«send money to your relatives back home» → I suggested to the recipient we use Western Union, but he had been banned from WU. Thus demonstrating the censorship-resistant value of Bitcoin. Other services we briefly considered seemed like I would have to first go through a verification step which would have taken ~24 hours, so not a solution. Remember our transaction was made in under 1 hour.

«SMS banking» → Non existent in our situation (US recipient)

«Hawala» → Maybe, but unworkable in our situation. None of use have used Hawala, we wouldn't even have known WHERE to look for Hawala providers...

Thank you for demonstrating my point. Nothing could have beaten Bitcoin/crypto in this instance.