You bring up a valid point, and indeed the cost math doesn't add up at the moment.

My argument is that if you are an e-wallet provider specializing in Vietnamese Dong, then implementing a Bitcoin wallet into your existing offerings is trivial, since most of the required technology stack is open-source.

If you are an e-wallet provider specializing in Indonesian Rupiah, implementing a Bitcoin wallet into your existing offerings is also trivial.

The magic (and cost reductions) will come when users realize these silos can now talk to each other. I believe it's a question of why not? instead of why?

The sender can easily buy bitcoins, the receiver can easily sell them. Neither has to know or care what local currency the other uses.

Sending bitcoin is easy in a connected app and requires no permission or blessing from the world's financial and governmental overlords. It's essentially a native "value transfer protocol" of the internet. Wheras managing hundreds of pairs of currencies using some choice of third party intermediary companies brings in third parties, contracts, counterparty risks, regulatory issues, legal issues, risk of government seizure, censorship & interference, etc.

Still doesn't make any sense.

- You need a third party intermediary if you want to use bitcoin as an intermediary unless you want to build an exchange yourself. It's just as easy if not more so to use a remittance company.

- Why would a sender buy bitcoins to send it to her friend when she can just click "send X rupiah to Nam" and receive a message like "Nam will get Y Dong". Or even "Send Y Dong to Nam" and receive the cost in rupiah.

This scenario only works if both the sender and receiver are comfortable in using bitcoin instead of their local currency as their unit of stored value. Which we know nobody is.

>> The sender can easily buy bitcoins, the receiver can easily sell them. Neither has to know or care what local currency the other uses.

People generally tend to care how much money they will be receiving!

> Wheras managing hundreds of pairs of currencies using some choice of third party intermediary companies for remittancing brings in third parties, contracts, counterparty risks, regulatory issues, legal issues, risk of government seizure, censorship & interference, etc.

Yes if your a remittance company. Which I assume this application developer isn't.

[edited for clarity and as I missed the last part of the comment]

I get what you are saying.

Bsaically you are saying that bitcoin is useless because nobody uses bitcoin.

Unfortiunately it's true that it is yet to see big adoption outside of techies, and citizens of basket case economies such as venezuela etc.

It's like if you invented email but nobody was using it yet. People would say email is useless, because nobody uses email.

But the concept of bitcoin is not useless, just as the concept of email is not useless. Day to day usefulness requires adoption it's true.

But even now it is useful as an intermediary currency that can "tunnel through" any kind of regulatory barrier as long as an internet connection exists.

Yep we are on the same page. I actually really like cryptocurrencies, but I work in regular payments so Im a practical and cynical sob :)

> It's like if you invented email but nobody was using it yet. People would say email is useless, because nobody uses email.

For the layperson, bitcoin (the utility not speculative side) looks like P2P email in a world where there was already gmail. While there is fundamental and important differences underneath, it's not apparent to most. Though a basket case economy may make it more apparent..

But presumably you realise that you can "tunnel through" regulatory barriers precisely because hardly anyone is using it? If Bitcoin started to get big in retail, the regulators would be all over it for all the same reasons.

Also, if the intermediated FX was less expensive than the direct cross, I would expect that the e-wallet provider would just centralise the Bitcoin transaction. Why get the punters involved?

Realistically, Bitcoin would only have value as a currency if there's a substantial economy denominated in Bitcoin. Like there has been on the dark web.