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Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

Both the US and the eurozone are kind of single market currency unions where you would expect money transfers to be relatively convenient. As soon as you make a transfer outside of the EU you'll get hit by arbitrary and outrageous correspondent bank fees and delays. Payment services like TransferWise's "borderless accounts" get around this by pooling capital in various banks internationally, matching transfers against each other, etc.

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SWIFT transfers aren't particularly slow or expensive these days. I use TransferWise but it's not cheaper in all cases.

It totally depends on the source and destination of the transfer. My girlfriend's small art house cinema recently transferred money to pay a filmmaker for festival participation and the correspondent bank fee was something like 60 euros on a 100 euro transfer.

Try Transferwise, those kind of fees are insane.

Just use Bitcoin? I mean I know people give it a lot of shit for some reason, but this is a perfect usecase for it.

So instead of a 60 euro fee, they need to spend ~.5-1.5 hours walking the director through how to set up a wallet and how to turn the internet money into actual hard currency? For someone that isn't already familiar, using bitcoin isn't exactly the most user-friendly experience.

Or Pirate Arr, or Litecoin

With Litecoin block generation halving in about 60 days soon it may not be affordable.

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