I used it to transfer money between countries with an exchange rate better than any other available. Surely this is not illegal?
That's exactly what capital flight is (one of its forms), and what most thrid-world countries try to avoid by these banning practices. They (we) have shitty unstable currencies and broken banking systems that the people have no trust in, so they use their savings to buy USD (hard to do in these countries) or Bitcoin to maintain value. Note that money doesn't even need to leave the country for it to be a form of capital flight; just the fact alone that you're buying foreign currency or Bitcoin in a black market.
In the west this is legal, but the bank may still ask you where the money came from under their enforcement of laws like knowing your customer and money laundering controls.
Tax agencies may also get involved if there is automatic reporting.
For the few customers that agree to a wire transfer, I'm trying out a cryptocurrency exchange in 2018 to convert them to USD.
I've spoken with my US equities/funds brokerage firm, and they have an FX desk, but they're still more expensive than the dedicated FX broker I found and currently work with. Before that, I was regularly raked by my US bank for 4-6% off the mid-market. I haven't seen mid-market spread + 0.01% anywhere, and only seen + 0.1% thrown around for 6-figure and up USD transaction sizes, wire transfer (ACH or SWIFT), at least several of those per month volume. TransferWise works at mid-market + 1%; but they don't work with paper checks. What you're getting is even better than cryptocurrency exchange-facilitated conversions, so I'm very interested in finding out more if you can post a pointer in the right direction. Thanks.
(Not an endorsement in any way and I'm sure there are others).
Fees are min($2, 0.002%), typical spread is a few pip or much less (eg. EURUSD at the moment: 1.20015 (sell) 1.20020 (buy)). But you'll also need a bank account in both currency most likely.
edit: maybe a downside, but there's a min $10/month activity fee at IB if you have less than 100k holdings (but your transaction fees count against that). But as I said, I'm sure IB isn't the only place with those offerings.
Part of my forex broker's value add is they have banking points of presence in many nations, and can accept the check there, then convert to any currency I designate (typically USD). That would probably explain much of the spread between IB's and my FX broker's margins.
Disclaimer: IANAL and perhaps a bad judge of how people around the world view the law.
Aren't these the same thing? [1] Do you mean something else (civil law)?
But that's a great point; maybe the problem is my lack of living in a purely civil law country. The thing is though, it seems more like common sense to me than a legal issue. Like for example, if (say) murder with a knife and a gun had been illegal, but there was no law against using baseball bats, then suddenly everyone in a civil law system would naturally assume using baseball bats to kill would be okay? It just doesn't make sense to me that "whatever is not expressly illegal must be legal", whatever the legal system... but maybe you're saying that would actually stand up in a civil-law court, and people would actually be okay with it?
It's also quite counter-intuitive to me since the US (with its common law) seems to be quite prominent in its tendency to let its people and companies stick to the letter of the law but not its intent. e.g. so many corporations find legal loopholes to take advantage of all sorts of people (from consumers to politicians) by means which are not technically expressly illegal but which almost surely are out of line with the spirits of many existing laws.
Murder is kind of hard to use as an example because there's typically really strong moral and cultural understandings that you shouldn't be doing that. But lets think of a more nuanced example. Lets say there's a lake that's being overfished. The government doesn't want to outlaw all fishing, but they want to rein in the more massive fishing operations. So they outlaw using trawler nets in the lake, but people using conventional poles or spears can keep fishing as much as they want.
Now say someone comes along and figures out another method to massively overfish the lake without using nets. In civil law countries if the law is written to specifically outlaw the use of nets I think the people would look at the law as faulty instead of the person who exploits the loophole. After all, whatever method they figured out isn't actually illegal. And the way to solve the issue is to update the law, not to punish the clever loophole seeker.
But in common law countries the law would more likely be written in a way that can't be as strictly interpreted. There might be wiggle room that would allow a judge/jury to basically say "Look we didn't explicitly forbid what you are doing, but it's clearly something this law was meant to prevent. Therefore you're guilty, and case law will be updated to include this verdict."
At least that's how I interpret it.
it was legal in so many ways in the past (slavery) and a few today (death penalty, wars)
the thing with all laws, and the state, is that they exist not to make the world fair, but ti maintain status quo.
in the death example, if the law explicitly left baseball bats deaths out, that means that someone with influence over the state wanted it to be exempt.
this is the same on china now probably. china has tons of tech and hydropower. heck they may have invented satoshi! and maybe now too many small players are disrupting their game? or it maybe be that btc is but an annoyance to them and when their economy crumbles because of the upcomingreal state buble they dont want to also have to deal with people loosing money to bogus ICOs. who knows?