People who have never tried to wire money to someone in another country, or send a large amount of USD (like $2k+) to a friend, probably just don't understand the major restrictions and headache of legacy banking system....

I have a friend from Mexico, who is not a permanent US citizen, that has been working on an app/service/company for years now. I've been supporting him along the way. On one occasion I was sending a few thousand to him and developers in Mexico. At the time I could only send a wire transfer, and it was a nightmare. The first time I tried it was rejected because I didn't select the correct output currency (or something like that), but I was never really informed of this. It took a couple weeks of calling people to figure out what was going on.

Just last week he had a pretty urgent need for $5k. Thankfully he didn't need it for maybe a week or so. However, my source for for the $5k required a short-term loan from my life insurance policy. They're pretty good about getting that to me quickly. I had everything worked out by Friday evening, but then Monday is a Federal holiday, so delayed until Tuesday. I get fund in my account Tuesday evening and I'm ready to send to my friend...which is no easy task.

Bank to bank transfer through Zelle? $1k/day limit

Venmo? He doesn't have a verified/qualifying account so he can't receive my transfers (they just error out with no explanation)

Wire transfer? Lol no

He ended up using his business's Quickbooks invoicing system to send me an invoice, which allowed me to pay via Debit, Credit, ACH, Venmo or Paypal.

It's all so broken and retarded.

I've talked to him a bit about bitcoin before and he's very receptive. When all was said and done, I reminded him, "If you were able to use bitcoin for your needs, I could have had this to you within 10 minutes, tops, of you originally asking me."

Sorry, have to rant to a community that gets it.

/fin