You may be able to buy from China on credit but you can't just move cash around willy nilly. Even debit card transactions take a day or two to clear.
But good luck opening a $25K stock trading account (from cash) in less than 7 days.
"On the bitcointalk forums, some users were less interested in the owners’ identity and more impressed by the infrastructure that allowed such an amount to be transferred without any regulatory hindrance, lawyers, or fees (the user paid no transaction fee at all). Even handing over that amount in hard cash would be a logistical challenge."
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/194993-btc-transaction-147m-mystery...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/billionaire-ea...
Moving funds between banks in the EURO area is virtually instantenous and practically free.[1]
And good luck opening any stock trading account with crypto currencies.
1. "Direct deposit", all largest banks in Sweden support it and that means that the money is transferred real time. That service is open between 7am and 11pm at Avanza.
2. Normal bank transfer and that takes one day in Sweden.
Source in Swedish but you could translate it: https://www.avanza.se/kundservice.html/281/vad-ar-direktinsa...
Avanza does not have a limit on how much money you can transfer but your bank might have, in that case you might have to rise that limit if you want to transfer a lot.
I don't know if it takes a day or two or clear (or more) if I buy from China but from my perspective it is usually an incredibly smooth checkout and I will get my stuff x amount of weeks later if I'm cheap with transport costs.
Also, how are fees in sweden ? bank transfer/currency exchange fees are just an absurd abuse of power imho.
Ohh, I don't think you would eat any better by only packing bitcoin.
I used regular money and went through a fairly well-known fintech company who specializes in this type of thing, and I think the whole process only took around 6 hours.
From memory it cost around 0.5% of the transfer value, and gave me the true mid-market rate.
We're not truly living in a world where it's Bitcoin or we stay completely at the mercy of the banks (w.r.t sending money across borders, at least), and the banks will catch up to where the fintech is - much like Travel Agents, they're just still successfully arbitraging their incumbency against the knowledge (w.r.t technology and the other options available) level of the general population.
While international development hopefully isn't a complete lost cause (on long enough timescales), I can definitely see how cryptocurrency could be seen as a viable shortcut around poor government in this respect.