> Did you actually try multiple banks? Is the banking ststem really that broken in Indonesia?
I like how you consider that opening an account on another bank was both cheaper and easier than using Bitcoin.
Opening bank accounts is pretty cheap and easy in Austria.
I don't know what it's like in Indonesia, hence my question.
> My (limited) experience with US banks is that they have huge hidden fees and you get really bad currency exchange rates. I'm talking about 8% of funds miraculously disappearing during currency exchange. I don't understand why anybody would bother going via USD.
You need to shop around for a better US bank account. This is not a common thing for us to do so if you pick up a random bank then you’ll be paying close to 10% in various conversion and fx fees. There are definitely US banks that charge 1%, some even 0%.
The problem in that case was with a partners bank, not my own. The solution was to request payments in USD rather than EUR and have my bank do the conversion.
My experience is that bank fees vary greatly.
My (limited) experience with US banks is that they have huge hidden fees and you get really bad currency exchange rates. I'm talking about 8% of funds miraculously disappearing during currency exchange. I don't understand why anybody would bother going via USD.
My Austrian bank on the other hand has much better rates and low fees. I think it was less than 1% for transfers of a few thousand USD last time I checked.
And finally, there are services like Transferwise; I just checked and they show rates of 1.5 - 2% for converting IDR to RUB.