This was an enlightening (but ”slightly” sobering) experience for me the other day:
A friend of mine here in Canada was lamenting how much it was costing her in Western Union fees & bank transfer fees to send money back to her disabled & unemployed mother in Europe.
But it wasn’t just the fees — it was also the monthly restrictions on how much money she could send! Her bank had flagged her as some sort of a criminal for continually sending money back to Europe, so she could only send something ridiculously low like $1,000 per month back home. Similar restrictions (but slightly higher limits) from Western Union for a repeat customer.
The big red flag, apparently, is that much of her income is in cash from her tips as a bartender. Her bank and Western Union loathe that she’s paying in cash, because that apparently means “criminal”. These fucking governments, man.
I took it as the perfect opportunity to introduce her to BCH!
So I had her download the Bitcoin.com wallet, and I sent her some BCH, and she was blown away at what happened before her eyes!! I told her that she could just instantly send that money to her mom, and then another family member could help her mom convert it to cash.
Her first question was: “How come nobody ever told me about this?” (She’s a new friend, or else she would’ve heard about it from me a long time ago! ;)
Her 2nd question was: “Where can I convert my cash to Bitcoin Cash on my end, and convert it the other way around on my mom’s end?” I told her about local.bitcoin.com.
Her 3rd question was: “Where can I spend this?” She was disappointed to learn that the answer was essentially nowhere at the moment, but that she could try to get her favorite merchants to accept it.
But then, after about 60 minutes of playing around with BCH, she asked her 5th & final question:
“This is really cool. Now how can I do this with the REAL Bitcoin?” 🤦🏻♂️
This is the damage that Core has done to our P2P currency by forcing us to change our name.
She was brand new to crypto, but she’s heard the word Bitcoin enough to think that that’s the “real” bitcoin, and this is something completely different.
This is the perception that we’re fighting against. This is the Corean damage that we’re fighting against.
Of course, I told her everything she needed to know about BTC vs. BCH, but it was heartbreaking for me. 😢
On an unrelated note, we tried to do that fun experiment where we pass $1 back and forth to each other very quickly, but there were lengthy delays. I’m assuming that it’s because the previous transaction hadn’t confirmed yet? On the sending side, it appeared like it had sent successfully, but it took 5-10 minutes for anything to show up on the receiving side. Is this because technically we’re not allowed to send coins until they’re confirmed?
She was still extremely impressed nonetheless!
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/n0whbu/introduced_a_friend_to_bch_and_the_brand_name/
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