The Buttcoin remittance challenge.
Right, there's a bunch of circlejerking happening in /r/Bitcoin right now so I think it's time to cut through the bullshit one way or another.
Country to send money to.
The biggest remittance markets are China, Indian and the Philippines.
I believe that since /r/Bitcoin often gives the Philippines as an example of successful Bitcoin remittance then it is the perfect country to use in our challenge.
Country to send money from.
According to this wikipedia article Malaysia and Canada have the biggest expat Filipino communities. 900,000 and 500,000.
So I think we should do the calculations based on both countries.
The methodology
Most people are not paid in Bitcoin. This is a fact. So for our calculation you must start with fiat, and end in fiat. We're not doing these calculations based on future utility of Bitcoin (No, neo. I'm saying...), we're doing them on the current utility.
We will also be doing a bank to bank remittance, because that is nice an constant. We don't need to take into account pick up locations Bitcoin remittance allows and pick up locations normal remittance allows. They'll vary too much.
Time will also not be taken into account, as time doesn't actually matter when it comes to remittance. Now, Bitcoiners might shout about this particular rule but let me explain my logic behind this.
A foreign worker gets paid every Friday. They start the remittance process on the Friday and regardless of if it takes 0, 3, or 5 days their family back in their home country just needs to base their life around money coming in on remitters pay day + 0, 3, or 5 days. Time taken is of no real value when it comes to remittance. All that matters is that it consistently arrives on day x.
As such, any remittance services that take over 5 working days are to be ignored for the sake of this challenge.
The amount
The amount is going to be 25% of the average wage in each of the countries. This isn't extremely scientific because it doesn't particularly need to be, and the figures are hard to come by.
So 1826.75 MYR for Malaysia and 1,398 CAD for Canada.
Don't bother complaining about these, they're just examples.
Few more ground rules
We're going to be going from bank/bank card to bank regardless, so we're not interested in banking fees on either side. They will be the same regardless of Bitcoin or WU (for example)
It must be from local fiat to foreign fiat.. You can't palm off the conversion fee to the receivers bank to keep fees down.
Any remittance service can be used, as long as Bitcoin is involved for people fighting the Bitcoin corner and Bitcoin isn't used for people fighting the WU (or similar) corner.
You must go through the process and document all the fees for each. Fees to look out for are currency spreads, transaction fees on exchanges, etc
Format for a comment should be:
Host country:
Home country:
URL of company:
Amount sent in host currency:
Amount received in home currency:
Total cost: (For this, go onto google and do something like 12,000 PHP (the amount received) to CAD and then subtract the answer from the original CAD amount to get the actual cost.)
Process followed: