I'm a bitcoin optimist, for several reasons. One of them is that I experience the inefficiencies of the current monetary system on a routine basis as someone who lives in a foreign country. Every time I want to transfer the money I make in Chinese RMB to my American bank account, I have to pay PayPal a 4% transaction fee. I
hate having to use such an expensive way to transfer money, but it's better than the alternatives! (See how to use PayPal to do so
here.) Compared with a wire transfer, at least PayPal is instant, and avoids the wire transfer fees from a bank which would come out to nearly as much.
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| PayPal's fees. 0.5%-2% sounds nice. The problem is, PayPal doesn't allow you to link a Chinese bank account! |
Why should transferring money from one country to another cost so damn much? This is one of the questions that Bitcoin sets out to address. With Bitcoin, there's no banks holding your money and charging high fees to send it somewhere else. Once you own bitcoin, it's yours.
