Quote from: pawel7777 on December 20, 2014, 11:12:35 AM

Quote from: exoton on December 20, 2014, 10:53:33 AM

There is no real reason to need to use their service to send money back "home" via bitcoin. All you need to do is buy bitcoin on an exchange then send it to an address that a family member controls in their home country then the family member can sell the bitcoin on an exchange and/or use it to buy goods/services

This only works when recipient knows how to use bitcoin, has internet connection and has access to legit exchange, which can be a problem.

With BitSpark you don't even need to know what the bitcoin is to use it.

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Bitspark managed to offer their customers a better solution. Just as with Western Union, the sender simply dispatches real money from the sending office, and the recipient gets the equivalent amount in local currency after the money reaches destination office. Bitcoin is still used in this system as an intermediary transfer method, but neither the sender nor the recipient is aware of it. The thing is, with Bitspark you wont need a Bitcoin wallet at all, and the company can afford to set the lowest transfer fee possible to attract more customers to use their Bitcoin remittances.

This does not make much sense to me. Why would they "use" bitcoin but not make either party aware of it? Unless the receiver is vulnerable to exchange rate movements then bitcoin is not really being used. They are likely only saying they use bitcoin as a marketing ploy

Also much of the world (even in 3rd world countries) have internet access and smartphone access and I imagine that it would not be difficult to get a BTC ATM installed in places that tend to receive a lot of money from overseas