Are you buying crypto in developing nations? How are you doing it?
In the United States and Europe, people can buy cryptocurrencies very quickly. It is just a matter of signing up with an exchange, providing your documentation, giving your bank account information, and creating the first transaction, which often involves sending a wire transfer. Once the exchange house can verify that the bank information you provided is yours, they can let you send money to the exchange by utilizing ACH transfers or wire transfers for more prominent transactions than $15,000.00. It is easy if you live in the developed world.
You could also use peer-to-peer exchanges if you want to transact without giving your information to exchanges. The cost will be much higher because you will have to pay the fee of the fiat transfer to your counterpart. Those costs in the US, for example, can be between $5 up to $25 with Western Union and around the same with MoneyGram. The cost of using money senders will depend on which country you are sending your funds from and where you are going. If you live in the USA, a fee of $15 could not be much for you because your income is a lot higher than in the developing world.
So we all know that buying cryptos in the developed world is much easier and cheaper because you can have a bank account and use either wired transfers or ACH transfers and even debit and credit cards for some users at Coinbase. But this article is about the developing world, so let me see if I could add to my writing by providing a way for people to acquire some satoshis.
People in the third world will be forced to use debit and credit cards if they don't have a bank account. Still, I don't think that exchanges will be willing to accept those as payment methods for cryptos because of the nature of credit/debit cards. The problem is that crypto transactions are not reversible. Debit/credit cards are, so exchanges would put themselves in a wrong position if they were to accept credit/debit cards as payments, and the same goes for peer-to-peer exchanges. And the same can happen with PayPal as well.
The other option will be Cash App, but this app also requires bank accounts, so I suspect it won't be of much help in the developing world either, not to mention that eventually, Cash App payments will be reversible at some point. So I guess the third world is stuck with using money senders to settle peer-to-peer transactions. People in the third world must be using services like Western Union and MoneyGram, where they deposit their fiat currency, and it is sent to the other party for a fee, of course.
I don't know how much Western Union charges in the third world for sending money within the same nation or abroad, but I don't think it will be cheaper than $10 for each transaction. The other option for the third world will be to use prepaid phone credits. But this will be a very inefficient way to send money, so that the fees will be much higher. In other words, you will end up paying more for your satoshis.
The other way could be to use Google Play Store credits and the app called Rewards to Bitcoin, which is an app that lets you buy Bitcoin Core BTC LN credits in exchange for your Google Store credits or rewards credits as well. But the fee for using this service will be around $0.33 for each dollar in Google Store credits. And the user will need to exchange those custodian satoshis for any other altcoin that they can hold. In the case of Bitcoin Cash, users will need first to buy a Google Store card which can have a value from $10 to $100, and exchange it into BTC LN. You lose more than 50% in value in USD terms and exchange those satoshis for whatever other altcoin.
To exchange into any other altcoin, the user will have to use services or exchanges like FixedFloat or CoinPlaza. The only difference is that if you live in a country where you don't have a bank account, you could still participate, and you could do it for as little as $10 now. I don't know how much your local store will charge you for buying a Google Store card, so you would also need to add that as a cost to obtain your cryptocurrencies. Rewards to Bitcoin only give you around $0.33 for each dollar in Google Store credits. That is a fee of 66%.
Once you paid for your Google Store card and received your BTC LN satoshi. By utilizing a Google Store Card, you are avoiding the money senders fees that can be between $5 to $25. And maybe my solution could help those that want to buy their first Bitcoin Cash satoshis but live in a country where they don't have banks or the amount of available funds is just under $20.
It means that the third world could be having issues getting into Bitcoin Cash or any other cryptocurrency, and I don't know the solution for investors there. As it is right now, people in the third world must pay a pretty penny to get in, in the first place. I hope the Bitcoin Cash community sees this and tries to fix it in the future. Even when you can get your fair share for only $2.1, getting that amount into the crypto market is challenging for those without a bank account.
Suppose the third world, to buy cryptocurrencies, must pay companies like Western Union and MoneyGram their transaction fees. That will mean users will be forced only to purchase cryptocurrency once they have a large amount of fiat currency to justify the money senders fees, which can be one again from $5 to $25. That will mean that people in the third world will have to accumulate around $100 to $1000 to justify the WU fee and make it less of an impact on their wallets and portfolios.
Buying small amounts of cryptocurrencies could be a luxury only reserved for rich countries like the US and Europe because last time I checked, I could send as little as $5 to my exchange using ACH. I don't get any extra charges on my bank account. That is something that the developing countries' citizens could not be able to do if they have to pay money fiat senders fees like the ones that WU offers.
If you live in a developing nation outside the US or Europe, please let me know how you get your cryptos. How much are the fees you have to pay to send your local currency into whatever exchange you're using, regardless if it is a peer-to-peer or centralized exchange?
