I make international payments regularly using things like Wise (formerly transferwise), and it’s far simpler than any crypto solution, and accepted by everyone.
And yes, I own some crypto and could use it if anyone was willing to take it.
The only case where it is simpler is there there are capital control, and in that case it is being used illegally.
This is not because such payments are illegal, but rather because the Brazilian financial system has poor norms and poor rule-of-law: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/16/wise-accuses-former-brazil....
And if you're sending money to Argentinians, they would beg you for it, as otherwise your recipient would just receive a fraction of the USD you send because of the difference between the official rate the government enforce, and the real rate.
Read about Blue Dollar in Argentina and you'll realize you're very mistaken in your idea that Wise is the solution there.
Nothing is lost to you in either case, but if you send it USD in the official ways, something is lost to those who'll receive less money.
Temporary, if you believe it can be strangled.
Given the lack of success of the Argentinian government with the Blue Dollar, my Bayesian prior is that it won't be temporary!
Now think about the general case: you pay a bit less than the going price in the rest of the world, to take into account the problem of "where the cash come from" (certainly not a difficulty for a country with as large as Argentina, with multiple land borders and sea ports) and price in the cost of solving this problem. Given the right price, you'll find clients, as every trade needs a counterparty, for a mutually beneficial exchange.
And you then have the answer to your question.
It's a good thing for everyone - including the people in Argentina who get to enjoy the Blue Dollar by receiving more from the remittance.
Check https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord... if you still can't see crypto being useful for remittances.
BTW It's quite frightening to see replies likes yours. Most people here on HN seems to have a blind admiration for governments and laws, with about 0 critical thinking abilities when it comes to policies that are ultimately harmful (for ex, based on what I read here about Wise etc, I'd summarize the default HN position to "let's make our apps obey currency control laws in Argentina, even if it further impoverishes the locals!") until they are ultimately proved pointless (ex: turning back Australia into a prison island to control a virus as contagious as the smallpox... yeah not gonna work, but thanks for demonstrating that)
If the people of Argentina can use cryptocurrency to route around the oppressive and unjust laws they suffer under, I say more power to them.
Cash is what the illegal drug trade runs on, and governments are generally very bad at preventing that.
One interesting data-point about Argentina is that currently about 8% of all physical US dollar bills (About $130 billion) are in Argentina (https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2021/06/28/a-cryp...).
bitcoin is by design inefficient, and it could have been efficient by design. the inefficiency model implies the need for large compute resources, which is a form of industrial, technological, and infrastructural prowess and capacity. See smaller and more power-insecure nations banning crypto-mining. Bitcoin only makes sense from an electricity standpoint when you have excess electricity that you would otherwise have no way of using. Hydropower, solar, and virtually all power plants have some excess capacity that they could theoretically convert directly to mining operations, for as long as they had no consumer power demands. The theory behind bitcoins numbers/algos is that the power plant shouldn't have to make a choice between serving customers and running crypto operations, they make the most possible serving customers, and burning excess supply.
Market conditions have temporarily distorted bitcoin mining distribution, but with fewer coins left to mine and a growing understanding of bitcoins algorithmically enforced economics, you will see it banned from everywhere that it does "waste energy", and lots of miners will realize that "stateless" currency depends entirely on industrial surcapacity which is entirely dictated and governed by the state. So a nation's governance structures and ability to adapt to a developing world turn out to be just as critical as the country's ability to supply massive energy demand. The places that are able to do this are typically worth spending money in so it makes sense as a unit of "value".
bitcoin was an attempt to replace gold mining and gold transfers, but it was also an effort to represent something about the miner who mined it. A bitcoin miner had to have lots of cheap energy and the technological capability to run distributed compute efficiently. bitcoin has been narrowing in on global energy surcapacity, and it turns out there isn't any. This will have all kinds of effects on the price of bitcoin, as lots of inefficient players and players in insufficiently developed economies are forced out of the mining pool.
however in places where bitcoin is mined efficiently, one could theoretically use those same bitcoins to purchase either cheap (or even green) electricity, efficient (cool) compute, or whatever else goes along with running massive mining facilities.
