Unless of course you try to transmit it to someplace your bank or the government doesn't like, or the bank has dumb AML controls. In which case the transaction will likely get held up if it can be sent at all. If you try to transfer from somewhere boring like from the USA to Canada of course you can send $25k no problem (most of the time anyway, my bank has interrogated me and locked up my account before for attempting to send $1500 to my wife until I gave up and just used cash).

Meanwhile you could transfer $25k in crypto to Dubai and walk away with it in cash at an OTC desk in an hour via a wallet to wallet.

“ Meanwhile you could transfer $25k in crypto to Dubai”

Thats a use case 99.99999999999999999% of humanity does not care at all about.

Dubai / UAE is about the largest per capita inflow of high net worth individuals, and even on an absolute basis has one of the highest immigration inflow of high net worth individuals.

Yes if you are poor as dirt and can just take your life savings of <$10k (probably 99% of humanity) on an airplane if you need to use it in another country, you can do so no problem and you do not care, the idea of a crypto OTC desk likely does not even occur to you. It is still solving the same problem, but by being small enough that no one cares.

The data pretty well speaks for itself. Humanity with money cares a lot about escaping capital controls. This is inviolable, the more the banking system handicaps itself the more capital flows into less regulated products.

The flat fee is a small part of what that transfer costs. The real transaction fee is embedded in the exchange rate. 2% markup is not an unheard of amount, which I guess would make your total cost $515 and not $15.

There's a reason Wise is a huge business and people in Canada resort to "Norbert's gambit" to exchange currency with minimal transaction costs.

I think it was about 1% off the "theoretical best" exchange rate I could have gotten. But I don't exactly have access to those kinds of rates as an individual. Do crypto trades not have the same dynamic once you involve exchanges? Once you include the take from the USD ~> Crypto ~> $Other do you still come out ahead?

No idea, never owned or used crypto. I guess for large amounts the reference point should be total transaction cost using Wise and/or some version of Norbert's gambit if your currency pair is a popular one and dual-listed securities/ETFs are readily available.

You do know that 3 out of the 4 most populous countries have currencies with restrictions on foreign exchange? Send a lot of money out internationally and they will ask for reasons and documents as evidence.

Do you imagine that large changes in your local currency holdings with no explicable financial transactions would be unnoticed?

> I just did a $25,000 wire internationally with a currency exchange in the middle and it cost $75. It went through in one business day.

This is exactly what I'm talking about and I'm not certain whether you're sarcastic .. Paying $75 on a 25k amount with a transaction time of 24 hours to complete is absolutely insane. You'd have used USDT or USDC or any other stable coin, you would have paid <$1 of fee and got the transaction done in seconds.

How about the exchange rate padding when you go from crypto to useful currency and back?

it's a 1:1 when you convert a stable to USD - some exchanges might take a small fee like 0.01% or so ... On Coinbase it's a 1:1 https://www.coinbase.com/en-de/converter/usdc/usd