Hi everyone, a friend of mine wants to send me money for a favor I did a long time ago. Now he wants to pay me back by sending $100k to the UK, which is about £80k. But it is really complicated to send it through banks all at once. He can only send $10k at a time and has to wait several months to send more, plus he has to fill out a lot of forms since he lives in Bolivia!
I heard that sending money through crypto is fast and doesn’t require filling out documents or explaining to banks why I’m receiving that money. The issue is that neither my friend nor I know how to send money through crypto. I need some help.
How do you transfer money using crypto?
Which broker do you use?
First, be careful with direct messages. Most of them are from scammers. Second, don’t use any technology you don’t fully understand. Take your time to read up on it before trying anything new.
Just remember that if you want to turn crypto back into cash in the UK, you will have to explain where it came from. Money laundering laws are very strict, especially for crypto. Exchanges have to check for this, and your bank will also check for money coming from exchanges.
Sending bitcoin anywhere in the world is really easy. No forms to fill out, no inspections, and no holding periods.
But the tricky part is whether you want to keep the bitcoin or sell it for cash. The exchange between bitcoin and GBP is where it can get complicated. Banks may ask questions about where the money came from when you deposit it. Your friend might also face tax issues in Bolivia if the value of their bitcoin has gone up and they’re sending it to you, etc.
In short, the hassle isn’t with Bitcoin itself; it’s with the banking rules and taxes around your transactions.
If your friend can send $100k to an exchange that has a bank account, he can send that amount to any other account. You will still have to go through the same processes.
One of you can buy bitcoin, and the other can download Electrum. In Electrum, you click to create a new wallet and follow the steps on the screen. Then you create a receiving address, copy it, and send it to the person who bought the bitcoin. They send the bitcoin to that address. The time it takes for the transaction to process depends on the fee you pay and the current fees others are paying. This website shows you the current fees people are paying: https://mempool.space
Once you get the bitcoin, you can sell it on Bisq. Bisq is an app you can download. You can find more info about it on the subreddit r/bisq.
Your friend can buy it on Bisq too, but you need some bitcoin before you can start trading there. I’ve heard you can buy your initial bitcoin in their chatroom: bisq.chat. I haven’t done that, though.
Also, Bisq might not be the best option for that large amount. You might want to buy it from Cash App or something similar, and then your friend can send it to your address.
If you’re using Bitcoin, do a small test transaction before sending the full amount. A lot can go wrong if you’re not completely sure how it works. I don’t understand why they can’t send you the full amount, bank to bank, as long as it’s cleared on their end. It doesn’t make much sense.
You can set up a bitcoin test net to learn about the technology before trying things you don’t understand. Feel free to message me if you want to learn how that works.
I think you might be confusing sending money through crypto with services like Western Union or Moneygram or even bank transfers. It’s different.
Crypto is its own asset, similar to how gold is its own asset.
If you want the sender to send in their local currency and for you to receive in your local currency, your question is kind of like asking how to send money through gold.
The answer is you can’t do that. You would need to buy gold, mail it to the receiver, and then they would sell the gold. You could follow similar steps with crypto instead of gold, replacing mailing with a simple crypto transfer.
The challenge isn’t the crypto transfer part; that’s simple and people use it all the time for sending money around the world. The problem is with getting into and out of crypto. The difficult parts will be getting the crypto at the start and selling it at the end.
It seems like you want a service that takes money from the sender and sends it to the receiver without you needing to worry about the extra steps. Unfortunately, I don’t think that service exists.
I know that was Abra’s original plan. They wanted to be like a money transfer service like Western Union, using crypto behind the scenes, but it didn’t work out as they intended. I’m not sure if any other companies have tried it.