Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
by scotty79 on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @04:33AM
(#15904173)
5% is a ripoff. In Poland I can trade bitcoin to local currency at pretty much no cost except bitcoin neteork fee. Maybe additional 0.10%-0.30% for transaction at the exchange and 0.50$ for bank transfer.
In my country (the Philippines) everyone is buying from high school kids to office workers.
The current minimum transaction fee is around $40. To exchange your bitcoin to Philippine Peso (PHP), the fixed conversion fee is 5%. If those don't seem a lot, get this: 83% of Filipinos earn below $400 a month. Most of whom I know are HODLing their bitcoin because it's too expensive to move their money. They would rather wait for their investment to reap huge gains before they cash out.
Bitcoin here is branded as a "get rich quick" investment scheme, and that's understandable, bitcoin doesn't have a valuable use case here. You can't buy anything here with bitcoin.