Welcome to the second decade of the 21st century.
Mexico has received more than $24.4 billion in remittances since 2014 from immigrants living in the United States, which makes up about two percent of the Mexican GDP, according to World Bank data. Traditional financial networks are charging upwards of 8% per transaction to and from the USA and Mexican borders.
A killer Bitcoin or Monero application that is well executed and can serve this 24.4 billion dollar market in Mexico would certainly catapult cryptocurrency to another level! As the entire decentralized and distributed asset market is less than half that, at 12 Billion.
Mexico, and the world at large, need remittance fees to be as close to zero as possible so maximum money-energy can flow and trade will be enriched as a result. The market wants Bitcoin is there to make it happen. The two forces meeting would really be spectacular in my view.
From a Bitcoin price perspective let's say the network had a 24.4 Billion dollar market cap. What would the price of a bitcoin be then? Well, roughly (24.4 billion divided by 21 million bitcoins equals $1162. Bitcoin holders could vacation on a Mexican beach for not more than a couple of Bitcoins.
And let's not forget that for a Global currency and value exchange network, Bitcoin's market cap needs to rise into the hundreds of Billions if not (and most probably) Trillions. But that's a story for another post.
Remittances is not a killer bitcoin application until hundreds of millions of people have bitcoin. It's like VOIP for the internet -- there needs to be the infrastructure in place in order for it to make sense.
Currently, the costsand time it takes to get into and out of digitial currency (like 99% of people want to do) makes BTC and other digital currencies poor rails for remittances.
Thank you for the reply!
You're right that bitcoin adoption is still far too small. The industry appears to be very much in the infrastructure building mode. It will be some time yet until we see major financial institutions and governments begin to acquire as much of this stuff as possible. And perhaps even longer out still before there is mass adoption.
How do you see this playing out?