrible for Bitcoin. Most remittances are fairly small, so the Bitcoin fees alone are more expensive than just paying Western Union or another remittance service. Not to mention bitcoin being extremely inconvenient for the types of people who tend to use remittance services.

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Things like Bitcoin might be horrible for remittances right now, but there is a lot of development in this space. For example, Ethereum is working on sharding to make it exponentially more scalable. The goal is that when sharding and proof of stake are completely finished, it will be possible to play something like Starcraft on Ethereum (super cheap transactions and 0.5 second block times). This is probably something like 10 years away, but it's coming.

The kind of people using these services are too poor or uneducated to transfer money using one of the many apps that already exist. The blockchain hype is insane, distributed transactions are pointless in most money transfer scenarios where existing systems work fine.

That still only addresses half of the problem. How are you going to send Bitcoins to someone in a country where they don't have Internet? Cash is king in those places--hence remittance services like Western Union. Bitcoin is cool but it isn't a panacea and there are a lot of out of touch comments about its uses. You need to understand your customer and why they use a particular product before you can actually say whether Bitcoin or something else will actually be any benefit.

If they don't have internet, how does Western Union receive the message for the money transfer?

My word choice of 'they' wasn't very clear but Western Union would have some access. However internet most likely isn't broadly available for those in poverty, so the recipient most likely doesn't have it. At least not reliably. Imagine having a currency you can't even use. Not very helpful. And then there's still the education part of learning how to use Bitcoin, securing your Bitcoins, and getting that currency accepted by others.

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