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Comment by dobbsbob | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is also the savior for Iranians right now. Students who live abroad can't receive or send money home, so they're now buying bitcoins with cash locally, and their family is cashing it out 10 minutes later in the streets of Tehran using localbitcoins.com and farsi ecurrency forums for a pretty good rate too.

Bitcoin is going to kill a lot of money transfer companies eventually

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Do you have a source for this? I find it very believable, but would like to read more.

Go on localbitcoins.com and type in 'Tehran'. There's also a very popular mailing list/forums for trading in Farsi I have to dig up the link when I leave my office.

Argentina has also embraced bitcoins en masse considering it's now illegal to transfer any money out of the country, and no Argentinian trusts their bank to not steal all their deposits. On payday in Argentina you see huge lines of people at the ATMs withdrawing everything they own to keep under a mattress, or smuggle to Uruguay to deposit in a stable bank.

Searching for Tehran does not actually come up with quality results. As an Iranian with a few bitcoins stashed, i would really like to know more about this as well as links to mentioned mailing list/forums.

If it's illegal to transfer money out of the country, how are new bitcoins getting in to the hands of Argentinians? They could mine a small amount, but if they want to purchase bitcoins owned by someone overseas, they'll need to transfer money out to effect that purchase, won't they?

Tourists have bitcoins and are willing to trade them for pesos at a much better rate than the ATM.

If it's illegal to transfer money out of the country, why not use Hawala? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

A friend of mine uses it to send money to family in Russia as well. Lower overhead than Western Union, wire transfer, etc, for small sums of money.

Strange. I was sending a regular wire transfer from Europe to Russia at the commission of ~1%.

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