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Comment by alexandersingh | Hacker News Reader

According to Wikipedia, remittances were in excess of $560 billion last year, faciliated by 250 million migrant workers[1].

You and I are not the user demographic ;)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance

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To be fair that demographic has been traditionally served by the hawala system[1]. It's not obvious to me right now that they'd switch to BTC so easily; of course I could be wrong.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

I'm long Bitcoin but those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt before using them to make a case for remittance and Bitcoin.

Some of the top receiving countries include France, Germany or Belgium (over $1000 per inhabitant) and the top sending countries include Luxembourg ($12B for a population of 575K).

So the numbers probably include cross-border workers. People living in France/Germany/Belgium but working in Luxembourg. Transferring euros within the SEPA region (for free) for at least $50B out of the $560B mentioned.

That's his point though, the early internet had many useful applications that where appealing to the mainstream. International money transfers are not a mainstream activity.

250 million people isn't mainstream? These are people sending money to their families on a monthly basis, and where current transfer fees can take the equivalent of a half day of work.

That strikes me as an appealing use case.

a highly regulated one too, crypto does not address the complexities of international monetary regulations. If the solution is to not abide by the existing regulations, it not going to be mainstream.

As jogjayr pointed out, the Hawala system has existed before and after formal regulations. Crypto alone might not represent a viable mainstream alternative, but it does have potential as one piece of a composite solution.

Can people in this thread please take a minute to consider demographics outside your immediate circles?

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