Imagine replacing a valuable material asset with nothing. I get that bitcoin was designed as a hedge against market volatility. But instead of soaring when the traditional market sours it has become a leading indicator of volatility. If you look at the crash of 2020 and the one happening now buttcoin variants preformed poorly almost a month before the market did meanwhile gold is doing what its supposed to.
> however in places where bitcoin is mined efficiently, one could theoretically use those same bitcoins to purchase either cheap (or even green) electricity, efficient (cool) compute, or whatever else goes along with running massive mining facilities
This is stupid, who would burn energy to buy energy? Bitcoin proponents who believe these lies probably also believe in overunity, free energy and perpetual motion.
In any case, my point is that the value comes from the societal relationships that invest the asset with value, not the physical nature of it.
No, I mean the labor of the workforce of the nation.
The receiving account holder may need to declare the payment to their local tax authorities, but that's true of crypto too, it's just not automatic.
Whereas with crypto, you get transparent fees/rates, transaction confirmation in minutes, at any time of day, with a permanent cryptographic record of payment, and you don't unnecessarily leak information to the recipient's local tax authorities.
I can hold foreign currency in my bank account (many banks allow this), so sending money in exact amounts internationally is trivial. And £20 isn't opaque or expensive. Much easier than putting a coin order in and then sending that.
Bypassing local law enforcement isn't a feature for me. These systems exist for reasons.
There is a reasonable question where allowing money laundering for good would offset the use cases for those with more evil intentions.
My opinion is probably not since most people in Argentina are going to launder a fraction of a BTC at a time, but all that would be offset by the harm from criminal syndicates (drugs, human trafficking, even oppressive governments).
This feels like solving an edge case with a massive potential downside. It would be a shame to have provided a technology that freed the people of Argentina, but at the same time, allowed the narcos to enslave them.
If an American wants to send money to someone in Argentina they have plenty of options that are cheaper and safer than Crypto: Wise, PayPal, Xoom, even Western Union.
If an Argentinian wants to evade capital control laws in their own country crypto may be their best option. Just calling it corrupt, as a foreigner, does not make it legal or ethical.
> Blue Dollar AKA Dolar Blue or unofficial dollar is parallel dollar rate of USD in Argentina. This is the cost of buying and selling a physical dollar bill in a cueva, or clandestine financial house in Buenos Aires. This is the best price you’ll get if you are buying or selling physical bills, and the transaction is done with no involvement of any government-sanctioned or licensed entity (like a bank).
What does exchanging physical dollar bills in Argentina have to do with remittances, or crypto? Many countries have informal or black markets for exchanging currencies, separate from the official exchange rates. That is not the same as remittances unless you are sending envelopes of dollars to someone in Argentina. My comment responds to the claim "Crypto is clearly the easiest way to do international payments right now," which simply isn't true, not even to Argentina.
That, who would have guessed, there are places who'll happily convert the crypto remittances at the Blue rate. So the people you send money to will get more money, while you'll send the same amount, just in a different way.
And the people receiving money, would would guess that, will be happier by receiving more money instead of less :)
Reading the Blue Dollar web site I noticed that Argentina recently started taxing crypto transactions, which means the government is requiring exchanges to report those transactions, like they already do for USD transactions.
I seriously doubt that people who already use the unofficial exchange rate will use the official exchanges for crypto...
https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord...
A reply with useful information works better than writing that someone absolutely doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but your comment did spur me to look more into the subject.
I made my initial reply because the amount of disinformation about crypto on HN is frightening.
You may want to incorporate that to your "reading lens" priors when reading dismissive information here: there is a large probability the person has no idea what they are talking about, and is simply repeating something.
And BTW it's not a value judgement, as repeating stuff that's true is good, valuable, and a valid default heuristic for most other topics on HN.
I've read this "crypto has no use-case" meme a lot recently, and it's always perplexed me. Crypto is clearly the easiest way to do international payments right now, particularly for countries with restrictive capital controls, like, for example, Argentina (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/argentina...).
Sometimes this is qualified as "crypto has no use-case except crime", but what obligation do I, a US person, have to follow or respect corrupt Argentinian regulations?