BCH in the real world

A few days ago, I needed to send money to a friend who lives in Poland. It wasn’t a huge amount of money – just about $404 (Rs. 30,000). A transaction like this should be super easy to execute – there’s nothing physical that has to be moved from one bank vault in India to another vault in Poland. Nothing has to be manually checked or counted. It’s just data that has to be transferred from one bank to the other. In a world where we are all connected by the internet, you’d think that this would not be too hard to achieve right?

My bank – State bank of India

Well, here’s the thing. My bank in India has a super long process for me to add new international beneficiaries under the tab that says international transfers. I have made international transfers from my account in the past, but on this occasion, the bank website simply didn’t want to accept the IBAN codes that I was entering. I tried another international account, and this also failed. There are only 7 international currencies that I can send money in and Polish Zlotys were not one of them.

This process with the bank took almost 5 hours and I simply couldn’t figure it out. The bank fee for sending Rs.30,000 is Rs.2450 which works out to about 8.1%. This is super ridiculous. They want to charge me a huge amount of money for a service and make things complicated at the same time! The website wouldn’t tell me what the exact issue was but I’m guessing that it was a mismatch of the currencies that they allowed conversion into and the Polish bank’s IBAN, but I can’t know for sure.

Wise – formerly known as Transferwise

Transferwise is a service that I have also used multiple times. I used it for the first time in Denmark about 7 or 8 years ago. It has worked seamlessly in the past and I have used it a few times to send money back to India or to send money to friends in different parts of Europe.

On this occasion, Transferwise also didn’t want to process my transaction either. They stated that the government of India has started collecting a new tax on remittances which they are not able to collect at this point and for this reason Wise could not send the money on my behalf. The fees on Transferwise was only Rs 629/- but that is still 2% of the $404 that I wanted to send.

This was a big disappointment as I was hoping that at least they would be able to get the job done.

BCH – Bitcoin Cash

We finally landed on Bitcoin Cash as the best way to make international money transfers from India. The reason I did not consider using Bitcoin cash till now was because I did not want to inconvenience the person at the other end. It’s a bit of a steep learning curve in the beginning and all I wanted was to drop the money in their bank account without instructing them to do anything.

Bitcoin cash is of course the fastest and cheapest option, but the only downside is that the money reaches in BCH instead of Polish Zloty. We eventually enlisted the help of another friend living in Poland to receive the BCH and send money in the local currency to our other friend’s bank account. It was straightforward but did require some trust and communication. The value of the money that reached was exactly what we sent.

I’ve heard that Western Union money transfer charges 10% of the transferred amount for small amounts like this. I am waiting for the day when the whole world switches to BCH and experiences seamless and instantaneous transactions like this.

My conclusion

I have been in the BCH world for a few months now but have never had the chance to use it in a real-world situation like this one. Here is an instance in which your money is literally locked within your bank account, and you are not allowed to transfer it to a particular place or person. These clauses and stipulations change from country to country and depend on the prevailing political situation, embargoes etc. This basically means that the money that you hold in your account was never yours to begin with. The fiat currency of a nation is a way for the government to exert pressure on its citizens and make them behave in a way that they deem fit. It can be used to preserve the status quo and maintain the dominance of developed nations over developing ones.

I’m not really sure what the issue was in not allowing me to transfer these $404 to a person who needed it. I’m not even going to ask why. But the truth is that this shows us how the financial system works to oppress us. I see the crack appearing everywhere.

Bitcoin Cash is a peer-to-peer electronic currency. It allows us to transfer money to any person, in any part of the world in an instant. It has ultra-low transaction fees and the payment that I sent to Poland only cost me Rs 0.09 which in USD is $0.0012. That’s less than a cent paid in transaction fees for money that has travelled halfway across the world.

Bitcoin cash is permission less. This means that I don’t need the approval of any bank or payment processor to move my money around. The BCH blockchain serves as a bank account and allows me to have access to my money directly. It is un-censorable which means that no entity can block a person from having access to his or her money.

It’s time for the world to make the shift towards a better form of currency – one that reflects the needs of the globalized world that we live in.