Importing Money

[ben]

The absolute best thing you can do is find someone who makes a lot of money on a regular basis here and wants to get their money out of the country and has a foreign bank account. That's what I do, and I have brought my costs to import money down to about $25 USD (what my primary bank charges for international wires - $15 when I can send to a bank in the US) no matter how much I am sending. The problem with this is that in many cases you may be dealing with pesos from the receiver instead of dollars. If the price of the peso fluctuates too much, you could lose out a bit in the medium term, depending on how long the money lasts you. If you can find someone who has dollars here and needs to get them out (they exist, just harder to find), even better.

This option is great, and I used it at one point. The problem is that it had better be someone who doesn't know or doesn't care that they could get a few percent from doing this relatively easily, as the market at this point is paying to bring money into the country (a couple of years ago, it was the other way around, but no more). Or someone who simply isn't interested in the hassle, and is willing to effectively leave (a bit of) money on the table to deal with someone trusted.

 

[Ceviche]

This option is great, and I used it at one point.

The best way to do it with rich Argie friends

 

[Jaredberryman]

I use a business called Argenper. I put money into a bank account and then pick it up at one of their sedes. They do not give the blue rate, but I think give a rate slightly lower (possibly contado con liqui?), along with a 4% fee. It's relatively painless. However, I did have to sign a declaracion jurada once a year. I also never transfer more than $1500 at once just because they seem super disorganized and I am afraid someday they will lose my money, which hasn't happened in the last year and a half of using their service. They have sedes all over the city.

 

[Markgeezer]

Considering that you can get Dollars out of ATMs in Paraguay, like Uruguay, I'd think you should be able to get dollars no problem in Uruguay at WU.

How much USD can you take from ATM'S IN Uruguay per day.... anyone ?

 

[sesamosinsal]

They're still a flawed technology experiment.

OK, and many would say that fiat currencies are also flawed (counterfeiting, arbitrary monetary expansion, etc), yet we still do use them daily. So, what exactly are you proposing? The Gold Standard? (And not even that's perfect. Tungsten, anyone?)

 

[scotttswan]

OK, and many would say that fiat currencies are also flawed (counterfeiting, arbitrary monetary expansion, etc), yet we still do use them daily. So, what exactly are you proposing? The Gold Standard? (And not even that's perfect. Tungsten, anyone?)

nope, fiat money works pretty going back to the gold standard would be stupid.

Excluding all the little problems...

(like the whole price being so high because some dodgy french guy in japan ran a program to increase the price to ridiculously levels whilst preventing people from taking anything out of his website, the entire "market" relying on 2 companies miraculously taking in bitcoins for money with no apparent means of making a profit, the market being incredibly shallow with wild swings in value preventing it being useful for transferring money anywhere, the community being idiots who have turned it into some sort of weird religious cult, its stupid size of 26tb, not having chargebacks and no ways of getting your money back if you make a tiny error, the stupid arms race where millions has been wasted, not to mention all the electricity pointlessly used, creating glorified electric space heaters that do nothing but calculate arbitrary shit, it has fee's regardless of what people say, its unscaleability)

The major problem with bitcoin is you can't update it without a hard fork of the whole system and are reliant on the users going with your grand ideas for a new bitcoin.

So, it's not anonymous, it's not free, it's not instant, it's useless to transfer money and it's not convenient. Unless you have an ideological stake in the concept of it (or want to buy drugs and/or child porn), there is literally no reason to get involved in it.

There's actually one thing that Bitcoin supporters claim about Bitcoin which is true: it has no chargebacks. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible. Whether this is actually an advantage or not probably depends on whether you've ever been ripped off before. If you haven't, then getting involved in it is probably a good way to fix that.

 

[sesamosinsal]

nope, fiat money works pretty going back to the gold standard would be stupid.

