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from the who-said-fake-money-would-never-be-worth-anything dept.
Thanks in part to Argentina's volatile financial markets, bitcoins are helping people there cut out the banks and government entirely in their financial transactions:
That afternoon, a plump 48-year-old musician was one of several customers to drop by the rented room. A German customer had paid the musician in Bitcoin for some freelance compositions, and the musician needed to turn them into dollars. Castiglione [the bitcoin moneychanger] joked about the corruption of Argentine politics as he peeled off five $100 bills, which he was trading for a little more than 1.5 Bitcoins, and gave them to his client. The musician did not hand over anything in return; before showing up, he had transferred the Bitcoins — in essence, digital tokens that exist only as entries in a digital ledger — from his Bitcoin address to Castiglione’s. Had the German client instead sent euros to a bank in Argentina, the musician would have been required to fill out a form to receive payment and, as a result of the country’s currency controls, sacrificed roughly 30 percent of his earnings to change his euros into pesos. Bitcoin makes it easier to move money the other way too. The day before, the owner of a small manufacturing company bought $20,000 worth of Bitcoin from Castiglione in order to get his money to the United States, where he needed to pay a vendor, a transaction far easier and less expensive than moving funds through Argentine banks.
Do any Solentils manage their transactions in bitcoin? What are your experiences?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday May 02 2015, @06:12AM
Do not trust.
I cannot find Google Pay. Do you mean Google Wallet? Anyway, too much tied to the Google ecosystem. Probably cannot be used without an all-encompassing Google account.
Unsuitable for personal money transactions.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @04:39AM
For basic moving of money over the Internet there is Paypal
- Do not trust.
Over the last 7-8 years I've received about 50 PayPal payments, mostly about $500 each. These are from universities in over a dozen different countries (I'm in USA) -- their money is pooled for an expensive service and the results are shared around.
So far, no problems with PayPal at all (knock on wood). On the other hand, international bank transfers were such a disaster that I quit accepting them. The most common problems were no tracking info (couldn't confirm the senders name), or random fees deducted by intermediary banks.
What I think is going on is that the USA banking system computerized first (and probably not with the best system design), but when Europe and the rest of the world computerized they didn't bother making anything compatible with the US system. Can anyone confirm this theory?