1.5% is decent no?
1.5% is good, the point is, it could be pushed to 0.5% or even 0.1% at a profit for btc businesses.
So talk me through that. Whilst bitcoin is not spendable prevalently in the Phillipines there needs to be a third party for the son to change his bitcoins in to Philippine Pesos. A third party that wants to make some sort of profit and also a third party that is exposed, for a certain amount of time to the volatility of the value of bitcoin.
There's also the predicament of the nurse needing to convert here GBP in to bitcoins initially. Again this presumably requires a third party wanting to make a profit and that is exposed to risk. I know in the UK that you can buy pretty much instantly from a market place but you are looking at 4%+ for your purchase. Purchasing £100 from an exchange would probably be more expensive due to bank fees and exchange rates and would require a wait of 2-5 working days.
I am failing to see how bitcoin can compete with WU. Even if bitcoin was spendable prevalently in the Phillipines, the purchasing cost in the first place is more expensive than WU.
Of course the cheapest methods are the most time consuming. Let's look at a free service such as
https://localbitcoins.com. This makes it possible to find local bitcoiners who are in need of someone willing to give them those precious pesos for bitcoins via face-to-face trade I.e. leaving bitcoins transaction fee, 0.0001 (£0.02, PHP 1.28, $0.03) or 0.00000000, in the picture. Now you can either hold those coins yourself or directly redirect them to the recipient (who only needs to repeat this process to complete the circle) There's nothing more I can say in regards to bitcoins price volatility; it could either come as an advantage or disadvantage.