Quote from: Melbustus on September 12, 2013, 05:31:43 PM

Bitcoin is, in fact, a fantastic way of transferring value. It's just that your family member apparently denominated his/her investment terms in dollars, not BTC.

In the 17th centry tulips were also a great way to transfer wealth as well. For the foreseeable future most will need BTC>FIAT exchange.

Quote from: DaFool on September 12, 2013, 05:38:46 PM

If you do some research you will find that the Fidor Bank is planing to implement a bank account which can do the exchange in real time. This would make Bitcoin a really nice tool for conducting transactions as an alternative to Western Union and similar money transfer services.

True but this just illustrates that the road to solving the issue of larger transfers is dependent on regulation. I believe it can be augmented also by unregulated but better p2p exchange. The Fidor Bank plan is exactly the thing that turned a great open p2p exchange into a highly regulated and thereby highly limited one (to german citizens only) that I mentioned: bitcoin.de. To be clear, I'm not apposed to this but it has a slow adoption rate and will be many years before it removes the headache of >$1k transfers. So, with that now we have China, Japan and Germany able to exchange relatively easily between them. Only 190 more to go.