Was that fiat money works "pretty well"? Ha, do you still live in Argentina? Fiat can work, but it can also fail miserably. A benefit of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is that there are limits to the expansion of their supply, and thus supply cannot be expanded willy nilly like the ARS or any other fiat currency.

Chargebacks are not always guaranteed. (Obviously, If you pay in cash, good luck with that) If you pay with a card using one of the world's premier fiat currencies, your bank may refuse to initiate a chargeback. A baexpats user might have a word about that with you regarding his rental from Hertz.

If you ever buy dollars here in Argentina, watch out. Some pretty good fakes are known to circulate in the black market, thanks to Peru, the world's top exporter of counterfeit bills according to the Secret Service. Those fake bills wouldn't be used for anything illicit, would they?

Quite a few companies accept bitcoins for payment, including Microsoft. Here is a more comprehensive list: http://www.coindesk....-with-bitcoins/

There are also bitcoin ATMs that are popping up all over the world: http://www.coindesk....itcoin-atm-999/

Nothing will be void of problems. Bitcoin is also not the only digital currency out there, and one can only assume that digital currencies will become safer and more efficient over time. Litecoin, for example, seeks to solve the issue of delayed transaction times and the massive size of the block chain.

The potential for these digital currencies is huge, especially when it comes to countries that insist on implementing long-term, dysfunctional currency controls.

*cough*Argentina*cough*

 

[scotttswan]

stuff...

99% of all companies that "accept them" take fiat cash from the 2 big players, bitpay and coinbase. They're glorified paypals but instead of having a real money balance your money is stored in a volatile "currency". After they've burnt through their VC money i doubt they'll last long.

Luckily for me those same companies will happily accept real money from me.

Instead of:

Go to a coin site > sign up giving the possibly unregulated site lots of private info > Buy coins > wait for coins to be transferred to my account > go to website > send coins to bitpay / coinbase as payment > wait an hour to see if payment went through depending on how big a fee i sent > get product.

I can just:

Go to website > buy with credit card > get product.

Also what's interesting is that many of these places that are adding these payment methods are finding a drop in earnings.

They're all currently hugely inflationary, and again there's no chargebacks so throw some coins to some random address that's them gone forever. In the 30-50 years when new coins are no longer mined, they will become deflationary and deflationary currencies are not a good thing for many reasons.

As for Litecoin, it's just another pump and dump scam that even fewer places accept. Any cryptocurrency needs to solve the problem of being distributed as its never going to beat something like visa, amex, mastercard etc as it is. Its a shame i think my favourite cryptocurrency hobo nickles has vanished!

As for the "ATM's" The majority are more vending machines as money only goes one way, usually at a huge markup too and that's after you've given some random joe all your banking details, fingerprints and more than enough data to cause you serious identity theft problems.

They are good at one thing though, creating hilarious crazy cults full of laughs to be mined!

 

[ben]

To reduce this argument to a simple sentence, bitcoins are an idea which captures the attention and excitement of many, for reasons both economic and political. And it certainly shows great potential - as an idea. As a functioning product, to claim that it works today as advertised (or as hoped for in the future) is to be blind.

 

[sevi]

Considering that you can get Dollars out of ATMs in Paraguay, like Uruguay, I'd think you should be able to get dollars no problem in Uruguay at WU.

How much USD can you take from ATM'S IN Uruguay per day.... anyone ?

My experience is primarily from Chile and other latin american countries but not from Uruguay. The limit per day is usually set by your bank not the bank operating the ATM. Although ATM's have a per transaction limit - you can just do multiple transactions until you hit the daily limit set by your bank. My experience with Schwab is that they have a default daily limit of 1000 USD per day. But you can call them an increase it permanently (up to $2000/day) or temporarily (over $2000/day). Before withdrawing large amounts of money from abroad it is recommendable to call your bank and inform them that you will be traveling to Uruguay (or wherever you plan to withdraw the funds) so their fraud screening system does not automatically block your debit card after a couple of withdrawals.