Sending money to someone in India with PayPal: forced to treat it as a purchase with 6% merchant fee and a conversion fee. They need to confirm the payment and mark a product as shipped. Money is frozen until confirming a product was received, which cannot be done for 48 hours.
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They pretty much treat anyone in India as being a scammer.
Meanwhile, simply sending the money with Bitcoin on-chain with a very low fee ends up taking about the same amount of time while having a flat fee worth about a dollar. No risk of it being held indefinitely by PayPal.
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I don't even want to get into how ridiculous it is trying to send money internationally via banks rather than PayPal. It's quite unfortunate that India is cracking down on using cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is by far the best way for us to fund open source developers around the world.
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what makes wiring money internationally hard? the one time I wanted to wire money to singapore for something, that worked without a hitch via online banking
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My experience is there's often some internal issue stopping it from going through and they won't say what's wrong.
The fees are pretty ridiculous too and then you get ripped off again with the currency conversion.
Sending money within Canada generally hasn't been any issue.
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huh, funny. so when you go to the bank and ask them "what happened to this payment" they just say "it didn't execute, I don't know why"?
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They don't talk that frankly about it. You get cycled through different support people trying to pass the problem back to you and they seem to have no way of actually figuring out what went wrong with stuff. Either that, or they can't tell you AML rules of some kind were applied.
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For an idea of the ridiculous fees:
rbcroyalbank.com/banking-servic
It can take substantial time to go through when it does work, and it's really not a reasonable way of sending money every month or every 2 weeks. Usually forced currency conversion at a bad rate on receiving end too.
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rbcroyalbank.com/banking-servic is a better way to do things but the limits are quite low, and I expect that the same problems happen with it. Dealing with their support for 20 hours when it goes wrong isn't appealing. I can just send a Bitcoin transaction of any amount for around $1-2.
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Bitcoin in India has also tended to have a favorable exchange rate for this where there's more demand than supply compared to elsewhere. I'm not sure what's going to happen but it's a very annoying disruption. PayPal is clearly not a good option. Can try bank transfers again...
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Sometimes they just arbitrarily decide you aren't allowed to send the money and you aren't allowed to know why. It's just unacceptable to rely on this kind of system. Sending money every 2-4 weeks is a lot different than once in a blue moon. You're near guaranteed to have issues.