Official exchange rate: 1 USD = 162 Peso
Real world one: 1 USD = 300 Peso
There of course might be price fluctuations, but this is exactly the reason why stablecoins are used and not BTC / ETH.
From you mention of the real, I assume you're talking about Brazil. I don't know anything about the current situation in Brazil, so I'll talk about Argentina and Venezuela instead. Maybe in Brazil you can just use the banking system and not have to worry about Bitcoin.
TransferWise doesn't work here in Argentina. They have no locations, so you have to use an ATM, which gives you less than half of the money because it only gives out monopoly-money pesos, using the falsified "official" exchange rate.
Western Union does cost about US$15, and uses the real exchange rate instead of the official one, but no Western Union location has US$1000 on hand. (The minimum wage, which is what most employees get paid, just got raised to $50000 a month in Argentine monopoly money, which is US$160.) You might be able to do it with five transactions of US$200. So figure somewhere around US$75, or more if you include the potential that WU employees will rob your house or attract attention from the tax authorities.
Bitcoin transaction fees are commonly under US$1, especially if you don't need the transaction to go through in the next half-hour, but if you want to convert the Bitcoin into local monopoly money by going to a money changer, you can expect to pay about a 1%-2% spread. So probably about US$20. If you can do a peer-to-peer transaction instead of going to a money changer, you don't have to pay the spread.
In Venezuela I don't think WU, TransferWise, or the banking system is an option, so it's not really a question of how much it costs without Bitcoin but what your chances of success are at all.
IOW are your savings due to breaking, or loopholing laws?
That utility is still there if a store takes multiple crypto currencies since only bitcoin has the throughput of a 28.8 dial up modem (1.16 KB/s). Ethereum has much more throughput but still has high fees. Anything else (litecoin, bitcoin cash, doge coin, monero etc.) will still give this utility, which is arguably the least impactful thing about crypto currency.
The shame is that it is all such a mess it almost doesn't matter. People won't stop leaving their balances in exchanges or putting it in ponzi schemes, or terrible 'smart contracts' or anything else.
People in general seem to want lottery tickets much more than they want a usable peer to peer electronic currency.
People have been doing that for hundreds of years. It's still done regularly today. Writing a check is creating your own money. Issuing a coupon is creating your own money. Creating a credit card is issuing your own money. It goes on...
You might be able to say the things you listed are IOUs, but they aren't ledgers, they won't scale and they can't be used without a central authority.
There have been a few examples of people creating a centralized currency before bitcoin though. One was liberty dollars which was a single company that printed bills and claimed they could all be exchanged for gold (which was probably true, they went down from the US taking legal action and not any kind of default).
There absolutely are ledgers behind both loyalty programs and barter networks and in the case of Airline loyalty programs, are literally planet-scale.
The only significant “innovation” is the inherently ecologically destructive PoW-based decentralisation.
Yes.
>Can they be exchanged for cash
Normally not directly because then the programs have to handle AML/CTF obligations, but almost always Dollar-denominated gift cards.
> or bought?
Yes.
Here's yet another example: American Express Travelers Cheques https://www.americanexpress.com/us/travel/travelers-cheques/
S&H Green Stamps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26H_Green_Stamps
Local Currencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_i...
An individual can create their own money, too. You can write a check on any piece of paper (it doesn't have to be bank paper) and give it to anyone who'll accept it. The bank will honor it. A thief stole money from me that way - the bank accepted his check.
An IOU is money. It is not legal tender, though, which is perhaps what you're thinking about.
So, uh, it just works?
<<is still flailing around for legitimacy.
Here we disagree. The governments are seizing it, regulating it, trying to copy it for its own purposes. It already is legitimate simply because it is has people using it.
Assuming the sender/recipient's countries don't outlaw it or regulate it into parity with traditional banking.
And only really uniquely useful if the sender/recipient doesn't already use the hawala system.
This raises an obvious question, though: Why would countries NOT regulate it like traditional banking?
Notice how customs declarations say "more than $10'000 in money or financial instruments". Countries don't care about money specifically, they care about transfer of monetary instruments.
Which means of course they care about BTC for international transfers. Maybe the laws are up to date, and maybe they're not, but it's perfectly clear that the intention of the laws is to include BTC, and it seems extremely likely that eventually they will be harmonized.
BTC’s intrinsic value is zero.