121–130 of 134 posts
Coinbase sucks but this isn’t the way bitcoin was meant to solve your issue. You can buy bitcoin anywhere and send it freely. You don’t have to use a dumb exchange. It is not decentralized anything at the level you are doing it—you are simply using coinbase to act as an international banking platform
where do you buy bitcoin that's not an exchange? hand cash to a guy in a park? (I suggest that because it was actually suggested to me)
The good news is this HN post could possibly get you the traction you need, which is also sad. Why is it that so many companies' customer support fails to function until someone squawks loudly on a high-traffic public site or social media?
customer support is very expensive from the site's point of view, and filtering through squawking on social media is a way to reduce the number of support tickets. If particular social media channels become clogged with too many "what about my case" postings then those channels will lose eyeballs and no longer function as social media that "gets noticed"
A lot of things in life are stochastic in nature, and so are the responses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
not really, El Salvador switched from wire transfers to BTC exactly because the fees were lower .
No, El Salvador switched from wire transfers to BTC because the president wanted to. Which doesn't has anything to do with the fact that if you've got Bitcoins in a village in some random developing country, you need to find somebody that's willing to give you local banknotes. That person is usually going to charge more commission than Western Union for the privilege of doing so, because they can.
The country switched to using BTC as legal tender because it was already being used as local currency because the people were using it for payments due to the lower fees.
> That person is usually going to charge more commission than Western Union for the privilege of doing so, because they can.
It seems like you're assuming this to be the case without having any real knowledge of the situation. BTC was adopted by El Salvadorans exactly because they were able to spend less on fees over the competition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western Union being free is the outlier here.
it's definitely not free. There's a fee but even if they waive it, they make more money from currency exchange rates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can critisize many things about bitcoin, but it is definitely decentralized...
Their point is that the current decentralised Bitcoin is functionally unusable and simply not ready for mass use. In that sense, a truly decentralized Bitcoin that people can actually make use of doesn't exist.
Meanwhile, I needed to pay folks who have fled the country, and now are located in Kazakhstan. I used... Western Union. Surprisingly, it was without any fees, I sent the exact amount in dollars from the US and they received exactly the same amount in US dollars in minutes. I don't know why Bitcoin today is something people want to use, since you can send Western Union or use other payment methods (like Wise) to almos…
Ukrainians aren't under any kind of sanctions so why not just use a service like Wise? As for anything related to crypto, most of it is a scam so it comes as no surprise that the few companies trying to be legit in this field are under so many restrictions it's incredibly inconvenient to use them... Anyhow, everyone I know transfers money to Eastern Europe with Wise.
I did look at Wise today because it was mentioned. It's not cheap, and certainly a lot more expensive than wire transfers or crypto.
Meanwhile, I needed to pay folks who have fled the country, and now are located in Kazakhstan. I used... Western Union. Surprisingly, it was without any fees, I sent the exact amount in dollars from the US and they received exactly the same amount in US dollars in minutes. I don't know why Bitcoin today is something people want to use, since you can send Western Union or use other payment methods (like Wise) to almos…
+1 for Wise. I regularly send funds to Zaporizhzhia and they are received almost instantly.
The good news is this HN post could possibly get you the traction you need, which is also sad. Why is it that so many companies' customer support fails to function until someone squawks loudly on a high-traffic public site or social media?
> Why is it that so many companies' customer support fails to function until someone squawks loudly on a high-traffic public site or social media? customer support is very expensive from the site's point of view, and filtering through squawking on social media is a way to reduce the number of support tickets. If particular social media channels become clogged with too many "what about my case" postings then those cha…